U of T may have had its best women’s hockey season ever last year as it went undefeated and won the school’s first national championship, but proof of the program’s storied history can be easily evidenced by the number of alumni who will represent Canada’s Olympic team in Salt Lake City beginning in about one week’s time.
Last year’s Canadian Interuniverity Sport (CIS) coach of the year Karen Hughes will be taking time from her head coaching duties with the Blues to work as an assistant coach with the Olympic team, and she will be joined by a trio of former U of T players, Vicki Sunohara, Lori Dupuis and Jayna Hefford, plus former U of T men’s player, Dave Jamieson, who will be the goaltending coach. Another former men’s team member Mike Pelino will be the video coach with the men’s Olympic side.
Not only will the three former U of T players be representing Canada, but partially due to their familiarity with each other from their days as Blues, they have wound up playing together as a forward line, giving U of T its own special unit of a sort on team Canada.
The Canadian Olympic team will certainly be motivated in their quest for a gold medal. The Americans defeated them in the first ever gold medal women’s hockey game at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, and then recently swept an eight game exhibition series with Canada, leading up to the coming Olympics.
However, in between, the Canadians continued their perfect record at world championship tournaments, winning a seventh consecutive gold at that event in 1999. Hughes said that she would not put too much stock in the results of the recent tune up series dominated by the Americans, emphasizing that the Canadians have had their eyes on the bigger prize all throughout.
“We outplayed them in the last game. A lot of the games have been very close. We outshot them in the last game. So our program has been built to be better by February,” said Hughes, referring to the month in which the Olympic tournament will be contested, and downplaying the exhibition games prior to that. “I don’t think it’s that big a deal. It comes down to—and everybody knows—one game in February.”
So far in her coaching career, Hughes counts being an assistant coach on the 1999 world championship team and coaching the Blues last year to an undefeated season and a national championship as her best experiences.
No matter what happens at the Olympics, chances are that when Hughes returns she will have another big goal to focus in on, as her U of T team will be expected to be in the playoffs, chasing a second straight CIS crown.
Hughes thinks her absence from the Blues is offset by what she brings back from her experiences with the national team.
“I’m away more, but I think they benefit in the end, because when I learn new things or better things I think that helps them,” said Hughes.
As a player, it couldn’t help but validate the quality of your coach, if she comes back with an Olympic gold medal to go with all the other awards Hughes and her U of T team have won already.
