Lee Stecklein already is working towards Year 2 of the PWHL era, but she’s not quite finished with Year 1.
And who can blame her?
Stecklein and her PWHL Minnesota teammates made history in Year 1, claiming the first ever championship and, while her sights and actions are already set on defending that title, there’s the little matter of her day with the Cup still to be handled.
In true hockey tradition, every member of the winning championship team gets a night with the Cup.
The Walter Cup will be spending this Friday exclusively in the company of Stecklein and she plans to keep it pretty low key.
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“My parents and my sister and her husband haven’t seen the Cup yet,” Stecklein said over the phone from the State of Hockey. “So, I’m going to go over to my parents’ house and invite any family and friends who want to come and see it. That should be about it. Just have some food, maybe play some pickleball, we’ll see, but I’m excited.”
Excited didn’t do justice to the feeling Stecklein had last May when Minnesota bucked the odds and took the Walter Cup home to Minnesota.
From a league standpoint, the season was everything anyone could have hoped. The crowds were big, the fanbase was engaged and the product surpassed expectations — and it’s still getting better.
In Minnesota, Stecklein and her teammates came out of the gate hot, setting the bar for the other five teams in the league. But coming out of the break for the IIHF world women’s championship, the team was dealing with some injuries to key players like Taylor Heise and struggled mightily.
That hot start became very important because even as the team continued to struggle pretty much right into the playoffs, losing its final five games, it gave them just enough cushion to ensure they would be participants in post-season play.
Once in the playoffs, the team really didn’t find its mojo again until Game 2 against a red-hot Toronto team. Toronto still won the game to take a commanding 2-0 series lead on Minnesota, but that game proved to be the turnaround the team needed.
They would win the next three against Toronto and then come out on top in a tightly contested five-game final with Boston.
“I’m still really proud of the way our group was able to move past that,” Stecklein said of the team’s end-of-season struggles. “We got huge games from Maddie Rooney, Taylor Heise, Michela Cava, just the way those players stepped up in those games, it was easy to get rolling and again because of how we were playing it was almost the perfect playoff mentality where it became just one game at a time. There was no looking too far ahead. We knew we had to go out there and hopefully try to win the game in front of us.
“It was really cool to see the way we were able to keep going,” Stecklein said. “Once we were past that sort of stretch we were not going back. We were just looking forward. However we went out, we were going out giving it everything and luckily that led to the Walter Cup.”
There were more hurdles to overcome in that championship series with Boston, none bigger than having had a potential series-winning goal in a scoreless Game 4 in double overtime called back following review. Boston would win that game forcing a fifth and deciding game back in Boston.
Less battled hardened teams might have folded under such circumstances but not Minnesota.
“The way (Game 5) went and the way we played especially in that second and third period, I’m OK that it took five games if we were going to play the way we did in those two periods because I thought that was the best we played all season,” Stecklein said.
The celebration of that game has been going on ever since, though Stecklein never has lost sight of the need to prepare to defend the championship. Stecklein admits it’s hard to imagine anything being tougher than what the team went through in Year 1, but she almost has convinced herself it’s coming and has been mindful of that with her off-season.
Stecklein, who likes nothing more than to get together on the ice with her teammates, took all of June off.
“My body definitely needed it,” she said. “The playoffs were long, fun, but definitely long, and the rest of the summer I was able to work on different things.”
Stecklein fit in a nice vacation with the family before June was finished and then joined teammates Clair DeGeorge, Natalie Buchbinder and Maggie Flaherty for a trip to Alaska.
DeGeorge is a native of Anchorage, Alaska, and has traditionally taken a handful of teammates to her home state to experience its uniqueness.
Stecklein loved it, but pretty much right after that it was back on the ice and back to work getting ready for the coming season.
Even having played versions of seasons like the first in the PWHL, last year was new ground for everyone and Stecklein admits there was plenty of learning, even for someone who has played the game at its highest level for most of her life.
“I think the travel of the season was definitely different and I think we were learning throughout last year what we needed to do as a team and what we needed to do individually for rest, recovery and treatment and all of those things to make sure we were ready for each game,” Stecklein said. “Hopefully we just keep doing more and more of that this year as we all get used to what this sort of took or even looked like and then I think as a team it was so fun to get to practice and play together.”
Officially, the team isn’t back on the ice together until early November when camps open, but Stecklein and many of her teammates are already skating four days a week gearing up for the task of defending that first championship.
There’s also that matter of moving the women’s game forward, a task Stecklein takes very seriously.
“I would love to continue to draw attention and more fans and again just continue to improve our on-ice performance and play,” she said when asked for her hopes for Season 2. “I think we were all getting feel of it often in year 1 and you could see the way each team improved throughout the season and I hope we pick up right where we left off and continue to push the game in new ways and hopefully encourage more and more people to watch our sport.”