The US-Canada Olympic women’s hockey rivalry hits home for Raleigh’s Alyssa Gagliardi
Alyssa Gagliardi was once a part of the ever intense, never disappointing rivalry that is Team USA vs Canada women’s hockey.
She also has a gold medal from it, though not from the Olympics. Hers came in the 2015 Four Nations Cup tournament in Sweden.
The Americans beat the Canadians for the gold that year, making it that much more special. They did it again in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and will look to repeat as Olympic champions Wednesday night when Team USA and Canada meet in the gold-medal game in Beijing.
Gagliardi, the girls and women’s youth and amateur hockey coordinator for the Carolina Hurricanes, said she still gets chills thinking about representing the U.S., taking the ice, facing the Canadians, being a part of it.
“You dream of putting on the USA jersey,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “To do that against any team is obviously an incredible honor, but then to know you’re going up against Canada ... It doesn’t matter if you’re playing in a sold out rink or a small rink in small-town Sweden, the intensity, the rivalry, the physicality and how badly you wanted to beat them, it was pretty cool to be a part of.”
Eye on the Olympics
In Beijing, the Canadians won their head-to-head with Team USA 4-2 in the preliminary round. Canada continued to roll through the tournament and hammered Switzerland 10-3 in the semifinals. The Canadians have outscored opponents 54-8 and will be favored Wednesday.
Team USA lost forward Brianna Decker (“I’ve known her since high school and that was pretty heartbreaking,” Gagliardi said) to a knee injury in the first game of the tournament. The Canadians, in contrast, have gotten forward Melodie Daoust back into the lineup — Daoust missed four games with an injury but returned for the Switzerland game.
But, Gagliardi said, history could repeat itself.
“I think so,” she said. “The U.S. looked pretty good in that (4-2) game. The score doesn’t reflect it but they outshot (Canada) two to one and they had a lot of good chances. And in 2018 ...”
Fond memories
In 2018, Canada was a 2-1 winner over the U.S. in a preliminary-round game as Canadian goalie Genevieve Lacasse stopped 44 of 45 shots and Sarah Nurse scored the winning goal.
But Team USA then beat the Canadians 3-2 in a sudden-death shootout for its first Olympic gold in 20 years. Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson scored the deciding shootout goal, U.S. goalie Maddie Rooney stopped Meghan Agosta and a wild celebration soon began at the Gangneung Hockey Center.
Gagliardi, 29, was born in Pittsburgh but raised in the Raleigh area, playing her junior hockey on boys teams in the Triangle until she was 14. She then played college hockey for four years at Cornell before turning professional and joining the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League in 2014.
Gagliardi moved to the Boston Pride of the fledgling National Women’s Hockey League in 2015, winning the league championship. As a member of the U.S. national team, she won a silver medal in the 2014 Four Nations Cup and then the gold the next season against Canada.
‘Now is the time’ to grow the game
As for Wednesday’s gold-medal game in Beijing, Gagliardi said she has five former college teammates on Team Canada and a “bunch of friends on the U.S. team” she has known since she was 11 and 12 years old. Her hope is that the game and another installment of Team USA vs Canada will only inspire more young girls to play, at the amateur and professional level.
Gagliardi has seen the interest rise in her position with the Hurricanes, which she began in 2019. She has developed the Girls Continue to Play program, has conducted camps and clinics and said some of the “homegrown kids are getting looks from NCAA Division I schools.
“There’s that pathway now,” she said. “It’s all there and kind of laid out now. You don’t have to leave to go play a higher level, which a lot of us did growing up.”
Another tense, exciting gold-medal game between the U.S. and Canada on the sport’s biggest stage can only help that, Gagliardi said.
“It’s exciting for the sport,” she said. “All the eyes are on that game from across the world. We always hope we see a big jump in interest in the game, and I think the biggest thing is if we can get women’s hockey in front of more eyeballs more consistently. It’s such a great product. There’s so much skill, so much talent especially at those levels.
“It’s something we hope as a women’s hockey community, that now is the time to kind of snowball off of that and use that as a base to launch into something greater.”
