Hanover
A young girl Daniel’s age, Matti Hartman, was also part of a group of youngsters “who were talking about hockey every moment, and he wanted to try,” Ray recalled last week. “He begged me for weeks.”
So on the day she signed Daniel up for learn-to-play, Ray’s youngest daughter, Eliana, tagged along. She was 4 years old at the time. “Sarcastically, I asked her, ‘I bet you want to play, too,’ ” recalled Ray, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering. “She nodded her head. That was it.”
As the record-setting Hartman leaves Hanover High School for a college playing career at Northeastern University this fall, the youngest Ray has taken the first step toward what she hopes will be a similar future. Earlier this month, Eliana Ray completed her freshman season with the U16 girls at Minnesota’s Shattuck-St. Mary’s School, serving as the backup goaltender on a team that won its fourth straight USA Hockey Tier I national championship and its fifth in seven years.
The soft-spoken Ray, 14, has gained much more than a medal or hat to commemorate a noteworthy accomplishment. Speaking via video chat last week, Ray said her experience — which happened sooner than she first expected it would — is also helping her become a more outgoing person as well as a better shot-stopper.
“When you take the best players in America and put them on a team, the competition is obviously going to be much higher than on a town team in New Hampshire,” said Ray, who posted a 2.00 goals-against average in 24 games for SSM. “It’s also Minnesota hockey, which says something for itself. It’s very competitive.”
Shattuck owns a long-earned reputation in prep hockey as a proving ground for young men with collegiate and professional playing goals. The alumni list would populate a pretty decent NHL all-star team: Sidney Crosby, Kyle Okposo, Derek Stepan, Jonathan Toews, Zach Parise and Ty Conklin all once wore the maroon, black and white of the Sabres at some point in their youth.
The Faribault, Minn., prep school, located about an hour south of Minneapolis, has put more work into its girls programs over the past 15 years or so, said U16 coach Peter Johnson, the brother of former 1980 U.S. Olympic and NHL forward and current University of Wisconsin women’s hockey coach Mark Johnson. Rather than siphon from Minnesota’s depth of female talent, SSM positions itself as an alternative for girls who have limited high-level alternatives. Two Shattuck grads, Saskatchewan’s Kennedy Ottenbreit and Colorado native Brooke Ahbe, skate for the Dartmouth women’s hockey program.
“For a lot of girls that don’t have competitive hockey in their area, this is a good option for girls to come and compete and go on to play in college,” said Johnson, whose U16 roster included girls from 12 U.S. states and Canadian provinces this winter. “The boys have the big names as far as NHL players, but women don’t play in the NHL. Their highest level is the Olympics, and we’ve had Olympic players that went here and paved the way for the players who are here now.”
Ray possessed an SSM brochure from a prospects camp after sixth grade, but her mother’s initial plan was for her daughter to spend a year at Hanover High before moving on. Shattuck normally recruits just one female goalie a year, but Johnson happened to need two when the Rays sent an inquiry about the program last spring. In the span of about four weeks, Shattuck hosted the two for a visit, reviewed video of Eliana in action, approved her transcript and offered her a spot in the Class of 2019. She accepted.
“I’ve gone to summer hockey camps, where I’ve been away for a week,” said Ray, who tended net for a Bantam-level boys team with the Hanover Wild last year. “This was kind of difficult at the beginning, but I got to see my mom every two or three weeks. It just got easier from there.”
Although he had an experienced sophomore in New York’s Abbey Levy as a starter, Johnson didn’t wait long to put Ray between the pipes, a 3-1 win over Minnesota Elite in the Sabres’ second game of the season last September. SSM’s schedule, nearly three times as long as what Ray would have seen at Hanover, was split between high school select teams surrounding a steady diet of elite-level programs from Detroit, Chicago, Winnipeg and elsewhere.
SSM didn’t have to go far for nationals, about 70 minutes due north to Blaine. The Sabres swept to six victories to win their championship, rallying for two third-period goals in a 2-1 defeat of Minnesota Elite Grey on April 4 for the title. Ray played about half of Shattuck’s opening game at nationals, an 11-0 decimation of the Washington Pride on March 31, but otherwise observed.
“Sitting on the bench, you’re still watching your team, and to win that kind of competitive game, a hard game, is just an indescribable moment,” she said. “To watch them win the national championship, it just feels like you’re the best in the world.”
Beyond that, Ray said she’s becoming a more outgoing person. It helps that Shattuck puts its sixth- through ninth-graders in a different part of the campus, meaning Ray got to be an older peer in a new group rather than a younger one among upperclassmen.
Johnson has noticed. And so has Mom.
“I guess I feel like kids need something to aspire to, and she’s always aspired to this,” Laura Ray said. “From the first time she set foot on the ice, she took to it. The first time she saw goalie pads, she just wanted to try it, so I wanted to encourage that.
“It’s hard to be separated from your kids at that age. She had the ambition, and I wanted to help her with her dream.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.