A New Winter Brings A New Rivalry Series For The U.S. And Canada Women’s Hockey Teams

(L-R) Savannah Harmon, Hannah Brandt, Megan Keller and Hilary Knight during the gold-medal game against Team Canada at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 on Feb. 17, 2022 in Beijing.

She’s finding a similar environment with the national team, and that has helped her settle in while trying to find her role within the group. Her teammates are driven and hardworking, she said, and they have put the work away from the team so that when they come together, they are in the best place.

“I think that’s something that really shows character and the fight and resiliency of this team,” Rosenthal said. 

These Rivalry Series games offer coach John Wroblewski an opportunity to see how players perform against the best competition in the world. The expectation is to win — always. But the team spends little time together on the ice over the course of a year, so when they do gather to practice before playing these games, it’s an opportunity for the coaching staff to reinforce the ideas and routines that will make the team successful once the puck drops. 

After the most recent world championship, the staff did an assessment of where the team was and where it needed to go. The expectation for this team is to win. Always. Anything else is a disappointment. To that end, the team mantra is constant development. The players and coaches expect the team to continue to build and expect instantaneous results.

According to Wroblewski, who also led the team at the world championship, the assessment broke down into three categories — staple items, adjustment items and cultural mandates. The staples are the calling cards of what makes USA Hockey. Cultural mandates are the things that are about how the team wants to play and carry themselves, he said. 

Both Wroblewski and his players have used the word “predictability” often over the past year when talking about how the team is performing on the ice. With their limited and sporadic time together, habits and predictability help the team gel together more quickly, he said. There is comfort and an ease of play afforded when a player knows where their backup is, where to drop a no-look pass for a linemate or the best place to crash the net to redirect a puck into the goal.

“There’s so much in hockey that is unscripted,” Wroblewski said. “You need the players to be able to not rely on systems or mandates all of the time. They have to go out and skate within their skill set and play passionately and try to be the difference maker. But also, there’s times in the game where you do need that default setting and that’s where the predictability comes in as a dynamic that you need to rely on. The quicker we can get on the same page with some of the default items, the more success and more fun to have.”

The results didn’t come the past year, but that doesn’t mean a need to revamp everything, said Rosenthal. Instead, this team is leaning on what was established as the basis of the program by the women that came before them. They want to home in on what they’re known for and play USA Hockey, she said.