MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Last spring, West Virginia junior and Winchester, Mass., native Ashley Osborne was homesick.
Sure, she loved being a Mountaineer, but there was something from home that she dearly loved that was missing: Hockey.
So, she decided to do something about it. Within a few short weeks, the WVU women’s club hockey team was born.
“I missed hockey wicked bad,” she recounted last Saturday following the team’s playoff-clinching 7-2 win against Towson. “I figured there had to be more girls like me who missed playing, too. So I researched what it took to form a club team, found a faculty advisor and got things rolling.”
Osborne leveraged social media, especially Snapchat, and used old-fashioned flyers and dorm-to-dorm visits to drum up potential interest. She was still very nervous about the turnout for the first meeting in early March.
“I was afraid nobody would show,” she said. “But a bunch of girls came — some with a lot of hockey experience, some with none — and within a couple weeks, we had 12 on our roster and I was totally excited.”
The team was accepted into the Delaware Valley Collegiate Hockey Conference for the 2019-20 season, facing teams like Virginia, Lafayette College and Montclair (NJ) College, a mere 6-hour drive from Morgantown. Once the team found volunteer head coach Nick Hilliard and assistant coach Dan Hausman, the Mountaineers were ready to skate, but the only practice times available at the BOPARC Ice Arena are at 6 a.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays.
“You know, it’s a lot easier to get up for 6 a.m. practice than to make it on time to an 8:30 morning class,” sophomore forward Sam Miller from Rochester, N.Y., said jokingly “I want to be there, you know, to be with all my friends and play the game I love. I’ve been playing hockey since I could walk, and it was very strange to go a whole year without it. So, when I saw the post about the meeting for the club team, I was pumped. I told my mom to ship all my stuff right away.”
Although Miller and team president Osborne have loads of experience, there are five players that never played before, yet committed their time, effort and financial contribution to become Mountaineers.
“Nope, I never skated or played before this season,” freshman Chloe Chipman from Leonardtown, Md., said. “I always played lots of sports growing up, and I went to the WVU Club Fair this fall, just to see if there was something I wanted to join. I talked with Sam and Ashley, and it sounded pretty cool, so I thought I’d try it. And it’s been a blast.”
While the Mountaineers (6-7) have certainly persevered through some intense growing pains, the team spirit and camaraderie has never faltered for a single minute all year.
“Why would I get on a teammate who is playing college hockey and learning the game and how to skate, all at the same time?” Miller said. “Anyone who’s ever played, or even watched hockey knows how hard it is. As long as you’re trying your best — and everyone on the team has done that from Day 1, from our volunteer coaches all the way to the trainers — why wouldn’t we support and encourage you? In the end, we want to get more girls to fall in love with the game.”
While Chipman remembers her first goal, Miller fondly remembers WVU’s 6-4 win against Penn’s team as a turning point in the season. Perhaps Osbourne’s favorite moment, though, best captures the Mountaineers’ success story.
“It was our first home game against George Washington,” she said. “There was pretty big crowd there. Not just our friends and family, but people from the community and little girls who play hockey and just a bunch of people who came out just to support us.
“When we played well, and scored some goals, the crowd started chanting ‘Let’s Go! Mountaineers!’ I just thought back to when I wasn’t sure if anybody would show up for that first meeting. It was really amazing to think how far we’d come, and it made us all really proud to be able to represent WVU, to wear the flying WV on our jerseys. I’ll never forget that moment, or this season.”
The Mountaineers travel Friday to Delaware for the first round of the DVCHC playoffs.
