Kelli Stack had extra motivation coming into this Canadian Women’s Hockey League season.
The 30-year-old forward was left off the United States women’s national team for 2018, a surprising snub for a player who had scored 108 points in 100 games while wearing Team USA colours, most recently as a member of the 2017 world championship team.
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That meant Stack, who wasn’t even invited to the Olympic centralization camp, had to watch as her former teammates — and friends — beat their Canadian rivals in a shootout in the gold-medal game at the Pyeongchang Olympics last month, giving the Americans their first gold in women’s hockey since 1998. Watching the final unfold was “bittersweet.”
“It was hard to watch just ‘cause I knew I deserved to be there,” said Stack, who owns silver medals from the 2010 and 2014 Olympics. “I was happy for my friends on the team that won.”
Stack viewed that final in South Korea from China, where she has been living while playing for the CWHL’s expansion franchise, Kunlun Red Star. With Kunlun, Stack has been a star, channelling heartbreak from the Olympic snub into a stellar CWHL season. She scored 26 goals and 49 points in 28 regular-season games to lead the league in scoring by eight-points. It’s the highest single-season point total since 2011-12.
“Going into this year, I knew I wanted to keep playing. I was physically at the top of my game and I knew that I was still one of the best players in the world and I wanted to showcase that whether it was with Team USA or here in the CWHL, and I think I did just that,” the Red Star captain said.
This season, Stack has also led KRS to a berth in the Clarkson Cup final – in their inaugural season, no less — after the No. 2 seeded Chinese squad won their best-of-three playoff series 2-1 against the No. 3 seed Calgary Inferno this weekend. KRS will meet the Markham Thunder, who swept the Montreal Canadiennes in the other semifinal series, in the final on March 25 at Toronto’s Ricoh Coliseum.
The Calgary-Kunlun series was capped off by a thrilling 1-0 triple overtime win for KRS on Sunday that saw Alexandra Carpenter – another player surprisingly cut from the 2018 Olympic team — score the winner after more than 114 minutes of game time at Markham’s Angus Glen Community Centre (to avoid a road trip to China, the series was played in Markham with KRS as the home team). It was the second overtime win in as many days for KRS, who battled back in the series after dropping the opener 3-0. Stack assisted on both OT winners.
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“Kelli Stack has been our lifeblood, I mean without her, we don’t win. She carries the team on her back, she did it again today,” said Kunlun head coach Digit Murphy after a 3-2 win in Game 2 on Saturday. “Kelli really is the engine behind KRS. And she’s a great captain, she’s a great conduit between the coaches with the players, the Chinese kids love her, and she’s just always smiling.”
The CWHL introduced two Chinese expansion teams this season — KRS along with the Vanke Rays, who just missed out on the playoffs — as a way to grow the women’s game in China. With the 2022 Winter Olympics being held in Beijing, the country has an ambitious goal of icing competitive hockey teams in four years. KRS is a part of that development plan.
After being cut from the U.S. Olympic team, Stack signed on with KRS this past summer as a player and sport ambassador, for which she is paid a salary, and made the move to Shenzhen, China, where the team is based. From experiencing the culture to growing close with her younger Chinese teammates, the year has been an unforgettable one, she said.
“It’s been one of the most unique things I’ve ever done, moving across the world and experiencing a new culture and a new way of life,” Stack said. “And getting to play the sport I love still, so it’s been an incredible experience so far.”
The KRS roster is a mix of 11 American, Canadian and European players — including Finnish goalie Noora Raty, who stopped all 66 shots faced in the Game 3 win — with the rest filled out with Chinese players, who hope to play for China in 2022. (The team can have up to six players who do not have Chinese citizenship, known as import players, on its roster, not including goalies, while the remaining North American skaters have Chinese heritage). Stack and the international players act as mentors to their Chinese teammates, teaching them on-ice skills as well as some English. Their improvement over the season has come a long way, said Stack.
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“They’re finally starting to understand where to be on the ice and having that hockey sense, which is kind of hard to teach at this age, usually you develop it throughout your playing career,” she said. “But you can see that with more repetition at game speed, they’re starting to pick up where to be at the right time, when to shoot, when to drive the net, and it’s been cool to see.”
Stack had her own “proud mother moment” in particular when Wen Lu, a player she mentors closely, scored her first goal against Vanke in their third-to-last regular-season game.
“She just drove the net and put in the rebound, right place at the right time, but that’s a play, if she doesn’t bust to the net, she’s not going to score that goal,” Stack said, beaming as she described the moment. “We were going crazy for her on the bench.”
Even with a tough travel schedule that included two 15-hour trips between North America and China in season, KRS finished in second place with a 21-6-1 record. Now the team is one win away from hoisting its first-ever Clarkson Cup.
“We didn’t know what to expect going into the year and we’ve overcome so much adversity throughout the season,” Stack said. “We have a gruelling travel schedule, so to make it to the Clarkson Cup would just prove all the hard work we’ve put in…it would validate everything that we’re doing.”
Stack has already won the Angela James Bowl as the year’s top scorer and is up for the league’s MVP award, announced this Friday. Stack is getting married in the fall and said she is contemplating retiring after the season.
“It’s kind of getting to that age where it might be time to start a family of my own and breed some phenom hockey players in the future,” she said.
After experiencing the letdown from being left off the U.S. Olympic team, if this is indeed her last year of competitive hockey, Stack has set herself up to go out on a high.
“I wanted to go out with a bang,” she said.
(Top photo: Chris Tanouye/The CWHL)
