From heartbreak to heroes: How PWHL champs hope to 'turn the mojo' for Minnesota sports (2024)

Kendall Coyne Schofield has done pretty much everything in women’s hockey, with one of the game’s pioneers experiencing her share of firsts.

Late Wednesday night, the 32-year-old checked another off her bucket list.

She stood on the top of a bar.

Just hours before, Coyne Schofield had become the first to hoist the Walter Cup, the championship trophy for the inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Minnesota dominated Wednesday’s Game 5 of the Finals against Boston to win the title, overcoming a heartbreaking double-overtime loss in Sunday’s Game 4. The champagne celebration in the crowded dressing room at the 6,500-seat Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass., was just the start of an all-night party.

Players, many wearing league-gifted bucket hats and giant PWHL championship silver chains and medallions, took their bus downtown to The Old Court, a small Irish pub. The team had rented it out in advance — win or lose. Parents and family members lined up to form a tunnel with their arms connected so players could make a grand entrance. Then came a TouchTunes-fueled jam session, with one of their go-to songs, R&B hit “Shiver” by John Summit and Hayla played. They sang. They drank. They danced. They chanted each other’s names.

With so much noise and no mic, Coyne Schofield felt the only way to get everyone’s attention was to jump on top of the bar. This league likely wouldn’t have come together had it not been for the three-time Olympian’s involvement, but she spent several minutes thanking everyone, from teammates to support staff and family members. “Everyone was like, ‘No, no, thank YOU!” said playoff MVP Taylor Heise. Coyne Schofield gave out two game pucks, one for Liz Schepers, whose first career PWHL goal was the game winner. Goalie Nicole Hensley got another for her shutout.

They closed down the bar at around 2 a.m. and moved to a meal room at the team hotel. They laughed, reminisced and crushed a late-night McDonald’s order. For those who didn’t go to sleep, Kelly Pannek and Lee Stecklein made a morning Dunkin’ Donuts run in the rain to fuel them for their noon flight home.

“Those are the small things we’ll remember the most,” said Pannek, the former Gophers star and Plymouth native.

This wasn’t the celebration Minnesota expected to have. The players already tossed their gloves off once, thinking they won Sunday’s double-overtime Game 4 on a Sophie Jaques goal. But it would soon get overturned due to goalie interference, stunning a crowd of 13,104 at Xcel Energy Center that kept chanting “We want the Cup!” Had they pulled it off Sunday, 7th St. in downtown St. Paul would have been one big block party.

Ain't no party like a Minnesota party… Madness from the locker room postgame in the PWHL🏆👀

(🎥: @nichens29 ) pic.twitter.com/WYVxZzdasm

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) May 30, 2024

But the intimate gathering at the low-key Lowell pub was special and fitting for the tight-knit group. It was just them.

On Friday night, in a rally at Xcel, the home of the Wild, Minnesota finally got to crown a champion of its own. The hope is that it’s a symbol for something more.

“The woulda, coulda, shoulda’s of that moment, to be able to share with (13,000) fans would have been awesome,” Pannek said. “I’m glad we were able to make it Wednesday. And bring it back to celebrate (Friday).

“I hope we can turn some of that mojo around for Minnesota sports.”

There are a dozen players on this team from Minnesota, from their No. 1 pick and star Heise to Pannek to top defender Stecklein to rookie of the year candidate Grace Zumwinkle to Maddie Rooney, who formed a 1-2 punch with Hensley in net. The general manager, Natalie Darwitz, is an Olympian, a former Gophers two-time national champ and a local legend. They’ve all experienced Minnesota sports heartbreaks as fans.

Darwitz, the St. Paul native, said her first was the North Stars losing to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1991 Stanley Cup Final.

“I watched the Timberwolves lose for 20 straight years,” said Heise, who grew up in a basketball family. “That was on my TV every single day. Every Vikings game I think I’ve went to, they lose. But I’m there for the experience. We have such great fans. Even though we lose a lot as a state, people are always hopeful for the future.”

Heise helped organize a group trip to a suite to watch the Timberwolves in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals on Thursday night. It was a season-ending, blowout loss. But Heise, the entire Minnesota women’s hockey team, sincerely believed Sunday that they weren’t going to be the latest in local sports playoff lore. Even though the viral image of Heise putting her hands on her face during the goalie interference review will admittedly become a “GIF for a lifetime.”

The WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx have four titles since 2011, but the men’s pro sports teams haven’t won one since the 1991 Twins World Series (11,906 days).

“Everyone writes about it,” Darwitz said. “Look at social media. ‘Oh, the Minnesota curse. Here we go again. Welcome to Minnesota.’ I wasn’t believing it honestly. It was one of those games where we had three (posts), we weren’t getting the calls. It wasn’t in the cards. But I honestly felt pretty good about Game 5 that we’d win.”

THE WALTER CUP HAS BEEN LIFTED!🏆 pic.twitter.com/QN8Ct1A3Vt

— PWHL (@thepwhlofficial) May 30, 2024

Darwitz felt even more encouraged after hearing what was said in the dressing room after Sunday’s loss. It was a gut punch, no doubt. Schofield felt the team needed to make it to intermission after the second OT to have a chance to collect themselves and win. But a minute after the Jaques goal was waved off, Boston’s Alina Müller beat Hensley to force a Game 5.

“You think you have the Cup and you realize you don’t,” Coyne Schofield said. “You get back to the bench and look for your gloves. ‘I think you have mine. I think you have mine.’ The ref is like, ‘Let’s go! We have to drop the puck.’ It’s an emotional situation. They’re rising up and we’re sinking down.”

“Our locker room when we came in after losing in that fashion, you could hear a pin drop in there for a while,” Hensley said. “It didn’t feel sad. It didn’t feel like we were sorry for ourselves. It felt angry. Not angry that it was the wrong call. It was a good call. But we were angry that it happened. That we couldn’t get it back together real quick. We all knew in that locker room that, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do it.’ It was just focus and determination and this anger that got to sit with us for 48 hours what it was like to win and have it taken from you.”

“We wanted to crush them,” Rooney said.

Two players broke the silence in the room. Pannek, not one to often joke at times like this, brought a little levity and focus.

“Well, (f—) it,” Pannek said. “We’re going back to Boston.”

“With that game, it’s easy to get caught in the shoulda, woulda, coulda,” Pannek said. “My message was, ‘We have another chance. We’re not done. We’re not over. We’re still in the driver’s seat in this scenario. Let’s attack the opportunity we have.'”

Schofield weighed in, too, telling them they have to do it as a group.

“Let’s pack our bags, go to Boston,” Coyne Schofield said. “We have a job to do.”

The resilience was a hallmark of this Minnesota team, which barely squeaked into the playoffs after losing the final five games of the regular season; it needed an Ottawa loss at the end to qualify. The top-seed Toronto picked Minnesota to be its first-round opponent, then went up 2-0 in the best-of-five series. Minnesota was toast. Or so everyone thought.

Minnesota won three straight to make the finals. Players say it was Rooney’s performance in Game 2, making 28 saves in a 2-0 loss, that was the turning point. They started to believe, ‘Hey, we can do this.’ Rooney, who went undrafted, was an inspirational story.

“We were playing with house money,” Heise said. “We were down 0-2. Everyone thought Toronto was going to win. When they picked us, we had the animosity between that. And I just think we said, ‘Screw it, go out there and play.’ That’s when we played our best game. That’s how it usually goes when you don’t have anything to lose and they have everything to lose. We watched 15 people vote on who was going to win. They said Toronto was going to sweep 3-0.”

“We never gave up,” Coyne Schofield said. “We believed.”

Heise stepped up in the Toronto series, her heroics helping lift Minnesota. Rooney was stout in goal. So was Hensley in the Finals, with coach Ken Klee the rare coach in the PWHL to use both goalies regularly. Schofield pointed out that Klee wouldn’t just roll out six forwards and four defensem*n like other teams. Everyone had a piece of this.

When Charlie Burggraf stepped down a week before the team’s first game, it was Klee who happily traded a planned vacation to Costa Rica to pick up his life and drive his truck from Colorado to Minnesota to take over the team. He had coached players like Coyne Schofield on the U.S. National team, and was the perfect maestro for this group’s run.

“You look at the MVP award, the best forward, best defenseman, best coach,” Coyne Schofield said. “We don’t have any of those. We have the best team. The way (Klee) makes every player’s role valued. Every single role mattered to get the Walter Cup and to win it.”

Friday’s celebration at Xcel Energy Center might have been the last time the whole group will be together. That’s the nature of professional sports and roster building. A good portion of the core will be back, of course, with Darwitz holding seven picks in the PWHL Draft in Minnesota on June 10-11. But when you win a championship, you walk together forever. The team will have the Walter Cup to celebrate with through the draft, though there will be plans for the team to have a replica it can use over the summer for potential Cup days like they do in the NHL; the original 37-pound Walter Cup will go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. They’ve been embraced by the community, invited to an upcoming Twins game. Restaurants have reached out to host them for meals. That is, after the team catches up on sleep. Hensley said she finally went to bed for the first time at 10 p.m. Thursday.

Hensley had told the team after Sunday night’s loss that once they won Wednesday, she was going to say, “So nice we won it twice.” And she tweeted it postgame.

So nice we won it twice 😎 https://t.co/bSlxElriTY

— Nicole Hensley (@NicHens29) May 30, 2024

“Minnesota sports has the knack for not winning championships all the time,” Heise said. “Maybe we’ll start it.”

(Top photo courtesy of PWHL Minnesota)