Goaltending for Ottawa’s PWHL team in good hands with ‘Masch’

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For Team Canada goalie Emerance Maschmeyer, the decision to sign as a free agent with a Professional Women’s Hockey League team in Ottawa ultimately became a no-brainer.

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She was initially intrigued by the prospect because it came with a feeling of home — her mother is from Gatineau and her wife, Geneviève Lacasse, is from Kingston and has family in the area.

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Also appealing was the fact that a couple of close friends and national team teammates, Emily Clark and Brianne Jenner, were inking deals in the capital as well, and from playing an exhibition game here she knew there was a strong fan-base waiting to blossom.

But what sold her on putting her name to a deal was a chat she had with Ottawa general manager Mike Hirshfeld.

“We valued very similar things, we got along really quickly” Maschmeyer said. “His big thing was having a great ‘culture’ and having a great ‘team,’ and those two words stuck with me. I was, like, that’s exactly what I care about.

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“To me, you could have the most skilled team in the world, the best individual players, but it’s all about how the team comes together and how the culture forms. And, for me, it’s when the moments are tough that those teams prevail.

“So that was a very key for me. To have that conversation with him, I knew that I really liked his approach. And then Ottawa was always kind of been like a third home for me, so that was exciting for me, and the market here for women’s hockey has also been very untapped. So that excited me.”

Yes, all in all, it was an easy call.

Since then, “Masch” has bought a house in Chelsea, about 10 minutes from where her mom grew up, and she and Geneviève are settling in among relatives.

And the exceptional 29-year old puck-stopper who grew up on a farm in Bruderheim, Alta., couldn’t be happier with her most recent move, as well as her new office on Bank Street, a.k.a The Arena at TD Place.

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“I’m really excited about our group,” Maschmeyer said. “I think that in the locker room, our team is gelling. There’s a lot of great characters, and I think our culture is forming and that’s really exciting because we’re starting from ground zero.

“I think on the ice we’re gonna see a very physical team out there. We have a lot of skill, but I think that, when teams play us, they’re gonna gonna hate us because we’re so physical.”

Team Ottawa has three tenders in Maschmeyer, Rachel McQuigge and Sandra Abstreiter, but Masch is No. 1 and, as such, for the season opener Tuesday at home against Montreal, she will be staring down the ice at Ann-Renée Desbiens, her partner on the national team.

“We’ve got three incredible women here,” Ottawa head coach Carla MacLeod said when asked about her goalie room, “so we’ve been we’ve been really comfortable on that side of it, that we can we can just keep building, and that’s the key.

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“Emerance Maschmeyer is a world-class goalie. But, you know, Abstreiter and Rach have done their job with their opportunities in the game as well. So, you know, there’s a confidence there in that we’ve got the right group to help us move forward and give us an opportunity to win on most nights, if not all nights.”

How the workload gets distributed has not been mapped out.

“That’s sort of a decision to be made down the way,” MacLeod said. “I think we just got to get going and get rolling and see where we’re at and what we need to do, and I think it’s doing them a disservice if you think you can look at a calendar date and start to pencil things in when, really, you’ve just got to have a feel for it.”

Maschmeyer took a long and winding road to get to this point.

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At an early age she decided that her goal was to tend goal at Harvard University, and in climbing the different levels (including becoming just the second female to play in the popular Brick Invitational minor hockey tournament, and backstopping Team Alberta to gold at the 2011 Canada Games) she landed at the Ivy League school.

In her college swan song, Maschmeyer made 29 saves as Harvard lost 4-1 to Minnesota in the championship game of the 2015 NCAA national collegiate tournament.

She was then selected by the Boston Pride in the 2015 NWHL draft, but also registered for the 2016 CWHL Draft, where she was the first pick of the Calgary Inferno, so she decided to come home.

Prior to the 2017-2018 season, Maschmeyer was traded to Les Canadiennes de Montreal. Two years later, when the CWHL folded, she was among the other elite players waiting for someone to start a true and legitimate professional women’s hockey league.

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That wait ended in November, when the six-team PWHL became a reality.

As the owner of nine medals from international and Olympic championships, Maschmeyer has played in front of large audiences  before, but, when Ottawa hosts Montreal on Tuesday, it will be in front of a packed house representing the largest crowd to attend a women’s pro game.

That, and the fact the game will be televised for family and friends in Alberta as well as the rest of Canada to see, is sure to produce some butterflies for the players.

But most every game does that for Maschmeyer, and she wouldn’t want it any other way.

“I feel like, no matter when I step on the ice for a game, there’s always a little bit of nerves,” Maschmeyer sdaid. “I think nerves are great. It’s a little bit of adrenaline, too, right, and coming out here we’ll have 8,500 fans, so that’s going to already bring a lot of excitement, and it will be so electric, so for sure there’s going to be nerves. But, for me, that means I care and that I still love the game. And, so, for me, the day that I don’t have those nerves, that won’t be good.

“I’m so excited to play. Of course, there’s gonna be some butterflies, that’s what it’s all about. It’s going to be so much fun. I can’t wait.”

dbrennan@postmedia.com

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