Halli Krzyzaniak preserving a program’s all-round picture

(Photo courtesy of UND Media Relations)

Halli Krzyzaniak only needed to stand for her first Canadian national team portrait in 2014 to tell an as-yet-unfamiliar world what she was — and still is — all about. Her choice to keep on her eyewear for that particular shoot set her apart from her teammates, fashion-wise. Three years later, it retroactively symbolizes her status in the program, namely as a graduated, yet unfinished student.

Two months into her sophomore year at the University of North Dakota, and barely eight months after her country corralled its fourth straight Olympic gold medal, Krzyzaniak cracked Canada’s roster at the 2014 Four Nations Cup. This meant missing a weekend of intercollegiate action, plus a week of classes in Grand Forks.

But she did not ditch her best intellectual persona in the process. Trade the red and black for blue and red, and the maple leaf for an “S”, and one would think Kara Danvers neglected to complete her transformation out of haste. 

For the customary stickblade-in-the-camera and stick-behind-the-shoulders poses, Krzyzaniak proudly sported Hockey Canada’s 100th anniversary patch on her No. 25 jersey. Above all of the visible gear, she sported a pair of rectangular glasses with frames almost as bold and black as the shoulder caps on her jersey. 

The hockey equipment signaled that Krzyzaniak has the athletic potential of Meghan Mikkelson. The spectacles signified that she, both superficially and within, has the head of Alex Dunphy.

Six semesters and eight IIHF events later, she does not quite have the superstar ceiling of Hayley Wickenheiser. But she does bear the same basic, all-round aspirations as the five-time Olympic puckster who is now embarking on medical school after hanging up her skates earlier this year.

Krzyzaniak is chasing her first Olympic roster spot on the heels of obtaining the WCHA’s postgraduate scholarship. The scholarship entails a $7,500 grant toward continuing education, which Krzyzaniak plans to pursue en route to a career in orthopedics.

For her alma mater, which saw its final shift of NCAA women’s hockey action for the foreseeable future March 4, the scholarship makes for one last bragging-rights bow.

“Receiving this scholarship from the WCHA definitely helps my pride in coming from the WCHA and playing in such a great league against some of the best players in the world,” she said in a phone interview with Pucks and Recreation.

Krzyzaniak is far from the last bastion of the North Dakota women’s hockey program, which the university administration euthanized in late March. All players with remaining collegiate eligibility are free to disperse to other programs. At least nine have already transferred to another NCAA Division I school, while two others are going to the Canadian Interuniversity system.

Among the alumnae, twin sisters Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux are gunning for their third go-round with the U.S. Olympic team. Michelle Karvinen and Susanna Tapani could both represent Team Finland next February, as could undergraduates Anna Kilponen, Emma Nuutinen and Vilma Tanskanen. Amy Menke is an NWHL prospect for the New York Riveters.

But barring an eventual replenishment, Krzyzaniak will be a part of the Fighting Hawks’ last graduating class. She will be a part of their last cluster of captains, having sported an “A” over her heart her junior and senior season.

And whenever she resumes her studies, she will be the last student-athlete in the program’s run to attend school with financial aid that she earned as a direct result of contributing to UND.

 “Especially with everything that did happen with the North Dakota program,” she said, “it’s really nice to know that I can still be a continuing part of the WCHA even after my graduation and coming out of our hockey program.”

Krzyzaniak came into the UND women’s hockey program when it was coming off its first two NCAA tournament appearances in 2012 and 2013. (Both runs ended in quarterfinal losses to league rival and national dynasty Minnesota.) She came in with three years of experience with the Canadian U-18 national team, plus an ornate background with Team Manitoba already to her credit.

Krzyzaniak entered the rigorous UND pre-health studies program with a desire to emulate her mother, Kelly, a family physician in their rural Manitoba hometown of Neepawa. The same way a conventional Canadian catches a craze through the tales of their ice-going idols, she acquired her additional ambitions through her mother’s stories of medical school and getting to know a community through an essential service.

“I guess I kind of grew up around her and just seeing what she did…the day-to-day happenings and knowing what she does and having so much pride in her occupation is mostly what’s drawn me towards that,” she said.

Though the Fighting Hawks never returned to the national bracket with Kryzaniak’s input, they finished .500 or better overall in each of her four seasons. As a sophomore and junior, her individual impact translated to a spot on the all-WCHA third team. In each of those two years, the conference also recognized her as a scholar-athlete and an all-academic honoree.

In 2016-17, Krzyzaniak was one of only four Division I women’s hockey players to make one of CoSIDA’s academic all-district scrolls. She was her sports only representative in District Six, which covers all of the women’s WCHA’s territory except Ohio State.

Theoretically, that made it easier for the UND athletic program’s veteran faculty representative, Dr. Sue Jeno, to nominate the university’s candidate for the league’s postgraduate scholarship, which she has done in 11 years on the job.

Four other hockey players (two women’s, two men’s) had previously won continuing financial assistance with Jeno’s good word. With Krzyzaniak’s selection, she gave Jeno and her team a third, plus a repeat following goaltender Shelby Amsley-Benzie’s honor in 2016.

And now, along with 2012 OSU alumna Natalie Spooner, she joins 10 other WCHA ambassadors — all of whom represent UND’s perennial on-ice superiors from Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth and Wisconsin — on Canada’s centralized roster. She does so as the only one with a selective league-issued academic scholarship waiting patiently on the backburner.

Head on a swivel

While working out with 27 other Olympic candidates in Fredericton, N.B., Krzyzaniak admitted her education will continue at a school to be named later. At present, she is tempted to return close to home by enrolling at the University of Manitoba. But the interim will be long enough for other enticements to emerge, and if there was ever a time that called for a gap year, the 2017-18 hockey season is it.

At the time of her debut with the national program’s big club, Krzyzaniak was one of 10 newbies joining the holdovers from the 2014 Sochi Games. In the wake of three straight silver-medal runs at the IIHF World Championship, her odds and desires for Pyeongchang have only emboldened.

But there are five cuts to come. At least two, maybe three of those will be among the nine centralized defenders Krzyzaniak stands with, including the Vancouver and Sochi veteran Mikkelson. 

As one of five blueliners without prior Olympic experience, she can ill afford an irrecoverable misstep in her protracted tryout. She cannot lose focus. With that said, if her retelling of the WCHA scholarship derby is any indication, she will have little trouble muzzling the scholastic hounds as necessary.

“I didn’t really think too much about it,” she said. “I was away at the World Championships at the time of the nomination, so for me it was kind of just an afterthought.”

Still, the same basic instinct that drew the syrup on her undergraduate sundae — multifold major in honors, biology and pre-health, 3.92 great-point average and all — can help her toward the big scoop she craves in her athletic dish.

Following a seven-week summer break, the Canadian women will reconvene in Calgary on Aug. 1, kicking off a six-month grind before the chosen 23 cross the Pacific. The broad timeline of the singular project resembles — if only vaguely — the senior thesis Krzyzaniak compiled over the last school year.

Per the program’s website, UND’s pre-health majors are expected to uphold following five pillars: “Complete any prerequisite coursework for the professional school or program of their choice as advised.” “Maintain a competitive cumulative GPA (3.0 minimum).” “Take the standardized entrance exam for their field of choice.” “Visit with the Health Sciences Advisor regularly.” “Visit with their major advisor regularly.”

One could liken all of those to, say, building and sustaining one’s Olympic candidacy through regular and visible involvement in the short-order Four Nations Cup and World Championship.

But after letting out an audible, contemplative, “Hmm,” Krzyzaniak singled out the colossal culmination as her defining stage in the pre-health program. Marathons of solitary research and one-on-one work with a professor would yield a page count in the triple digits on her thesis.

“Just having that self-discipline and time management and knowing that the due date wasn’t very close, but I still had to get this very large body of work done,” she said. “It really helped me to be disciplined enough to force myself work on it for a couple of hours every day make sure that I put aside enough time with my other coursework in order to finish the whole project.”

While her upcoming endeavor will not have the company of other commitments, but plenty of human company, it will consume Krzyzniak’s calendar in a comparable manner. In turn, she will again need to manufacture her own urgency in the opening month to prevent it from mounting on its own in the homestretch.

To put that another way, the willpower that fed the inner Alex Dunphy in the 2016-17 academic almanac must now go back to the Halli Krzyzaniak who made an impression at the Pursuit of Excellence Hockey Academy in Kamloops, B.C.

Prior to Krzyzaniak’s first Four Nations Cup, former POE coach Scott Spencer told Christine Ulmer of Hockey Canada’s website, “Halli’s work ethic is second to none. I’ve never seen someone as driven, determined and committed.”

But just as she balanced the Fighting Hawks and Team Canada with her course load, Krzyzaniak could still fetch a few breathers amidst the Olympic tryout. While she is in Alberta, she may take the opportunity to explore the University of Calgary, whose medical doctoral program has ranked among Canada’s top 10 by Maclean’s, the country’s premier college ranker.

As a 2016 draft choice of the NWHL’s Boston Pride, Krzyzaniak may also have long-term options below the 49th parallel. The Pride’s area code boasts three of U.S. News and World Report’s top 50 medical schools in Harvard (ranked No. 1), Boston University and Tufts.

“My main focus in hockey right now is training and competing to hopefully play in the Olympic Games,” Krzyzaniak insisted, before allowing, “That’s definitely something that I would look into, knowing that there are some really great medical schools out there. So if that was something that I would be able to work, so that I was able to play hockey and go to medical school at the same time, that’s something I would definitely look into.”

Plenty to ‘lean on’

Minus her mother, Krzyzaniak is not one to single out influences by name. The habitual team orientation that boosted her leadership credentials in the UND locker room also served to cut down the tales from the UND classrooms that ultimately yielded her scholarship.

“Really, all of the professors at UND were super great and super helpful,” she said. “Knowing the schedule that I had as a student-athlete, and then leaving fairly often for events with my national team, they were very supportive in helping me achieve the grades that I wanted to while missing so much time, and to be able to graduate within four years…I wouldn’t have been able to do it if they weren’t so helpful.”

The calls to give back some of that moral support have rang, if not early and often, then suddenly and harshly. On Nov. 17, 2014 — three weeks after Krzyzaniak traded her specs for her shield to skate in her first Four Nations Cup — North Dakota classmate and teammate Lisa Marvin sustained a multitude of gruesome injuries in a near-fatal auto wreck. 

As Pat Borzi of the New York Times articulated much later, “It would be three days before Marvin’s teammates washed the gasoline and blood out of her hair.” For months thereafter, Marvin lacked physical autonomy as she healed from a host of bone, ligament and nerve wounds.

But after missing the balance of her and Krzyzaniak’s sophomore season, then all of 2015-16, she returned to game shape and saw action in 24 contests this past year.

“With Lisa’s accident, it put a lot of things into perspective,” said Krzyzaniak, who in a future vocation may one day have a role to play in another athlete’s long journey back to game shape. “Most of us had never dealt with something of that magnitude before.

“So to see something like that happen firsthand and to be alongside Lisa for all of her stay in the hospital and then through her very long rehab process, it made us all be able to better see the big picture of life and to know that she was just so lucky to be alive after that.

“But, really, the experiences we were able to have as student-athletes and as teenagers and young adults, that’s just something that you can’t take for granted."

As though any of the Fighting Hawks needed to learn that lesson twice, they were literally taking the ice at Ralph Engelstad Arena for a postseason practice March 29 when the word leaked that their work would be for naught. Menke, the last team captain, subsequently wrote in The Players’ Tribune that she heard the news through classmate Gracen Hirschy, who had learned it via social media.

“It was very abrupt, there was no warning, there was really no indication that something like that was even a possibility,” said Krzyzaniak. “We were a very tight knit group, though, so we had one another to lean on.”

Eight days before posing with Hirschy, Marvin and Menke at their commencement ceremony — her wardrobe uniquely punctuated with an honors’ gold medal — Krzyzaniak had her own social-media missive on the matter. The university’s official Twitter account had quoted President Mark Kennedy as follows: “Our alumni love UND. We are looking to keep it that way.”

Krzyzaniak’s reply: “Really?? Are you sure??”

When she elaborated to Pucks and Rec, she first spoke like the House or Senate leader of an opposition party. Then she switched to a supporting tone for her former teammates who, while she aims to represent UND through a higher than higher education and participation in the five-ring festival, will round out their Division I eligibility on other campuses.

“The president of the university made it very clear that reinstating wasn’t going to happen without an absurdly large amount of money, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us,” she said.

“But it was more just leaning on one another and knowing that there are going to be some tough days, and that no matter where the girls end up, they always have our support to lean back on.”

Not that Krzyzaniak is dipping too broad a brush into the grudge canister. After all, the athletic department and everything it provided in her time put her in a position to become UND’s first representative on the Canadian women’s Olympic team.

However strong that springboard proves in the sporting world, she will have her league-sanctioned cushion to lean back on. Dr. Jeno and company put her on the path to the last academic scholarship anybody will derive directly from playing North Dakota women’s hockey.

“They were nice enough to nominate me for this award,” she said. “To actually be awarded the scholarship was kind of a surprise for me."

Nothing like a pleasant surprise to brighten the picture so soon after a darkening shock.