Life After Hockey: Kelsie Fralick seizing new days with Old World tongues

(Photo courtesy of Kelsie Fralick)

 

Attende, quaeso. Nunc goaltending pro superbia Boston: una numero, Kelsie Fralick. (Your attention, please. Now goaltending for the Boston Pride: No. 1, Kelsie Fralick.)

Fralick terminatur ad tres salvet ad tres shots ad eius debut in superbia. (Fralick finishes with three saves on three shots in her debut for the Pride.)

Kelsie Fralick and John Garrett have much to discuss. Should they ever meet, their choices of site, subject matter and speech would be equally flexible.

Fralick, a former backup goalie for the 2016 Isobel Cup champion Boston Pride, now grooms aspiring Classics sages. Garrett, the Vancouver Canucks goalie-turned-TV color analyst, ranks fifth among the greatest scholars in Floyd Conner’s Hockey’s Most Wanted.

Fralick, a product of Connecticut College’s Division III program, made one regulation relief appearance in her one-year professional career. But she also had a best-selling NWHL jersey.

Garrett never sparkled on the stat sheet in his 16-year WHA/NHL journey, but had one unmistakable moment of glory. He landed a 1983 NHL All-Star Game roster spot by default when Vancouver’s No. 1 netminder, Richard Brodeur, withdrew due to injury. When he went, he came away with the showcase’s MVP honors.

Garrett’s fascination with Latin was more instrumental in securing his mention in multiple hockey books. As quoted in Conner’s 2002 tome, he reasoned that the so-called “dead” dialect was still relevant. In typical goaltender eccentricity, Garrett quipped, “If I meet an ancient Roman, just think of the great conversation I can have with him.”

Fralick, a first-year Classics teacher at Blair Academy in Blairstown, N.J., has her own defense. At times she even needs to convince those who have already enrolled in her class.

“Just because it isn’t spoken doesn’t mean that there is any less value in learning it,” she told Pucks and Recreation. “We don’t speak like William Shakespeare or Chaucer, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any value.”

Fralick has fed her craving for Classical cultural understanding through ample national and international travel. While she has yet to encounter a centurion, she has found a Latin-speaking sanctuary.

Every summer, the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies conducts a variety of Rusticatio seminars. Most workshops are weeklong, adult-only immersion experiences where fluency is an understood prerequisite. While bonding in a virtual, modernized Rome, goers talk as the Romans talked.

“There are people speaking Latin out there,” Fralick said. “You just have to know where to look.”

With its protocol, Rusticatio is a refreshing change of pace for those who Fralick affectionately dubs “Latin nerds.” It is akin to an intensive hockey camp for pucksters whose communities and schools undervalue their sport.

As an academic discipline, Latin is foreign even among foreign languages. Its long-ago fade from the catalog of official languages lends it a mystique that does not touch French, Spanish or Chinese.

It comes in handy for Dead Poets Society-style speeches, old-fashioned Catholic masses or time-honored government or military slogans. Otherwise, Americans are generally inclined to sneer at its use as archaic or pretentious.

There are exceptions to that norm, but it is a norm all the same. Likewise, in most U.S. localities, baseball and football interest perpetually supersedes that of hockey the way French and Spanish do Latin in schools. For the youngest organized athletes, the offerings are practically a steady diet of soccer outdoors and basketball inside.

Conversely, much like with Fralick’s second language, you need to know where to look for high-end hockey development. The game comes from a foreign land (Canada), takes place on an uncharted surface and requires extra equipment.

“I think the stereotypes that go along with Classics and hockey perpetuate themselves because people think they don’t belong,” Fralick mused. “So they don’t try.”

Fralick has had the fortune of attending and working at schools that appreciate and accommodate both of her passions. Her scholastic alma mater — Hotchkiss in Lakeville, Conn. — doles out Classics diplomas to qualified graduates. Her first employer — St. Paul’s in Concord, N.H., (alma mater of Hobey Baker, who ranked sixth on Conner’s list of skating scholars) — has a similar offering. It also ices boys’ and girls’ hockey teams at the varsity, JV and club levels.

And while Blair has no rink to speak of, it handsomely caters to Classical interests. Fralick is instructing Latin at three levels and introducing Greek to her most learned pupils.

“If you go into a Classics classroom and take a look at the students,” she said, “there is no way you’d be able to say that the children of the one percent are the only takers.”

“Same with hockey,” she continued. “You walk into a locker room, and there is no way you’d be able to say that all the girls in there are from middle-to-upper-class families.”

Fralick’s own narrative screamed blue-collar on the ice, then added a worldly twist off it. She took up hockey at the relatively late age of 10 in her home Philadelphia suburb of West Chester, Pa.

Fralick stayed in Chester County through middle school, attending Upland Country Day, before enrolling at Hotchkiss. She remained in the Nutmeg State for four more years after the Connecticut College Camels signed her on.

In between, her family and various schools took her on journeys to South America, Europe and both polar caps. As one of those excursions, she spent six weeks exploring the Etruscan and Roman ruins of Orvieto, Italy. She also has a nosebleed’s view of the hallowed Roman Colosseum as her Twitter cover photo.

At Connecticut, she was a can’t-miss two-in-one phenomenon and philanthropist. Early in Fralick’s sophomore season, Bettina Weiss of Her Campus dubbed her “one of the friendliest faces on Conn’s campus.” As an upperclassman, she would land consecutive Hockey Humanitarian Award nominations.

Studying Classics and anthropology, she sustained her longtime long-term teaching ambitions while dazzling the Camels’ crease. Once she assumed the starting job, the team’s struggles to get above .500 magnified her individual output. She twice finished a season with a goals-against average below 2.00 and mustered a 2.20 average as a junior. Over her final three seasons, she never retained a save percentage below .929, and stamped a career .932 success rate over 76 games.

The NWHL launched after Fralick graduated in 2015. While far from the lone Division III product to enter the revolutionary paid circuit, she was Boston’s only signee of that ilk. Two months after the inaugural draft, she signed to join Brittany Ott and Lauren Slebodnick in the Pride goalie guild.

While teaching in Concord, she would see action in a fraction of one game. On Jan.10, 2016, she played a de facto closer role for Ott, stopping all three shots she faced in an 8-1 rout of the New York Riveters.

But her defining individual athletic moment came two months earlier. Before play commenced, Fralick learned via the blog Stanley Cup of Chowder that her jersey was among the NWHL’s top 10 selling replicas. With its Boston focus, the post’s title stressed Fralick, whose thread was No. 9, and Pride teammate Hilary Knight (second).

“To be mentioned in a headline with arguably the best player in the world was an incredible honor,” she said. “That said, I come from a big Italian family, and my colleagues at St. Paul’s School were very excited about my being part of the league. So I knew that pretty much all of my jerseys were sold to friends and family while Hilary’s were likely purchased by her fans nationwide.”

Come what may, she had several supporters flocking to the Hub from north and southwest of the state border alike. Many of them reaffirmed the web reports by sporting her sweater in the stands.

Fralick’s answer to Jim Morris’ MLB pitching stint culminated in Boston’s Isobel Cup run. She retired a champion, returning to St. Paul’s as a teacher-coach rather than a teacher-coach-athlete. She briefly reapplied the student label en route to a master’s in education from the University of Pennsylvania.

“Without sports, I wouldn’t be where I am today, hands down,” she said. “Playing hockey really prepared me to be the best student I could be and the best person I could be. I had to manage my time efficiently, I had to be organized and I had to give 100 percent in everything I did if I wanted to go anywhere or accomplish anything.

“I developed some good habits throughout my athletic career that have helped me become an efficient teacher, a good coach and a person with whom my students can relate and feel comfortable.”

As of this year, Fralick has a field hockey team to tutor in Blair’s fall sports season. She will likewise coach lacrosse this spring. On the surface, that makes for a lighter yearly load than what she bore in her two years at St. Paul’s. But she knows as well as anyone that her labors of love pale in comparison to, say, the 12 Labours of Hercules.

For motivational Classical literature, Fralick recommends “not the entire story, the actual story of Hercules is pretty sad. But I would say that people should read the part where he performs the 12 labors.”

In most versions of the tale, the majority of the labors bear self-explanatory glamorous benefits. Hercules must slay three creatures or monsters, capture three others alive and acquire five objects. In between, the fifth assignment — the start of the second period, if you will — entails cleaning the Augean stables.

Fralick likes to separate the labors into “mundane” and “crazy” categories. The mixture of grunt work and heart-stopping missions ought to hit home for student-athletes, especially those playing rugged sports.

“Hercules doing all of these tasks is pretty inspirational,” Fralick said. “There was doubt that he’d be able to complete them all in the allotted time.”

Somewhat paradoxically, one of Fralick’s toughest tasks as a rookie coach was remembering to eschew drills with a Herculean feel. St. Paul’s appointed her to the JV post in both ice and field hockey.

For the former scholastic sensation, regal collegian and major-league mainstay, the objective had long been Ws over development. It was far less complicated than, say, distinguishing deponent verbs from the passive voice.

At St. Paul’s, Fralick needed to remember that she was not running a Rusticatio for athletes. Some players had varsity aspirations. Others wished to further involve themselves in school, to extend their learning in a different manner.

“It took me a little bit of time, and a lot of frustration and soul-searching,” she said. “But I finally got to a place in my head where I would push them to be the best they could be, but to also remember that they are playing because they have to and because they want to have fun.

“I have loved JV sports ever since because now I understand the mindset and can push them when I need to. But I can have fun with them when they need it.”

It bears noting that the freshman Camels from Fralick’s senior season are now skating into their own swan songs. She has logged associations with academic and athletic institutions in four other states in the interim. But the relative brevity of her now-completed transition from student-athlete to teacher-coach cannot escape her.

“I am able to draw on not-so-distant memories to high school and college and think of a drill that would address a theme I want to work on with the girls,” she said. “You also have to acknowledge that, in this day and age, students are quick to Google their teachers and coaches. They are able to see what I’ve done to get me where I am today.

“So the girls respect me a lot more knowing that I was just in college and just finished pro, so they know that I know my stuff. And the boys think it’s cool that their Latin teacher isn’t really such a nerd.”

Fralick’s pedagogical principles stem from influences as old as nearly two-and-a-half millennia. At Connecticut, she took to YouTube for a testimonial on the ancient Greek author Xenophon. With her joint focus on Classics and anthropology, Fralick was drawn to the frank, firsthand account of a Spartan military campaign in the Anabasis.

“He wrote without frills, and you can immediately see that he was definitely a military man,” she remarked.

Of the genre, she added, “Ethnography is the readers’ way to step into the shoes of the people who are being documented. Xenophon was writing a combination ethnography-military exploits book. So Xenophon was the author my brain needed for my sanity, but he was also writing something that I genuinely wanted to read.”

Having pushed off her plunge into Greek until college — “biggest regret from my high-school days,” she said — Fralick lauded Xenophon’s style for easing her introduction. And her enthusiasm for expert experiential writing gives her yet more company from the broader goaltending family.

Case in point: The Game by Ken Dryden, who placed second on Conner’s aforementioned ranking. One more: Open Net by the late George Plimpton, Conner’s single-most wanted scholar to have played the sport.

As for Conner’s No. 5 man on North America’s opposite coast, Fralick admits she was unfamiliar with Garrett until recently. But now she knows there are at least two people who could lobby for a rink-based Rusticatio if they wanted.

“Actually, to that same point, the goalie who came in after I graduated Conn studied Classics as well,” she said. “But in terms of (Garrett’s) quote itself, I totally agree. The material we read in Classics would lend itself to a really interesting, deep, educated discussion from literature to military to everyday life. It really would be an amazing conversation.”

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.