Inject
a quiz whiz with Brianne Jenner’s compete level, and the go-getter could sop up
six figures on Jeopardy!, then crave
conquest in a tri-county trivia tournament. Give Jenner’s fire to a
fisherwoman, and she can catch an urban legend before pursuing the same salmon
supper she has caught for the past three neighborhood cookouts.
That
is the extent of Jenner’s insatiability. Coming off a gold medal in her first
Olympic endeavor with Team Canada, the belated Cornell women’s hockey senior is
fixated on unfinished business in the NCAA realm.
“Last
year was a big year,” she offered in a phone interview with Along the Boards
this week. “It was an accomplishment of my dream in many ways. But a month
after that was over, I was excited to get back to Cornell.
“Athletes
are competitive people, and always focused on the next challenge.”
Scale
and scope of press coverage aside, no challenge is too grand or too minor, too stale
or too novel for Jenner.
The
Oakville, Ont., native is barely 11 months removed from cutting into Team USA’s
2-0 lead with 3:26 to spare in regulation, sparking Canada’s comeback in the
Sochi Games title tilt. Marie-Philip Poulin, herself a belated senior at Boston
University this year, proceeded to force overtime and score the sudden-death
decider for the 3-2 victory.
With
that, Jenner punctuated her arrival on the international platform by pitching
in to preserve her country’s Olympic dynasty with a fourth consecutive gold
medal.
Fast-forward
to the present. With less than a full month to spare in the regular season, she
is helping the Big Red dig out of an initial pothole as they defend another
ECAC Hockey crown.
Dating
back to 2009-10, the year before Jenner arrived, Cornell has been to five
straight conference title tilts. It has won four of those, with the exception
of 2012, when a 30-5-0 overall finish more than warranted at at-large bid to
the exclusive, eight-team NCAA tournament.
But
after starting this season at 3-6-0, the Big Red will need a near-perfect
finish down the stretch to avoid an unfamiliar reliance on the automatic bid
that comes with the league playoff pennant.
In
a way, Jenner’s momentary deletion from Cornell’s roster may now be yielding pivotal
benefits on that front.
Had
she whiffed on a spot for Canada’s pre-Olympic centralization tour, the Big Red
would likely be looking at a two-member senior class in 2014-15. In addition,
they may have had a maximum allotment of 16 skaters instead of 17 — still one
fewer than the conventional game-day quorum.
Instead,
she is allying with Emily Fulton and Jillian Saulnier to pilot the offense and impart
the intangibles to five juniors and nine underclass skaters. She and Saulnier
most recently tallied four points apiece to steamroll Union, 8-2, Friday
afternoon, improving the Big Red to 8-1-3 since Thanksgiving.
“We’re
a much younger team now, so it took us a while to understand what kind of
hockey we needed to play,” Jenner said of the preceding slump.
She
added, “It has been a challenge this year. We had a really tough schedule early
on. Obviously, that’s not any excuse, but it kind of forced us to face some adversity
and reflect on our game. We’ve been working really hard and we’re really confident
in the team we’ve become.
“We
have all the bits and pieces here, and it’s going to be up to us.”
Now
11-7-3 overall, and with eight regular-season games still to come, Cornell
cannot afford to stop kicking ice chips over its acrid autumn. As of Friday
evening, its sits at No. 10 on the PairWise leaderboard.
At
the start of this weekend’s action, four other ECAC tenants alone — Quinnipiac,
Harvard, Clarkson and St. Lawrence — were ahead of the Big Red in the national
qualifier projection. Yet they are still higher than any to-be-determined
College Hockey America program that has its name on an automatic bid.
A
clean sweep through the homestretch could fortify the Big Red’s position.
Although, beyond a Feb. 6 visit to Quinnipiac and a Feb. 13 home date with
Harvard, there are not many opportunities to bulk up on big-game loot.
Regardless,
whether it is Canada or Cornell, the pride factor is all the same for Jenner,
who has also won gold at the 2010 Four Nations Cup and 2012 World Championship.
“I
think there is some parallel. We’ve built a really sound program here,” she
said of the Big Red. “This year, we are a bit more of an underdog, but we’re
okay with that as well.”
A
veteran of two Frozen Fours, but no national championship games, Jenner has no
time to worry about her team’s billing. Just like the discrepancies in prestige
between tournaments, that cannot alter her appetite for a fulfilling finish to
a given campaign.
For
her senior season in Ithaca, that entails a timely surge en route to an ECAC
championship three-peat, followed by the program’s last unchecked breakthrough.
This year’s Frozen Four happens to be at Minnesota’s Ridder Arena, where
Cornell lost a 3-2 triple-overtime marathon to Minnesota-Duluth in the 2010 title
game, its last game before Jenner enrolled.
“It’s
hard to compare to the Olympics, because that’s something everyone works toward
their whole life,” she admits. “But a lot of really elite hockey players strive
for an NCAA championship, and I’m capable of that.”
This article originally appeared on Along the Boards
