Ruggiero's Legendary Career Almost Over

Harvard students are known for leaving college with a lot of experience and accomplishments under their belt. But few can boast the resume with which women’s hockey co-captain Angela Ruggiero will graduate.

Olympic gold and silver medallist. Ivy League Player of the Year. Four-time Patty Kazmeier Award nominee, presented to the best player in collegiate women’s hockey. Four-time ECAC Player of the Week this year alone. Top 10 nationally in goals, points and assists. Anchor of the nation’s best defense—allowing 1.17 goals per game.

The list seems endless for the player whom the Hockey New called “the best female player in the world,” in an issue in 2003.

“I absolutely, 100 percent agree,” said Harvard Coach Katey Stone. “She’s a tremendous asset to the team.”

“It’s a huge honor,” Ruggiero said. “Any athlete aspires to be the best at their sport.”

But to Ruggiero’s coach and teammates, her skill is the least of what she brings to Harvard hockey.

“[Ruggiero] sets an example of excellence in her individual preparation, how fast and how physically prepared she is,” Stone said. “But she’s also always been a tremendous teammate—kind, sensitive.  That’s the side of her people don’t really know as much about.”

After every Harvard home game, a small gathering of kids, boys and girls alike, wait patiently by the exit to the Bright Hockey Center in order to get “Rugger”—the nickname that has she has earned due to her physical and rugged play—to sign their scorecard.

On the ice, her leadership and experience has been invaluable in helping to fill those gaps as she sets the stage for the defense—spending the majority of the game and almost the entirety of every power play and penalty-killing situation on the ice.

In fact, Ruggiero has been involved with the national team since before her freshmen teammates even graduated from elementary school. She was first involved with the team at age 15—nine years ago.

“Angela is the best defenseman in the world,” said junior defenseman Ashley Banfield.  “She’s been instrumental to the development of our defensive unit, not only for the freshmen, but for [junior Emily] Haigh, [sophomore Jen] Skinner, [sophomore Jaclyn] Pitushka, and myself.”

Just this past weekend, Ruggiero led the Crimson to only its third regular-season ECAC crown in school history.

But the end is far from here. Ruggiero still has a chance to add to the trophies she has helped bring to the Crimson. In just over two weeks, she hopes to be leading Harvard to its second national championship in her tenure here.

However, when she stepped onto the ice for Harvard in 1998, she couldn’t anticipate the program would be quite so successful.

“When I decided to go to Harvard six years ago in 1998, we had a .500 team that year,” Ruggiero said. “I chose to go to Harvard mostly for the academics and the hockey team side in that they were good people. I didn’t really expect them to be a national-caliber hockey squad.”

In fact, the year before Ruggiero arrived, the team finished under .500, at 14-16.  The year after, with an 18 year-old first team all-Ivy Ruggiero on the defense to complement an explosive offense, the Crimson rolled through the season, losing once in 34 games en route to a national championship.

During her tenure here, Ruggiero took two years off for training and participating in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.  The highlights of this experience included her selection by fellow national teammates as one of the eight Americans who carried the United States flag from the World Trade Center during the opening ceremonies.

“It was an amazing experience,” Ruggiero said. “To walk for your teammates and your country-in and of itself it was so emotional.”

Upon returning to the Crimson for the 2002-2003 season, Ruggiero co-captained Harvard to the NCAA championship game, before falling 3-2 to Dartmouth in double overtime.

In a follow-up performance, Harvard has just wrapped up its sixth straight winning season and is on the verge of its second straight trip to the NCAA Frozen Four under Ruggiero’s second year as co-captain.

Since her return from commitments with the United States National Team—which prevented her from playing in the first two games of the season—Ruggiero has registered a point in all but one of the games in which she played for the Crimson.

From the start, her attitude was that despite the graduation of a number of key members of last year’s national runner-up team, Harvard had to believe that it would win.  And she instilled that feeling in her teammates.

“You have to expect to win from the start,” Ruggiero said. “We did realize there’d be a lot of gaps to fill, but we sort of figured it out over the course of the season, and we’re happy right now where we are.”

Ruggiero-along with fellow co-captain Lauren McAuliffe-shoulder the responsibility of bringing and holding together a team on the ice that had a lot of potential, but also a lot of unknowns with the loss of five key seniors last year.  In fact, Ruggiero began this season as the only remaining member from the 1999 national championship team and one of two remaining Olympians-compatriot sophomore Julie Chu being the other.

“There are many talented players in this league, but Angela stands head and shoulders above the rest in her confidence and creativity on the ice,” said freshman defenseman Caitlin Cahow. “Every time I watch her on the ice, I learn something new.”

With her skill and importance to the Crimson in mind, a number of opponents formed their game plans against Harvard around trying to shut her down.

“She has had to face tremendous adversity this season,” Cahow said. “Teams have tried to physically take her off her game all season long, but she has kept her cool and gotten the job done withstanding pressures that would make most of the rest of us tempted to just give up.”

Following Harvard’s 2-0 victory over Princeton Sunday afternoon—which clinched the ECAC championship—Tigers’ coach Jeff Kampersal revealed just how good the opposition views Ruggiero, remarking, “she’s probably bored with college hockey sometimes.”

When she steps off the ice for her final time as a Harvard hockey player later this month—whether victorious or not—Ruggiero will have the choice of whether to continue her career or to move on from playing hockey.

Many of the best female collegiate hockey players make the choice to continue playing hockey and hone their skills by going to Canada to skate for some of the most competitive women’s teams in the world.

Currently, former Crimson star and Ruggiero’s old roommate Jennifer Botterill ’03 plays for the Toronto Aero, and is second on the team in scoring.  While Ruggiero could follow Botterill up north, there are always other possibilities for the biological anthropology concentrator.

“She will be able to do whatever she wants to do-she’s intelligent, articulate, has great social skills, and is extremely passionate,” Stone said.

However, with limits on the number of American players on Canadian teams, top level players-including Ruggiero-have begun to look elsewhere for after college options.

“I seriously considered [going to Canada],” Ruggiero said. “But now I want to stay in Boston, where we are going to try to put together a team of United States players to play college and junior men’s teams.  It will allow me to get a job.”

And the match-up everyone would be waiting for next year would be the return of Ruggiero to Bright Hockey Arena, only this time facing-off against former teammates and close friends.

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.