Following an outstanding freshman season at the University of Minnesota, Emily West, a 2007 graduate of Pine Creek High School, was recently named to the 2008 Team USA U-22 Select Women’s Ice Hockey Team.

“It’s a huge accomplishment,” said Pine Creek hockey coach Ken Martel, who coached West, on the boys team, her senior year at PCHS. “I can’t think of many girls who have come from Colorado that have gone on and are playing at the Division-I college level, let alone internationally. Being selected to a national team at any level is such a huge accomplishment and I think the whole state should be proud of having a local person like Emily excel and play at that level.”

West headed Aug. 12 to Lake Placid for a training camp that featured the USA Women’s National Team and the Under 22 and Under 18 Select teams. After a week of training with the best female hockey players in the country the U-22 and U-18 teams she departed for Montreal to face the Canadian Select Teams in a three game tournament pitting the two most dominant women’s hockey powers in the world against one another.

“I’m very excited,” West said about making her first national team. “Individually, I’ve been skating quite a bit, and getting ice and lifting a lot and just trying to keep in the same routine that I was in at school.”

It was just a year ago too, that West left the area to go play for one of the top programs in women’s collegiate hockey.

“About this time last year I was really nervous because it was getting really close for me heading out to school… and once I got there and hung out with the girls and finally got settled in it was just awesome,” West said.
Despite losing in the NCAA quarterfinals to arch-rival Wisconsin, the young Gopher said she couldn’t have asked for a better first year playing NCAA hockey.

After all, Minnesota did go through a spell of 21 consecutive games without a loss and West was a key part of the team’s success, leading all Gopher freshmen with 24 points on the season, earning WCHA player of the week honors the last week in November and leading the team with a plus/minus rating of +20 in 2007-08.

Just to give an idea of how good the Minnesota team truly is, West is one of five Gophers that is currently on the U-22 roster.

Martel, who is also involved in USA hockey, primarily at the youth level in both player development and coaching education, said that Emily is currently in a pool of about 40 girls that are going to get a chance to be considered for the Olympic team in 2010.

“I think she’s in that player pool,” he said. “She’s been invited over the last three years to our 40 person team player camp that Team USA holds during the Christmas holidays. So even when she was a younger player in high school she was competing against that level of competition… They thought enough of her to bring her to the holiday camp when she was still a senior in high school.”

That could have something to do with the fact that while Emily was busy dominating the Midwest Elite Hockey League with the Colorado Select U19 AAA girls team she was also busy ensuring that the Pine Creek boys team was a force to be reckoned with.

“She was a first line player, first power play unit player and top penalty killing unit player on a team that was in the top eight in the state,” said Martel. “She’s just a tremendous athlete and I didn’t look at her as a girl playing boys hockey, I looked at her as just another one of the players on the team, and an exceptional player on the team at that.”   
West said if she had the opportunity to do it over again a million times she would play for the Pine Creek boys team each time.

“All the guys were really accepting and I knew all of them from high school and was friends with everyone on the team,” she said. “I had been skating with some of the guys since I was really young, first starting to play hockey, so it was really fun to get back reunited with them and play my last year of Colorado hockey with them.”
And just when did Emily start skating?

“I started skating when I was 2 or 3, and I started playing hockey when I was around 4,” West said. “I first started playing on the Colorado Springs boys teams and I think a lot of it had to do with having an older brother who played. He had quite the influence on me. I sort of followed in his footsteps and just went from there.”

From Pee Wee boys teams in Colorado Springs, to the second highest level of USA Women’s hockey with room still left to grow, one person who definitely believes in her is Coach Martel.

“When we had our team banquet her senior year in high school, I told everyone ‘I now this is not the last time I am going to be around Emily as part of a team because I get a chance to spend some time with our national teams on occasion and there is no doubt in mind that she is going to end up one of those teams eventually’ said Martel. “… and here she is right on track.”

It’s a track that 19-year-old Emily West is very happy to be on.

“I want to be involved in USA hockey as long as I can,” West said, “hopefully with an end goal of attending an Olympics someday. I‘ll just have to train everyday and keep doing the things I’m doing with my teams and hopefully everything will work out how I hope.”

Photo Courtesy of University of Minnesota