Kelsey Koelzer, first Black woman NCAA hockey head coach, 'has the fire to be the best'
HORSHAM, Pa. — The crystallization came at a Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport gate not long after one of the finest individual moments of Kelsey Koelzer’s hockey career.
Koelzer, playing in her first National Women’s Hockey League All-Star Game on Feb. 11, 2018, scored four goals and was named the game’s co-MVP. Awaiting a flight back to her native Pennsylvania, the 2016 No. 1 overall pick scrolled Twitter when one notification in particular caught her attention. It was from a parent who wrote that their mixed-race daughter saw Koelzer playing in the game, and had quickly decided she wanted to take up the sport.
The former Princeton Tiger responded, and her encouragement garnered thousands of retweets. Her representation mattered. It made a difference, at least in one life.
“I just feel like it kind of helped open the eyes of younger Black people who wanted to play hockey,” Koelzer told Paste BN Sports.
Since then, though, Koelzer has hung up her skates and taken on a new challenge. In September 2019, she was hired as the head coach for the women’s hockey program at Division III Arcadia, located outside of Philadelphia. The Knights will play their first game in three months, with a 26-year-old coach – five years removed from being selected as the No. 1 pick in the NWHL draft – and a roster of 18 freshmen and one sophomore.
Koelzer already blazed a trail in her playing days. Now she's making history again, this time as the first Black woman NCAA head hockey coach.
Though there are no official records or databases about the ethnicities of hockey coaches, it's believed by experts that Koelzer is the first Black woman to become an NCAA head coach. Ed Wright was the first Black person overall to do it when he was hired in 1970 as the head coach at the University of Buffalo.
“I don’t know that young girls are going to see me coaching and want to play hockey, per se. I think it’s a lot less glamorous to be a coach than it is to be a player, right?” Koelzer said. “I think having the opportunity for kids to still see someone who looks like them coaching is something that’s big.”
'This is honestly perfect'
As a child, Koelzer looked up to the U.S. Olympic women’s hockey teams, although she was often the only girl on her youth team. Those early U.S. teams had no players of color, so she turned to the NHL and Jarome Iginla, who played over two decades in the NHL, and is just the fourth Black player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“I kind of had to combine role models in a sense,” she said while seated on a bench at the newly constructed, yet completely barren, locker room inside Hatfield Ice Arena, where Arcadia will practice and play its home games (about 25 minutes from campus).
Koelzer grew up watching her older cousins skate. Their father, Fred Koelzer, found the secondhand equipment she used to participate in clinics. He coached her in middle school and went to almost all Princeton home games.
“The one who made it accessible to me and opened my eyes to the game,” Koelzer says of her uncle.
People began telling Fred his niece was destined for greatness on the ice by the time she was 12. She was always competitive and motivated, at the rink and in the classroom, Fred remembered.
“She has the fire to be the best,” he told Paste BN Sports by phone.
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Fred continued coaching youth girls teams until recently, and Kelsey would stop by and help. During those practices, he saw his niece immerse herself into the teaching aspect of hockey.
Cara Morey, the women’s hockey coach at Princeton, didn’t think Koelzer’s future involved coaching, but she saw leadership capabilities from early in her college career.
“She can hold a room,” Morey told Paste BN Sports. “She’s got strong opinions and she’s brilliant.”
Koelzer held teammates accountable, Morey said, and never shied away from an uncomfortable conversation, whether the subject matter was race or effort.
Morey’s impact on Koelzer opened her eyes to the coaching profession. Going to the rink to play for Morey was easy and fun. The Tigers staff pushed her to be better. Before arriving at Princeton, Koelzer never played for a woman coach. She wants to be a coach her players can always approach, and will trust her as she tries to make them better players and people.
It’s the opposite of what she experienced during her second season in the NWHL. Koelzer was driving 90 minutes from her 9-to-5 job as a corporate recruiter to Newark, New Jersey., for practices multiple times per week. A new coach who didn’t seem to care made the commute feel longer. There was also the shoulder surgery she had to pay for on her own.
“A lot of things started to pile up that made me think how much more time and effort do I want to give to it?” Koelzer said. “It was definitely starting to wear on me physically, and then mentally, the effort that it took to play – not that I didn’t want to play. It was a lot.”
Passion for the sport persisted. Then Koelzer’s aunt, an adjunct English professor at Arcadia, noticed a job posting for a women’s hockey team that didn’t yet exist. Koelzer, 24 at that time, applied that night and was hired later that year.
Koelzer has never lived more than an hour away from Horsham, where essentially her entire family lives. Raised by a single mother, Kristine, they share a special bond – one that has kept Koelzer tied to the area.
“There was a lot of stuff for them to overcome, hockey-wise,” Fred Koelzer said. “Not only how expensive the sport is and how it’s not traditional for girls to be on boys' teams, for African American girls to be on boys' teams or playing hockey at all, so they’re really close.
“If an amazing opportunity would present itself, she would go after it. But that amazing opportunity presented itself locally and I’m sure she couldn’t be more thrilled about that.”
Or, as Kelsey Koelzer put it: “This is honestly perfect.”
Waiting for the world to catch up
After watching Koelzer wade through an up-and-down freshman season at Princeton, Morey – then an assistant in charge of the defense – asked the head coach if she could switch to the back end.
Her shots still topped out at more than 80 mph and she could impose her will physically. She became an All-American within a year, while demanding the best from her teammates.
“That used to be intimidating to people,” Morey said. “Now that she’s proved herself and been around the game, there’s just such a high level of respect for her.”
Given her lack of experience coaching, that might seem counterintuitive. Koelzer herself thought parents and prospects might not take her seriously and would balk at the idea of playing for someone barely out of college.
But who better to know exactly what her players will be going to be going through than someone who graduated college in 2017 (with a psychology degree)? There’s a level of understanding often lost to the decades between a player and coach.
“I think it’s all about how you carry yourself,” Koelzer said.
She has done difficult things before. Still, Koelzer has surprised herself over the past 18 months by tackling tasks from roster construction toequipment ordering.
Given the need for more diversity and women in the collegiate coaching ranks, Koelzer's potential behind the bench is limitless, her former coach said.
“Instead of changing herself," Morey said, "she waited for the world to catch up to her.”
Follow Chris Bumbaca on Twitter @BOOMbaca.