Inside Micah Zandee-Hart's path from Victoria to Team Canada and the PWHL

Micah Zandee-Hart slowly skates to centre ice at Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre. As a defender, No. 28 doesn’t take a lot of faceoffs, but this isn’t your average puck drop and the smile on her face hints at just how long a journey it’s been to get to this point, and how sweet it is to arrive — not just for her, but for every player on the ice.

Awaiting Zandee-Hart at the centre dot is a pair of legends — tennis great and long-time women’s sport advocate Billie Jean King and the PWHL’s senior VP of hockey operations, Jayna Hefford — as well as her Canadian national squad teammate Blayre Turnbull, PWHL Toronto’s captain.

Together, the four women pose for a photo that will live in league history, inaugurating the first-ever game in the brand new Professional Women’s Hockey League. The moment is made all the more special for the 27-year-old Victoria, B.C. native by the ‘C’ that adorns her white-and-turquoise sweater.

For Zandee-Hart, the short skate, the exchange of handshakes and hugs, and the ceremonial faceoff that opens the new year with a new era for women’s hockey, mark the end of her time on the ice for this momentous Jan. 1 matchup. Continued recovery from summertime shoulder surgery means she’ll have to wait a few more weeks to make her PWHL debut. But as much as she’d like to be out there playing today, there’s consolation in a fact clear to everyone at the rink: This is just the beginning.

THE STORY OF ZANDEE-HART'S first foray into hockey is one to which younger siblings everywhere can relate.

“I think I was about three or four, and my older brother, Ben, played hockey,” Zandee-Hart told Sportsnet last month. The youngest of four kids growing up in Brentwood Bay, a small community just outside of Victoria, she attended Ben’s games and watched as he and his friends played street hockey out front of their house. “I loved to compete. As the youngest child, I always wanted to keep up with my siblings. So, I saw him doing that, [and I] started following his lead.”

She was four when her dad, Mick, took her to her first free skate and, as she tells it, “that was it. … I never really looked back, I guess.”

She looks back now, of course — at a childhood defined by family and hockey, the unconditional support of Mick and her mom, Patricia, and the community that surrounded her in the sport. She played on boys teams until age 15, one of just a handful of girls in the Peninsula Minor Hockey Association.

“It was great. Growing up in a smaller community allowed me to go to school with the same guys, and I started playing with [them] when I was about four or five, so it wasn't abnormal,” she said of her early playing days. “I think that I was just a part of that group, and they always supported me. We never really had any issues with people pushing back or anything. I felt like I always earned my spot on the team, and I was a pretty quiet kid back then, so I think I just kind of went with the flow and worked hard, and no one could really question that.”

There was no roadmap charting where her love of hockey and obvious talent for the game might take her, but Zandee-Hart had dreams. In 2002, at age five, she watched the Olympics on television and while she didn’t know how she’d make her way there, she knew she wanted to. As she got older, the path to that goal became clearer — “Coaches started telling me, this is how the process works. You play for your province first, and then maybe you get scouted to represent Canada.” — and it wasn’t long before she was walking it herself.

At age 12, a coach in Victoria connected her with the coach of an elite girls team in Vancouver, who came to watch her play and was impressed enough to invite her to join his spring hockey team. “That was kind of my first taste of playing with other girls that had that same aspiration,” she said.

Then, at 15, Zandee-Hart started getting invited to B.C. hockey camps — the ones with Hockey Canada scouts in the stands. “So that was kind of a moment of, ‘Okay, if I keep going along this path, someone's going to see me,’” she said.

Zandee-Hart spent three years developing on the Okanagan Hockey Academy’s U18 prep team in Penticton, part of the Junior Women’s Hockey League. During that time, she got the call from the national junior squad, twice competing for Canada at the U18 world championship.

“It was surreal,” she said of that first national team experience, which she shared alongside fellow Vancouver Islander and former PWHPA Calgary teammate Sarah Potomak. “We went over together to this camp as little 16-year-olds, and we didn't know anybody. And it was just a moment of, ‘Wow, this is what we wanted. And we're finally here. We're in the door, we're wearing the maple leaf on our chest’” Zandee-Hart recalled. “And I think it was, for me, I felt like this is where I'm supposed to be.”

That feeling followed her to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where in addition to averaging 22 points a season from the Big Red blue line, she earned her first call up to the senior national team ahead of the 2019 world championship. Two years after graduating as Cornell’s captain following a point-per-game senior campaign in 2020, Zandee-Hart made her Olympic debut with Team Canada, helping her nation claim gold on the world stage. Later that same year, she earned her first world championship gold, too. She is now a mainstay on the national team roster.

“That was probably a turning point, I would say, in my life and my career,” she said of her college experience. “The four years at Cornell really were when I grew up and kind of became the Micah that I maybe am now. ... Playing for that team in a school that really followed hockey and loved hockey, and being in upstate New York, I absolutely loved it.”

IN LATE JUNE 2023, the group behind the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association announced the buyout of the Premier Hockey Federation — then the only pro women’s hockey league in North America — to make way for one unified, sustainable league for the world’s best players to suit up and faceoff against one another on a regular basis.

As the six markets that now make up the PWHL were identified and timelines put in place, September brought the first tangible signs of the league and its teams taking shape, including the naming of general managers. Upon his hiring as GM of PWHL New York, Pascal Daoust knew exactly who he wanted to build a team around — and he wasted no time calling her up.

“Building a program, you need that core to be strong, to be good leaders, good person, good players,” Daoust said. “We know the skills that she has on the ice, but there's a lot of time that we have to spend off the ice. And for sure, having Micah is a real privilege for New York.”

Zandee-Hart felt an instant alignment with the executive during their first phone call early in the negotiation window.

“I think our values just really aligned on building a culture and building a team,” she said. “And his expectations of me as a player and what he saw that I could contribute was also something that I wanted to achieve within myself and I wanted to strive to be.”

She consulted her family and others in her camp. Everyone agreed the fit was right, and the relative familiarity of the New York area from her time in Ithaca helped eased any nerves around jumping into a long-term commitment so quickly.

Zandee-Hart signed a three-year contract with New York in September, one of 18 players league-wide to ink a foundational free agent deal prior to the draft. (New York also signed Team USA forwards Abby Roque and Alex Carpenter.) All 18 women signed during this initial free agency period were members of the Canadian and American national teams, but Zandee-Hart stood out as the first and only player to cross the border of hockey’s top rivalry and sign with a team outside her home country.

“It was the first player committing herself to cross the border,” Daoust explained.  “So, to me, it shows a lot of will, leadership, and that leadership, that personality she has.”

New York’s practice facility is in Stamford, Conn., and they play their games at rinks around the Tri-State area, including Total Mortgage Arena and UBS Arena. The fact she’s not embedded in The Big Apple suits Zandee-Hart’s Vancouver Island roots just fine. “I'm not a city kid, so it's kind of nice to be outside [the city]” she said. “But if I want to take the train in, I can go experience that New York City lifestyle.”

Zandee-Hart was still relatively early into rehabilitating her shoulder when she’d signed her deal, but that didn’t slow her down once training camp started up in November. Daoust said in December he’d been impressed by her sunny demeanor as she dealt with this setback.

“She's bringing people up. She's not dragging anyone down, even though she's not playing,” he said. “Her leadership, her personality, is only a sunshine in the environment, that's for sure.”

That leadership, ultimately, is what earned her the first captaincy in PWHL New York team history. Zandee-Hart is no stranger to wearing the ‘C’, having captained Canada’s U18 squad prior to taking on the role at Cornell. And her leadership hasn’t gone unnoticed during her three years with Canada’s senior national team, either — just ask national squad teammate and PWHL Toronto rearguard Renata Fast.

“I was so ecstatic to see Micah named captain,” Fast told Sportsnet earlier this month. She’s had a front-row seat to Zandee-Hart’s development on the Team Canada blue line since 2019 and when she learned of New York’s plans to announce its captains at the Rink at Rockefeller Center in late December, Fast’s first thought was of her Canadian teammate.

“I thought about their team and I'm like, ‘Micah needs to be their captain.’ There is no better leader than Micah — I would have Micah as my captain any day,” she said. “She's such a genuine person, a phenomenal teammate, always pumping people up, so positive. I think that was probably the easiest decision to make her captain, and it was 100 per cent the right decision.”

WHILE ZANDEE-HART is not the first Victorian to make it to the pros — NHLers Jamie and Jordie Benn, for example, also hail from the area and grew up friends and teammates with her older brother — she does hold a special slice of B.C. history as the first woman from the province to win Olympic gold in hockey. And as she looks at the landscape of girls hockey in her hometown, she can see the growth — there’s now an all-girls association based in Victoria called the Capital Region Female Minor Hockey Association, which was established in 2019.

“I've seen some girls now going off to university from Victoria playing hockey, which is incredible. It's something, again, that I didn't see when I was young, so it's grown a ton,” she said. “People in Victoria are super passionate about not only growing the game of hockey out there, but growing the women's game. I think they have great people volunteering and trying to make it bigger and trying to, obviously, being from the island, they're trying to grow it so we can compete with the mainland teams and the Vancouver teams and all that kind of stuff.”

Even now, about 5,000 kilometres and a ferry trip away, she feels the pull of home, and the desire to give back to the community that helped her skate towards her dreams.

“I wish I could be more involved, to be honest … But, if there's a young girl out there that looks up to me for what I did and that got them in the game … I think that [is] a great legacy that I would love to leave,” she said.

For now, five games into her team’s inaugural season, Zandee-Hart has yet to lace up her skates and compete but she’s getting close. Still, despite the temporary setback, the significance of this new chapter isn’t lost on the blueliner.

“Just showing up to the rink every day and going, ‘This is my full time job. This is my 9-to-5,’” she said. “I get to play a game for a living. I think that's a pinch-me moment every day.”

With files from Kristina Rutherford, Deidre Hambly, and Christine Simpson.