In the Spotlight
By P.J. Slinger
The difference in latitude between Boston and Minneapolis is a scant 3 degrees.
But for Boston-area native Courtney Kennedy, it wasn't latitude degrees that she noticed when she first visited the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
It was the Fahrenheit variety. And she'll be the first to tell you it was more than a 3 degree difference. After all, this was the deep of winter in Minnesota.
"When I first came to Minnesota, it was freezing, I mean FREEZING," said Kennedy, a senior defenseman for the Gophers. "I was used to Massachusetts cold, not Minnesota cold."
It just so happened that Kennedy's initial visit to the Twin Cities coincided with the coldest snap the state had been through in years, when the mercury didn't attempt to budge past the negative numbers.
"It was the worst," she said. "I wasn't used to cold like that."
Despite the, um, chilly reception, Kennedy had business to attend to - namely, seeing if she wanted to transfer from Colby College to go halfway across the country where she could play for the newly created women's hockey program at the U of M.
"I just remember running from coach (Laura) Halldorson's car to the sports pavilion with just a fleece jacket on. I could hardly breathe," Kennedy said. "But now I can't even believe I used the cold as a reason to not come here at first."
Kennedy did make the transfer, but certainly not because of the weather.
"The facilities are just amazing," she said.
And Courtney's sister, Shannon, who is a year older than Courtney, also was transferring to Minnesota to play hockey.
"Shannon and I decided to go together," Courtney said. "We were looking at schools by ourselves at first, but we decided we'd stick together and go to Minnesota. If we were going to stay out East, we had different ideas of what we wanted to do."
And once Courtney got to Minnesota, she found out the weather wasn't that bad.
"At first it was like `I cannot deal, I cannot deal.' But it just took about a month to get used to it," she said. "My mom sent me tons of thermals, and she still sends them every year. But I've found that 10 below (zero) is the same as 60 below. It's just cold."
Halldorson said Minnesota winters are part of playing for the Gophers -- or for many of the nation's hockey colleges, for that matter.
"As for the cold, I know and they know they're not going South to play," Halldorson said. "It was just a cold snap we had that year that doesn't happen very often. It doesn't affect the way we recruit."
And after all, the cold couldn't be that bad. Kennedy had grown up playing outdoor hockey on her neighborhood pond in Woburn, Mass., with her sister and neighborhood boys.
"We always played hockey with the boys, even when we were real little. At that age you all just hung out anyway. It wasn't until we were squirts or peewees that we found out it was a male-dominated sport."
But Shannon and Courtney would play all day on the pond with the boys.
"My mom would bring out hot chocolate and lunches sometimes and we'd stay out until supper," Courtney said.
Courtney said every year in early winter she and her sister would look out their back window at the pond, watching and waiting.
"We couldn't wait for it to freeze," she said. "We'd go out and step on the end of the ice to see how thick it was. Eventually we called the fire department to come out and check it for us."
Kennedy said all those hours on the pond turned her into a hockey junkie.
"We played out there every day. And we were very competitive -- very competitive. Playing that gave me my love for the sport. It wasn't like I was doing it to get in shape or to prepare for college hockey or anything. I didn't think of it as anything but having fun."
She said the neighborhood kids played on the pond until it was nearly melting by springtime.
"We had street hockey nets that would fall through the ice at the end of the season because we never got them off in time," she said.
But it wasn't just Courtney and Shannon who were hockey buffs in the Kennedy family. Their brother is a freshman for the Lawrence University hockey team in Wisconsin. And their father, Paul Kennedy, is a women's hockey coach and director of a skating camp in Massachusetts.
"He's a very intelligent hockey man," Courtney said.
And that likely helped the sisters become great players. Courtney was so good that Halldorson had to recruit her three separate times before finally landing her. Halldorson was the coach at Colby College when Kennedy first was thinking of playing for Colby. Then Halldorson got the job at Minnesota and tried to get Kennedy to come right away, but Kennedy already had made a commitment to play at Colby and wanted to keep that commitment.
And she had a great freshman season at Colby. She was a first-team selection by both the American Women's Hockey Coaches Association and the Women's Hockey News after leading the nation among defensemen in goals (18).
After that season, Courtney and Shannon decided to transfer to Minnesota.
"I wanted to go to a school where I could develop not just my hockey skills, but as a person," she said. "So I went to Minnesota. But I don't regret going to Colby, and if I had it to do over again, I'd do it the same way."
Kennedy said her first year at Minnesota was interesting because she was playing for a team that had no history, at least on the women's side.
"When I first came here, there wasn't a team yet," she said. "It's hard to understand what's going on and what's going to happen when there's nobody ahead of you. But once we got together, we saw there was character to us. It made it a lot easier."
That season, as a sophomore, she was a second-team AWCHA selection. And last season, she was a team leader as the Gophers won the national championship. In that title game, Kennedy had four points and was named to the all-tournament team. That year she also set a school mark with five assists in one game and was the team leader in plus/minus with a +50 rating.
"She's a very talented player and our best defenseman, maybe one of the best in the country," Halldorson said. "She's a leader on and off the ice. She very competitive and plays strong D."
This season, Kennedy has 4 goals and 11 assists in 14 games.
As Kennedy winds up her collegiate hockey playing career this season, she realizes the past few years have been about making friends more than anything else.
"When you first think about college hockey, you don't think about the people. You think about the practices and the lifting and training," she said. "But you are with the same people for four years, or for me three years, and you just get to know everything about them. That's the great part about college hockey that you'll always remember."
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