W. Hockey Stars Defend National, Canadian Honor

Sunday, April 8, 2001, was a memorable night for the Harvard women’s hockey program, even though the women’s college hockey season had already been over for two weeks.

At the University of Minnesota’s Mariucci Arena, one of a handful of arenas in the United States that maintains an Olympic-sized ice surface, the U.S. and Canadian Women’s National Teams met for a game of Olympic proportions, one that would determine the champion of the world in 2001.

Each team featured elite talent and unmatched depth. So many players on each roster had the ability to be the heroes of the day. But what turned out to be the deciding factor were the Harvard hockey players.

The U.S. and Canada each boasted two players with Crimson ties: the Americans had defensemen A.J. Mleczko ’97-’99 and Angela Ruggiero ’02-’04, and the Canadians had Jennifer Botterill ’02-’03 and Tammy Shewchuk ’00-’01. The four together had led Harvard to its first national championship in 1999. Then while Ruggiero started a year sabbatical in the fall of 2000, Botterill and Shewchuk stuck around and led Harvard to the Inaugural NCAA Women’s Frozen Four the following spring.

And on April 8, Botterill and Shewchuk led Canada to its seventh consecutive world hockey championship.

Canadian Coach Daniele Sauvageau chose to keep the longtime teammates together on the same line throughout the tournament, teaming them up with Kelly Bechard. Their line came through at the halfway point of the championship game, when Bechard found Shewchuk wide open at the edge of the crease for a goal that put Canada up 2-1.

Then with 3:15 left in the game, Canadian defenseman Therese Brisson found an opportunistic Botterill wide open at the edge of the crease for the critical insurance goal. Botterill’s goal turned out to be the game-winner, as Mleczko scored with 1:19 left to force a final score of Canada 3, United States 2. Or it could just have as easily been called Harvard 3, Rest of the World 2.

Harvard Coach Katey Stone was in attendance, watching the game carefully, volunteering as a WHRB between-period analyst, and switching between U.S. and Canada cheers more often than anyone in the building.

“It was really hard because one minute A.J. scores and I’m all over the place, one minute Tammy scores and I’m all over the place, and people are looking at me, saying ‘You’re American,’” Stone said. “Yes, I’m an American, but I also coached these kids. They’re not Canadians or Americans when they play for me. They’re Harvard hockey players.”

And those four won’t be the last National Team players to come through Harvard. U.S. forward Julie Chu, like approximately 1,600 high school seniors across the country each year, decided to enroll in Harvard before the May 1 deadline. Like Botterill and Ruggiero, Chu expects to play in the 2002 Olympics and join the Harvard hockey team in the fall of 2002. The three Harvard students and two Harvard alumni Shewchuk and Mleczko are all in good shape to make their respective Olympic Teams when the National Team rosters are cut down to 20 players.

Salt Lake City will be hosting the second women’s hockey tournament in Olympic history from Feb. 8 to Feb. 24. The Canadians and the Americans are the heavy favorites to advance to the gold medal game, and both sides want to win badly. Though the Canadians have won all seven World Championship hockey tournaments, they have yet to win a gold medal after falling to the U.S. at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano. The U.S. is eager to defend its title and take advantage of a rare opportunity to win a gold medal on its own soil.

Maple Leaf Magic

Botterill’s first Olympic tryout run began in 1996 when she caught the eye of national level coaches in Calgary during her senior year of high school, and, like Chu, she postponed her college entry to make a run at the Olympics. That trip resulted in a silver medal, thanks to a 3-1 loss to the United States in the gold medal game.

“There is so much excitement, so much pressure and so much crowd support at the Olympics,” Botterill said. “It had been a dream of mine since I was really small to go to the Olympics and represent Canada, so to get there it was incredible.”

Shewchuk, on the other hand, never made it onto that 1998 Olympic team. She postponed her sophomore year at Harvard to try out for the team but she was cut from the final roster by Coach Shannon Miller. Shewchuk has been a national-team mainstay since Miller, who coached Minnesota-Duluth to the first NCAA women’s hockey title last season, was fired shortly after the Nagano loss.

Shewchuk and Botterill have each had storied careers at Harvard. Shewchuk passed Mleczko and graduated as Harvard’s all-time leader in points, goals and assists. Botterill scored the game-winning goal in overtime of the national championship game during her freshman season. In 2001, she won the Patty Kazmaier Award, given to the nation’s most outstanding women’s hockey player. Botterill also broke the college hockey record with an 80-game point-scoring streak that began with her first game at Harvard and ended with the last game of her junior season.

While the U.S. National Team centralized in the fall of 2000 and lured several athletes, including Ruggiero, out of college for the year, the Canadian National Team came together only a week prior to the World Championships. That made Canada’s victory in the World Championship all the more eye-opening.

“I like going from one to another with no break,” Shewchuk said last year. “[The international game] is a step up from college hockey, for sure. It’s so much faster. The shots come faster. But college hockey in the U.S. has gotten so much better. It’s at a level now that I’d recommend it to any woman who has serious aspirations.”

“We [Canadians] just feel players are better developing [on their own], and then when we meet up, its new, and exciting—a change of pace that builds our confidence,” Botterill added.

In the award ceremony following Canada’s victory, Botterill was named MVP of the World Championships. She led the tournament with eight goals scored. After the event, Sauvageau credited Botterill’s experiences at Harvard with making her the player that she is today.

“I believe there are things coaches can’t teach,” Sauvageau said. “By putting our players in different situations, in college, in club hockey, it only makes them better. They play for different coaches. Jennifer Botterill has only become a better player in college.”

The Canadians are centralized in Calgary for the Olympic year, however, which forced Botterill to postpone her senior season with the Crimson.

Crimson, White and Blue

Although the U.S. failed to win its first World Championship last year, the Americans did manage to sweep the Canadians in a mid-October two-game series, winning each game by a score of 4-1. Ruggiero had a goal and an assist in the first of those games.

“We’re underdogs again, but we really want to win the gold medal in front of our own crowd,” Ruggiero said.

Ruggiero has continued to develop as a player during her time with the U.S. National Team. Already a prolific goal-scorer with Harvard thanks to her hard blue-line slapshot, she’s emerged as one of the United State’s top offensive-minded defenseman. She now has the skating ability to finish an odd-man rush with the grace of her forward counterparts.

“I think we’ve worked a lot on skating, just overall when you get to play with 25 of the best athletes in the United States, they’re going to push you,” Ruggiero said. “The Harvard atmosphere is very competitive, but here you’re playing internationally. It’s a win-win situation.”

The whole U.S. team has improved in terms of its speed.

“I think we’re more skilled then we’ve been,” said U.S. National Team Coach Ben Smith. “We’re tenacious with and without the puck. Those are the things we’ve been working on. But we’ve got to make sure we balance that speed and not take ourselves out of the play sometimes by being overaggressive.”

The Americans have been able to succeed despite a mixture of ages that ranges from defenseman Lyndsay Wall, age 16, to Cammi Granato, age 30. Several players, including Mleczko, are now married.

Chu, meanwhile is one of four players on the roster who has yet to play a year of college. The others include Wall, and two girls from Minnesota—Krissy Wendell, who is committed to University of Minnesota, and Natalie Darwitz, who is still a year away from college.

The team will have to grow up fast by the time the Olympics roll around. The tournament has expanded from six to eight teams this year. Play will consist of two four-team round-robin pools followed by semifinals and medal games. The gold medal game is set for Feb. 21. Although the U.S. and Canada are heavily favored to reach that game, 1998 Olympic bronze medalist Finland and 2001 World Championship bronze medalist Russia are expected to be among the other contenders.

“Finland has always been a pesky team, and I think they’re putting a little more support into it,” Smith said. “The team I keep waiting for is Russia. They’ve got hockey over there, so were just kind of waiting for the sport to gear up. I think they’re on the verge of being a contender.”

Coming to Harvard

When Ruggiero and Chu return from the Olympics, it will hardly be the first time the two have played together. Although Ruggiero is two years older, they won national championships together with the Connecticut Polar Bears select team and both attended the same high school, Choate Rosemary Hall. There they both played hockey, and both were goalies for the Choate women’s soccer team.

“We’re excited, Julie’s kind of following in my footsteps,” Ruggiero said. “She’s one of the nicest people you could ever meet. Everyone’s excited that she’s coming.”

Chu also considered Brown, Dartmouth and Princeton among her final choices. Knowing Ruggiero wasn’t a deciding factor in her decision to attend Harvard, as she had national team teammates and friends, such as Princeton’s Andrea Kilbourne and Annamarie Holmes, at other schools. Chu said she couldn’t quite pin down why she chose to attend Harvard.

“In the end, it was just a gut feeling, I guess,” she said.

As Chu enters college hockey and Ruggiero returns, the sport is more competitive than ever.

“I think the fact that women’s sports are growing in the Midwest shows that the popularity of the sport is growing and the level of the sport is rising,” Chu said. “Girls are getting involved when they’re just getting able to walk, and I think that’s great. I think that’s just going to improve the skill level. I’m looking forward to playing college hockey eventually.”

Ruggiero, who will have to pass up on a second round of potential Olympic Team endorsements to keep her college hockey eligibility, is excited about returning, but the departure of the Harvard Class of 2002 when she returns will be tough to take.

“I’m real excited that I kept my eligibility,” Ruggiero said. “I’m excited to take classes. It’ll be hard adjusting in terms of a lot of my friends will have graduated. But it’ll give me the opportunity to focus more on academics and hockey. I’m really excited to win another national championship.”

The Final Word

The playing schedule of the Harvard women’s hockey team will make it difficult for the Crimson to see any U.S. or Canada games in person this year. The U.S.-Canada game at Hamilton, Ontario in November—the same weekend when the Crimson plays at Toronto and Niagara—appears to be the team’s best chance.

Stone isn’t the least bit surprised by the continued success of her players.

“The kids are great,” Stone said. “They have worked so hard to get where they are and I have so much respect for them. And whether they’re wearing a Harvard jersey or they’re wearing a USA or Canada jersey, they’re probably the hardest-working kids on the ice because they were here. So I wish them every inch of great luck.”

And that goes for Harvard players of the past, present and future.