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Putting Minnesota on the map with a national title was the easy part. For the Gopher women's hockey team, sustaining that reputation is the challenge.

PHOTO BY DIANA WATTERS

Every once in a while, Muzzy will say how much she misses Streetsville, a rural hamlet west of Toronto, where she grew up. She'll recall how at the age of three she began figure skating, and, a true Canadian, found her soul wrapped up in a love affair with the ice. Then she will note that at her mother's urging she parlayed the natural grace she found on skates into success as a child model. With a hint of shyness, she'll talk about having an instructor who told her how to walk, how to dress, how to eat. Embarrassed, she'll admit that she once graced the cover of a Sears catalog.

And then she'll crack a joke about how she used to be a great-looking kid, but that she's 22 years old now, and things change when you get older. She'll say this and slap the sides of her steely, jeans-clad thighs. "I had the real 'girl life' at the beginning," she'll say, suddenly unrepentant. And then the woman who scored more goals than anyone else in women's college hockey last year will spit out a nervous laugh.

When pressed, Nadine Muzerall will tell you that her parents, Annabelle and Leo, split when she was three years old, and her hero was her older brother Darren. She'll confess that figure skating and modeling were fine, but that, despite her mother's reticence, she never felt the rush of anything more in her life than when she went to Darren's hockey games, and how she realized that her father was a fine hockey player, her brother was a fine hockey player, and she wanted to be a fine hockey player too.

Never mind that less than two decades ago, even in Canada, there weren't many girls playing hockey. Forget that during the day she was living sugar and spice and everything nice. The sport was in her blood. Nadine and Darren would spend hours in the backyard, in the black of night, maintaining a makeshift hockey rink, their hands frozen to the garden hose as they sprayed water onto the earth. Eventually her mother gave in and soon was carting the girl and her gear to practice at 5:00 a.m. on the back of a bike. Later Annabelle would even encourage her daughter to leave home and attend a prep school in New Hampshire that offered girls' hockey.

Muzzy will tell you this because she wants you to understand her biggest fear: that the temperature would rise, that an early spring would hit her corner of Ontario, that in her backyard, solids would turn liquid. For 19 years the end of ice-skating season has meant something sad to her, and now she finds herself feeling a deeper melancholy as she faces the close of another season, this one at the end of her college career.

As a left wing on the defending national champion Minnesota Gophers, Muzzy rose to the top, winning a national title and being named all-conference in her junior year. But her senior year has been hard: She didn't make the Canadian national team this fall, she had a concussion early in the season, she was benched for a few games because on her 22nd birthday she got caught drinking, breaking her coach's rule against alcohol. But more earth-shattering, in the waning weeks of the season, for the first time in her life, she has realized that she might want to do something outside of hockey.

 

Nadine Muzerall led the country last year in goals scored; this year things have been rougher PHOTO BY DIANA WATTERS

It's senior day for the Gophers, the final home game for a group of ten who came to the University of Minnesota as girls, became women, and carried their built-from-scratch hockey program to a championship. It's the last stretch of the season and the Gophers are feeling pretty high. There's no reason to think they won't win the Western Collegiate Hockey Association women's conference title, go on to win the conference tournament, and successfully defend their national title. These possibilities and the specter of a pre-game ceremony with the seniors' parents have set an emotional tone, but Laura Halldorson is all business.

In the locker room, the Gophers' head coach goes through a checklist of things the team must accomplish in order to win. One of them is "Respect your teammates and other players." Another is "Play with heart." The third is "Stop the player we won't name"--presumably a reference to Wisconsin freshman Meghan Hunter, who at the time leads the nation in scoring. Halldorson asks what each point is, and gets a response for the first three. When she says, "Point four?" and gets nothing but quiet mumbles, she repeats the question.

"Kick the shit out of them," says senior defenseman Courtney Kennedy, oblivious to the fact that she's breaking Halldorson's no-swearing rule. Her legs are bouncing up and down, full of adrenaline.

Halldorson looks askance, arching her eyebrows. "It's discipline," she supplies.

The game starts with an all-senior lineup, and Halldorson tells the veterans they'll be on the ice together for only 20 seconds, so they had better enjoy it. The players can't make the line switch at exactly 20 seconds, and Muzerall breaks free. Twenty-five seconds into the game she scores on a long slap shot from just inside Wisconsin's zone, setting a record for fastest goal scored in the history of the program. The shot sets the tone for the whole game, and the Gophers romp, 3-1, to win the conference.

Two weekends earlier, the Gophers played a "home-and-home" series with St. Cloud State University, meaning that one game would be played at Mariucci, the second in St. Cloud. It was hard to imagine a more dominant team on Friday night as the Gophers won 7-1 with 60 shots on goal to St. Cloud's 14. Muzzy, who possesses blazing speed, great shooting accuracy, and a half-joking intimidation shtick à la Dennis Rodman, nailed a hat trick--three goals in one game. Kennedy, a burly player with a cannon of a slap shot, had two assists, as did freshman La Toya Clarke, who was easily the fastest player on the ice. Goaltender Erica Killewald, a senior, seemed bored with only a handful of saves to make.

But on Saturday night, things fell apart for the team and the Gophers lost 7-6. A year ago this loss would have been unimaginable. Minnesota was the bully on the Midwestern hockey block (followed closely by rival University of Minnesota-Duluth), and other area programs were struggling to catch up. The level of competition is up this year, however, and every other team in the country is gunning for the Gophers.

Muzzy, who holds pretty much every scoring record for the team, seems to be able to score when she wants to. Whether she wants to is another question: "Her streaks," says Doug Woog, assistant to the U of M men's athletic director, "are directly related to her moods."

After her first goal on senior day, Muzzy denied herself the pleasure of showboating and celebrating, choosing instead to skate down to goalie Killewald--better known as "Killer" to her teammates--and pat her on the shoulders. Earlier Muzzy had taken a swig from the squeeze bottle Killer keeps on top of the net; the jug contains holy water, Muzzy insists, and taking a drink always means she's going to score. After the game she finds herself explaining this to the tiny press corps in attendance (exactly three reporters). "I just wanted to let her know that her holy water works," Muzzy explains. "I wanted to let her know that I couldn't score goals without her in the net on the other end."

Muzzy, Killewald says later, is "the most eccentric person I've ever met in my life."

 

Coach Laura Halldorson learned on the East Coast how to spearhead the women's hockey explosion in Minnesota PHOTO BY DIANA WATTERS

On Valentine's Day the Gophers run through a midafternoon bloodletting disguised as a practice. The February daylight filters onto the ice in Mariucci Arena, and the squad--half in maroon practice jerseys, the other half in gold--is immersed in a puck-clearing drill wherein the maroon team shoots the puck from one end of the rink so the gold team can chase it. It's an exercise designed less for skills than for conditioning, and the players are gasping for air.

Laura Halldorson doesn't use a coach's whistle. Instead, she controls the practice with tongue-whistles through her front teeth. Halldorson and her three male assistants are dressed in black breezer pants and windbreakers. And though in a sense the drill is a punishment for a loss, the coaches dole out plenty of instruction while the players slice down the ice. The day before, the team ran through a two-hour practice that didn't involve a single puck. Muzzy is putting on surly airs, and Halldorson keeps commanding her to center ice for attitude checks.

Halldorson has a team-first policy, one that precludes showboaters and superstars. Practice is all about discipline; there is no yelling or theatrics. The coach remains a detached--if somewhat intense--presence, quietly orchestrating efficient routines on the ice without ever showing anger or cracking a smile.

Later, in her office at the Bierman Building in Dinkytown, Halldorson explains that the tail end of the season is the hardest, and working through a grueling schedule is important for her players. "We hit a turning point last year to give the players more responsibility," she says, sitting on a cushioned, cream-colored chair amid a television, VCR, boombox and dry-erase board. "When we started out, there were only four teams that could really play against us, and I already taught the players about consistency and focus. The team told me they wanted to shoot for a high bar, and I always asked if that was realistic. Last year we won the national championship. This year they wanted to win the conference, win the conference tournament, and win the championship.

"Those are their goals," she stops to point out, "not mine. So it's important that they know how to motivate themselves."

If that sounds simplistic, it's not. Up until a few years ago, hockey was pretty much exclusively a men's sport. East Coast schools such as Princeton, Brown, and New Hampshire have had women's hockey programs for upward of 20 years, but the sport has just recently exploded in the Midwest. Gopher women's hockey was born in 1997, the result of a campaign by Women's Athletic Director Chris Voelz to make Minnesota a national leader in the sport, and a massive infusion of cash thanks to Title IX, a 1972 federal law aimed at creating gender equity in higher education.

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