Sports writer - Grant writer

Category: women’s hockey

But first, coffee: How a coffee shop set the table for the NWHL

In mid-December 2012, I was in a bind. As the women’s hockey columnist for New England Hockey Journal, I had to find a lead for my holiday break column that didn’t involve me interviewing a student-athlete.

Somehow – I’m not exactly sure where – I came across the story of a former Northeastern player who had just opened a coffee shop in New York City. I emailed for an interview, and she called me from her store within minutes. It was a great chat, making the story an absolute pleasure to write.

Embed from Getty Images Fast forward five years. That player was Dani Rylan, now commissioner of the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), the first women’s hockey league to pay players. As of last week, the  four team league  has two agreements in place with NHL teams, and even has a corporate coffee sponsor in Dunkin’ Donuts. (I am sensing a caffeinated theme here…) The NWHL has had its stumbles, and I don’t necessarily agree with everything it has done, but I can’t deny that it has had a lasting impact on women’s hockey.

New England Hockey Journal has since purged its online archives, but I still have the version of the story on Rylan I sent to my editor on December 19, 2012. Enjoy!

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It’s 6:15pm, and former Northeastern University women’s hockey player Dani Rylan has been at work for just about fourteen hours. But she sounds as enthusiastic as ever.

“I’ve been here since 4:30am,” she explains, the till of a reconciling cash register ringing in the background. “And I have a hockey game at 8:30pm tonight. It’ll be my first hockey game since opening the shop. I don’t think my teammates will like my backcheck tonight.”

“The shop” Rylan speaks of is Rise and Grind, a coffee shop she opened December 17th in East Harlem, New York. The former forward for the Huskies found herself in the coffee business unexpectedly just months after graduating from Northeastern. The former GoNU.com reporter had one of her dream opportunities working for NHL Network placed on hold because of the pesky lockout, and found herself looking for work.

“I had moved to New York City to work for the NHL Network. My brother lives in New York City too, working as a coffee distributor. He had a storefront he wasn’t using, so we worked out a business deal. I got the storefront and a coffee distributor and opened up a shop.”

But unlike her hockey playing days, running coffee shop ownership is not exactly a team effort. “I am a one man band,” Rylan laughed. “I can’t afford to hire anyone else until I pay off my business loans, so it’s just me.”

Rylan isn’t just running the shop solo – she renovated the 200 square foot, eight foot space by herself as well. “My friend designed the shop, but I had to do all of the renovation work. I ended up laying tile and all of that.

“I compared (the renovations) to preseason. I was pulling twenty hour days to to get the shop ready. It was just like working incredibly hard in the preseason with the hope that it pays off during the season. I feel the same way about this.”

It may seem like Rylan is up against incredible odds, but odds have never stopped her before. Rylan played undergraduate hockey on the men’s ACHA club team at Metro State in Colorado after playing high school hockey with Assabet Valley and and ISL’s St. Mark’s. When it was time for graduate school, she found herself in the sports leadership program at Northeastern, which allowed her two years to play for the Huskies. Despite the brief length of her tenure, she made an impact. She tallied six goals and 14 assists in 70 games played for the Huskies. Rylan was named a tri-captain for 2011-12 and had assists on game-winners in some of the biggest games of the year, including Northeastern’s Beanpot championship.

“The Beanpot championship allowed us to be rockstars on campus for a little bit,” recalls Rylan. “We were wearing our 2012 Beanpot championship gear around campus for a few weeks.”

One of those pieces of Beanpot memorabilia has made it into Rise and Grind.

“I donate five cents of each cup of coffee I sell to Ice Hockey in Harlem,” explained Rylan. “I physically put the five cents in a stainless steel style mug we all got that says 2012 Beanpot champions on it. I keep it next to the register. It’s not a lot of money, but I hope it makes a difference.”

Even though she finds herself practically living at the shop, Rylan finds the time to keep up with this season’s Northeastern squad. “I talk to a lot of them still, and I keep up on GoNU. I just loved being on the team. I think they all got sick of my telling them how much I loved them all when I was captain.”

Rylan considers this week her shop’s soft opening “to get the kinks out,” but will have her grand opening on January 2nd. It was not exactly what she had in mind when she thought of life after college hockey, but it is turning out to be something that excites her as much as hockey – and that’s not her coffee talking.

“My brother came by this afternoon when no one was in the shop and he caught me dancing behind the counter,” she laughed. “I told him I’m having fun! I wouldn’t be having as much fun if I were working for someone else’s coffee shop. It’s a lot more fun when you are doing things for yourself.”

Coaching, Pre-Olympic Power and More: The Many Layers of the US Women’s Hockey Team’s Protest

I don’t have a ton of time, but I needed to get some thoughts out about the dispute between USA Hockey and the US Women’s National Team. My unfinished take below is based on covering the sport here and there since 2011. I will try to finish it and edit it better eventually, but for now, I just wanted to get it out there. 

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Although it is not an Olympic year, the U.S. Women’s National team has harnessed the weight of Olympic competition in their World Championships holdout against USA Hockey.

An Olympic hopeful in any sport can tell you about the importance of the pre-Olympic year. Major competitions are often held in Olympic venues (although they aren’t in women’s hockey), teams start to gel in a certain way that will influence selection in the Olympic year and individuals try to put the final flourish on credentials that will earn them an Olympic spot.

For national organizing bodies like USA Hockey, pre-Olympic years are key for evaluation and marketing purposes. They are looking at an athlete’s recent competition performances with a magnifying glass, seeing how they meet the pressure to perform and how they fare against the world’s best. It’s also a key year to getting faces out in front of the American public, giving mainstream fans a taste of who they will be rooting for next February.

Holding out of a U.S. hosted World Championships during a pre-Olympic year, exactly what the U.S. Women’s National Team is doing, disrupts that finely tuned machine, making it the most effective form of protest. The pre-Olympic machine has ground to a halt for U.S. women’s hockey.

While the Women’s National Team has been clear in all of what they are fighting for – proper compensation for devoting themselves to the sport for a four-year span, equal recognition by USA Hockey properties, equipment equality, and a better development system for women’s hockey – USA Hockey is taking an interesting PR turn. Their statements in response to the National Team’s coordinated protest only address the compensation piece of the complaint, and do so in great detail. They’re trying to turn public opinion by making the protest all about money, repeating endlessly that they are not in the “business of paying athletes.”

But the Women’s National Team consider compensation a small part of the protest. Building a development program structure would make great strides in checking off the rest of the National Team’s wants. Marketing opportunities would grow from having a group of athletes “in-house” and representing USA Hockey from an early age. It works on the men’s side, where we have heard about Auston Matthews from way before his NHL Draft Date. His residency within the US Under 18 Team wasn’t the only reason he was so visible, but it sure helped USA Hockey promote his abilities better.

A better women’s hockey development structure would might also create coaching jobs for members of the current National Team, and coaching is an underlying issue and cause of this protest that no one seems to have touched upon. Members of the National Team approached ESPNW and other outlets a few weeks prior to their protest with claims that they currently were coachless, with previous coach Ken Klee ousted quietly after the 2016 Four Nations Cup. USA Hockey swiftly released a statement saying that Robb Stauber who led the US team for a few games against Canada at the start of 2017, would lead the team at the upcoming Worlds. Was the coaching situation the tipping point for the National Team’s protest, or was approaching the media about it a test case for a future protest? 

Also along coaching lines, why hasn’t the National Team addressed the lack of women’s coaches in the current system? They went from an Olympic Team led by Harvard’s Katey Stone in 2014 to only having female coaching on the World Juniors team (where Boston University’s Katie Lachapelle and Boston College’s Courtney Kennedy have received several opportunities over the years as assistants.) Why haven’t Kennedy and Lachapelle gotten more senior team chances? If it is due their college coaching demands, how can we make these national team coaching positions just as enticing as their assistant positions on D1 programs?

 

Minnesota To Host Stellar Season-Opening Tournament

Ridder Arena at the 2013 Women's Frozen Four

Women’s college hockey will have quite a season-opening tournament to drop the puck on what could be the most competitive season in the history of the sport.

The University of Minnesota released their 2014-15 schedule Friday afternoon, and it confirmed a season-opening tournament that other program’s schedules had alluded to for weeks. The four time NCAA champion Gophers will host three teams at Ridder Arena during the weekend of October 3rd and 4th representing the geographic expanse of D1 women’s hockey: St. Cloud State, Boston University and Penn State.

Boston University, coming off their third straight Hockey East Championship, will start off their tenth season as a varsity program by playing a St. Cloud State squad led by new coach Eric Rud in Friday’s early game. Afterwards, third-year program Penn State, coming off a somewhat controversial off-season, will face last year’s national runner-up Minnesota. On Saturday afternoon, the Nittany Lions will play the Huskies, and the nightcap will be a rematch of the 2013 National Championship game and 2014 NCAA Quarterfinal, with the Terriers taking the ice against the Gophers.

Saturday’s Minnesota-Boston University matchup will have incredible symmetry for women’s hockey diehards. Both teams will return big-name Olympians to their roster the night before: USA’s Amanda Kessel for the Gophers and Canada’s Marie-Philip Poulin for the Terriers. The last game each played for their college teams? The 2013 NCAA title game at Ridder.

This season-opening tournament is significant in the women’s hockey landscape. For 18 years, men’s college hockey has had their Icebreaker, a four team tournament in the season’s early weeks that included teams from all over the country. The Icebreaker was a chance for powerhouses across conferences to challenge each other early and set a tone for the remainder of the season. Women’s hockey has been slow to adopt a similar model. Midwestern teams rarely would travel to the East Coast, and vise versa, given travel costs and some long-standing superiority complexes.

With Minnesota bringing in teams from Hockey East and College Hockey America to start their season, women’s college hockey may finally have their equivalent. It’s a giant leap for a sport building off an Olympic jump in popularity in a new landscape of further parity, given Clarkson’s groundbreaking national championship.

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