“MORE POWERFUL NOW THAN SHE’S EVER BEEN”
K aleigh Fratkin is about to lace up her skates in pursuit of a third consecutive Isobel Cup. No. 13 is one of the Boston Pride’s cornerstone players and certainly the anchor of the defence corps. It’s a safe bet nobody takes this pursuit more seriously than Fratkin and, given her history, it’s fair to assume she also takes none of this for granted. On Thursday, the Pride face the Minnesota Whitecaps in Game 1 of their Premier Hockey Federation semi-final best-of-three series in Boston. And while we’ve come to expect excellence from this team, none of this seemed plausible to Fratkin when she felt lost at sea eight years ago, released from the Canadian national team and wondering if her hockey career would end in her mid-20s.
“Up until then, all I aspired [to do] was be on an Olympic team,” Fratkin says. “I was always someone who knew I was a bubble player within the program, but wanted to give it a crack. When [I was officially released], I really remember the phone call to my parents: ‘What do I do? Am I done playing hockey?’”
That was the summer of 2015. Fratkin had already completed a four-year career at Boston University and played one season with the Boston Blades, the lone U.S.-based team in the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League. In January of ’15, Fratkin won the Nations Cup with Canada in Germany, followed by a CWHL Clarkson Cup triumph with Boston in the spring. Then came the very difficult call from Team Canada. Thankfully, that conversation was soon followed by a random email Fratkin has saved to this day. It was a blast from Dani Rylan Kearney, the founder of the fledgling National Women’s Hockey League — the name the PHF went by until 2021 — informing her of tryouts for women interested in playing for a league that, unlike the CWHL, intended to pay players.
Reminiscing while sitting in a downtown Toronto hotel café during the PHF All-Star Weekend in late January, Fratkin — who turns 31 next week — recalls her mindset at the time. “For me it was like, a door is closing, [I] thought I was done. What do I have to lose at this point?”
Nearly a decade on, it’s worth wondering what the hockey world would have lost had it not seen this dynamo from Burnaby, B.C. keep doing her thing on and off the ice.
As it happens, Rylan Kearney’s email was not the first time fate intervened in Fratkin’s sporting career. Fratkin grew up with two sports-loving older brothers, but her father, Ron, apparently didn’t see swimming in any of his kids’ future.
“My dad was like, ‘I don’t want to do the maintenance of a pool,’” Fratkin says, explaining Ron’s attitude when the family moved to a home with a backyard pool. “[He] blacktopped our pool and ended up making it into a sports court. It was like basketball, baseball, hockey; [I really got into ice hockey] through roller blading in the backyard. We were the place the kids came, all my brothers’ friends. If I wanted to be a part of it — especially being the only girl but also being younger than them — I had to fight my way in there and had to be as good as them. My brothers weren’t just going to invite me to be in their games. They were like, ‘Yeah, if you can keep up with us, we’re more than happy to have you play. But you’ve got to keep up.’”
That’s rarely been an issue for Fratkin thanks in large part to the intensity everyone references when talking about her. It was already on display when, probably for the first time in her life, she wore proper hockey skates. After arriving at a Christmas skate for her older brother Jesse’s team, Fratkin rebuffed the white figure skates the family brought for her and demanded to wear the black skates the boys had on. “I literally made my dad drive back to our house to get Jesse’s old hockey skates,” Fratkin recalls. “Then the minute I put them on at that Christmas skate I kind of never looked back.”
Jesse wound up blazing a path to the East Coast for the kids, playing hockey at Brown in Rhode Island. Casey, who is three years older than Kaleigh, played a few years of Jr. A hockey, so by the time he went to Connecticut-based Wesleyan University, he was actually leaving home at the same time Kaleigh did to attend Boston University. The Terriers’ freshman class had a clear headliner Fratkin’s first fall, as Marie-Philip Poulin came to BU about six months after her first time playing Olympic hero for Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. But Poulin wasn’t the only player arriving with a reputation. Fratkin was heavily recruited, having demonstrated her abilities playing on hyper-competitive AAA boys teams beside the likes of Toronto Maple Leaf Alexander Kerfoot and Florida Panther Sam Reinhart right before those guys took their next steps toward becoming NHLers. “I was a little intimidated,” says Anya Packer of the girl who wound up becoming a close friend to this day. “She was shredded. She came to college and I think all of us were like, ‘This girl is a beast and she’s gonna hurt somebody.’ And we were 100 per cent spot on.”
Katie Lachapelle got very much the same vibe. As an assistant on the BU staff who ran the defence, Lachapelle quickly learned she could trust ‘Fratty’ to thrive at both five-on-five and special teams — provided it wasn’t the notoriously rugged Fratkin who was in the box. “Kaleigh, go!” became one of Lachapelle’s most-used sentences.
“How she is now, quite frankly, is probably very similar to how she was her freshman year in college,” says Lachapelle, now head coach of Holy Cross. “She was just always very mature. There wasn’t much difference between freshman Kaleigh and senior Kaleigh except three more candles on her birthday cake.
“When you think, ‘Okay, what does a hockey player look like?’ It looks like Kaleigh.”
Fratkin’s skating, hands and toughness have all been on display for eight years now in the PHF. After getting Rylan’s email, she basically told her old Terriers pal Packer the latter had to come with her for Connecticut Whale tryouts. “No one knew what the next year was going to look like, maybe what the next day was going to look like, but everyone was like, ‘We want to all play professionally,’” Fratkin says.
After one season with the Whale [with Packer beside her] and another with the Metropolitan Riveters, Fratkin landed back in Boston with the Pride. In 2017-18, her first season there, the squad finished third in a four-team league with a record of 4-8-4. Now, they’re coming off a 19-4-1 campaign in search of a third straight title on a seven-team circuit that’s come a long way from its scrappy startup roots. A couple months ago, Boston hosted the NHL’s Winter Classic and the Pride took part in some festivities downtown ahead of the game between the Bruins and Penguins at Fenway Park.
“People [were] coming up to us being like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are Boston Pride, right? Can we get a picture with you?’” Fratkin recalls. “And it’s like boys, girls, men, women. In the earlier years, unless you really knew hockey — and you knew women’s hockey, which is very niche — you maybe knew what the NWHL was or you maybe knew who the Boston Pride were. Now, [that’s changed] because of opportunities to be on TV or having the Isobel Cup final on NBC Sports. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s made strides and certainly in the last couple years it’s really gained traction. [People are realizing] ‘Oh wow, some of these girls are making more money than guys in the ECHL or AHL.’”
The passion pours off Fratkin when she talks about raising the profile of women’s hockey, just as it does when she plays the game itself. “She’s always trying to give back,” Packer says. “[She’s trying to] truly make hockey a more inclusive and [accepting] space that more people can touch, feel and see. A lot of that comes from inspiration from her father.”
Yes, if anybody would have loved to witness what Fratkin, the Pride and the PHF are doing it was Ron. While he did get to see Kaleigh achieve so much in life and the game, Ron passed away in January 2022. Fratkin’s heartfelt social media tribute left no doubt about the impression her father made. “There was nobody who supported their kids more than Ron,” says Packer.
One way Fratkin bonded with her dad was through post-game debriefs. Packer, who stepped away from her role as GM of the Riveters before the season to have her second child and support her hockey-playing wife, Madison, has tried to help fill that void, often connecting with her pal to go over games. “Kind of hear her out when she just needs to vent or when she’s on a high because she played a great game,” Packer says. “I catch a lot of Kaleigh Fratkin hockey games and to be honest, she’s even more powerful now than she’s ever been.”
That’s great news for the Pride as they try to chase down another title. It’s also fantastic news for a women’s game Fratkin intends to remain a part of for a long time. While she jokes about feeling old around young teammates and not wanting to keep up with the kids forever, Fratkin — who studied broadcast journalism — also talks about her desire to stay in the game through any number of other potential avenues. Whether that’s in media, coaching or management, she doesn’t have to figure it all out just yet. And, hopefully, between now and the time she’s ready to transition, even more possibilities will exist for women in all facets of hockey. “Each year I feel like I reflect on the progress that’s been made,” Fratkin says. “That’s what really keeps me going.”
And it’s a reciprocal relationship, because the way she goes — fully committing to any endeavour — has played no small role in those gains.