“ALL-IN, ALWAYS”

Spooner has been known to dance, too. “She can two-step,” Team Canada and PWHL Montreal forward Laura Stacey says. “She sings, she dances, she’ll give you a hug if you need one. She brings the vibe up wherever she goes.”

That fun-loving personality — with a megawatt smile to match — has been No. 24’s trademark since she became a fixture with Team Canada more than a decade ago, and now that the PWHL has launched, Spooner is in the spotlight more than ever. She may make life in the pros look easy, but the road to this point has been anything but, especially considering her speedy return to the ice following the birth of her son. Only recently has Spooner started to feel like her old self again, and it’s showing. Halfway through the season, the 33-year-old winger leads the league in goals, with 12. And nobody had more than Spooner’s six points at the recent Canada-USA Rivalry Series, despite the veteran playing in just three of seven games.

As flashy and fun as she is off the ice, Spooner is known more for physicality than finesse when she’s on it. And those around her believe her reputation as a power forward means the finer points of her game are often overlooked, that she doesn’t always get the credit she’s due for the skills she has worked hard to master on her way to the top of the league’s stat sheet.

The fact is, few in the world can do what Spooner does on the ice. And few are willing to.

Spooner wasn’t a one-trick pony as a kid — she took French Immersion in school, played the clarinet, and even attended band camp. But she was best known for excelling at sports, voted athlete of the year all four years of high school at Cedarbrae Collegiate, her name listed in the yearbook beside “Most likely to become a professional athlete.” (Those predictions sometimes come true.)

At 17, Spooner represented Canada at the first-ever women’s U-18 world championship in Calgary, in January 2008. She’d always been a goal-scorer, but it was scoring three times for that team and registering 11 points in five games that sparked the thought that maybe one day she could represent Canada at the senior level.

It wasn’t long before she did. Her first invite to a senior national team camp came later that year. “I was super nervous and so young,” Spooner says, recalling that first camp in Prince George, B.C, but her early teammates remember her a little differently.

Toronto GM Gina Kingsbury was there as a player and recalls Spooner standing out. “Her size, her compete-level, her bubbliness, her ability to connect, even at that young age, with the older players, it was incredible,” Kingsbury says. “There’s a few players that, when they come in at a young age, you know they’re going to be around for a long time. She was one of them.”

“She’s a freight train,” says former Team Canada defender Tessa Bonhomme of her first impressions of Spooner. “When she gets going, she’s damn near impossible to stop.”

Spooner, who’s still an unstoppable force at five-foot-10 and 170 pounds, made her first 4 Nations Cup roster out of that camp for the tournament that November, just after she turned 18.

Spooner didn’t see much ice in her Team Canada senior debut in Lake Placid. But in the final, the gold medal came down to a shootout against the U.S., and Canadian coach Mel Davidson tapped the teenager on the shoulder. Spooner can’t recall if she’d played a single shift that game. She figures she played two, at most.

“The fact the young kid got picked, no one was upset,” Bonhomme says. “She had this great shootout move, and 99 times out of 100, it worked.”

A forehand-to-backhand-to-forehand with deep cuts in tight on the goalie — all of her teammates know the move. “You go and you stop and come back,” Mikkelson explains.

Except this time, on the biggest stage she’d played on to date, Spooner did not come back.

“I went to cut back to the forehand and my blades just gave out, and I fell right into the goalie,” Spooner says. “Not a great first impression. Not a good start.

“We ended up losing, so that was even worse.”

Spooner can laugh about it now, from the perspective of a two-time Olympic gold medallist sitting ninth on the national team’s all-time points list. But it wasn’t easy to take back then.

“It was like: ‘What if that was my moment?’ If I would have scored that, what would have happened? Would I have made the team again? Would I have made the Olympics in 2010? Was that the moment that ruined it all?” she says, thinking back.

“I didn’t make the team again until two years later,” she adds. “It was not good.”

She’s turning heads on the ice, too. Last night, on Valentine’s Day in Boston, Spooner scored her first hat trick of the season, and now she’s No. 1 in the PWHL in goals, with seven in her last three games.

“I feel like I’ve got my legs back under me, which is really nice. I’m feeling quite normal — well, at least what I think is normal,” Spooner says. “It feels like every month I’m like, ‘Oh, I feel way better now than I did last month, post-pregnancy.’ That keeps happening.”

Not long after Spooner found out she was pregnant with Rory, she called up Kingsbury, the general manager of Canada’s women’s team. Kingsbury recalls some of the first words out of Spooner’s mouth were: “I’ll be back for Milan,” the Italian city playing host to the 2026 Olympics. “There was no doubt in my mind that she would be, that she had everything figured out,” Kingsbury says.

Spooner figured out a shorter-term goal, too: To be on the ice for the 2023 World Championship, which started five months after she had Rory. She sought out advice from Mikkelson, who made a similar comeback when she competed at the 2016 worlds an incredible — and painful — six months post-partum. “The first thing I told her is, ‘It’s going to be really hard,’” Mikkelson says. “I also told her there was no doubt in my mind she could do it. Yeah, she’s bubbly and fun, but she’s one of the most fiercely motivated and dedicated people that I know. You see her on the ice, the way she plays, there’s an underlying fire in her.”

Spooner went for a “twirl” on the ice a month after Rory was born. “I didn’t take a hard stride because I was like, ‘I don’t know if my insides will fall out,’” she says. In March, she played in a few games with the now-defunct PWHPA’s Toronto chapter. “Back then, four months after I had Rory, I was like, ‘Wow, I feel great,’” she says. “But I was also comparing myself to how I’d felt a month after childbirth. So yeah, I did feel great, compared to that.”

Spooner didn’t actually feel great, but she still made Canada’s world championship roster last spring, for the ninth time in her career. She was in Brampton, Ont., for the tournament with five-month-old Rory in tow. Spooner registered six points, including two goals, but Canada lost in the final to the Americans.

“Looking back, maybe I came back too fast, but I didn’t know any different. I didn’t know what my body was going to feel like,” Spooner says. “But getting back with the girls with Team Canada, mentally, I think it was one of the best things I could have done. It made me realize I’m still a hockey player and I still have that piece of me.” She calls it “a release” to get to have fun on the ice again.

“I’m struggling with how to say this, but when you have a baby, it can be quite isolating, I feel. And so, to be able to take that time and to have my parents’ support and Adam’s support to go with the girls and play, it was amazing,” she says.

“I wasn’t on my own anymore. I could talk to people,” Spooner adds, laughing. “It was so good for me, mentally, just to get there and also to realize, ‘Okay, if I played at worlds, and I wasn’t feeling 100 per cent at all, but I did it, then I can get back to where I want to be.’”

After worlds, Spooner didn’t step on the ice for six months. She took a break to heal. “I feel like it took a long time for my body to get back to a place where things weren’t hurting,” she says.

Spooner isn’t all the way healed yet. “I’m like 95 per cent, maybe 90,” she says. “I’m almost there. It’s just the aches and pains after childbirth that still haven’t gone away, sometimes.”

Mikkelson encouraged Spooner to share that part of her story, and she’s proud of her friend for opening up about the challenges in coming back. “Because it’s hard, and people should know,” Mikkelson says. “You don’t want to give people false hope that, ‘Look, I came back this fast and everything was peachy keen.’ No, it’s physically very hard on your body.”

Spooner’s aim after that six-month break was to be ready for the PWHL season in January. She didn’t attend Team Canada’s September camp, and when the PWHL had pre-season games in December in Utica, NY, she played just eight minutes. She had by then stopped nursing Rory.

“I started to feel way more normal, and also free,” she says. “I had this baby attached to me at all times, right? Where now, someone else can feed him. Having my body back to myself to be like, ‘Okay, now the purpose is to be an athlete, not to be a food source.’”

PWHL Toronto struggled to start the season, going 1-4 out of the gate, and Spooner started slowly, too, compared to what she was used to. “I knew I wasn’t myself yet,” she says of those first few weeks, though she had two goals during that five-game stretch. “But I was literally focused on improving every game to get there.”

Now 15 matchups into the 24-game inaugural campaign, her team sits in second place with a 7-3-0-5 record thanks to eight straight wins through the end of February and into March — two coming in overtime or a shootout. Spooner’s line with Emma Maltais and Sarah Nurse is the team’s most potent, averaging more than a goal per game as a trio and producing nearly half of Toronto’s total goals this season (18 of 40). Spooner’s shooting percentage is just shy of 20 per cent, good for top 10 in the league, and her 15 points trail only Marie-Philip Poulin and New York’s Alex Carpenter, who each have 17.

“It’s great because I feel like as a team, we’re really finding our stride,” Spooner says. In a shootout win over New York in late February, she was called on for two attempts. Spooner scored the first on her backhand, the second on her forehand, and was the only player from either team to find the back of the net, sealing the win for Toronto. She leads the league in shootout goals, too.

“For her to be back now probably at a pace that’s even higher than when she left, that to me is just, you shake your head,” Kingsbury says. “How is that even possible?”

There is a difference, though, in the way she’s getting those goals now, further along in her career. Many of Spooner’s goals now start from below the faceoff dots, an area Team Canada and PWHL Toronto coach Troy Ryan has been encouraging Spooner to spend lots of time in. “She’s very effective down there,” Ryan says. “And she just has that knack to score. There’s a lot of times you’ll just be watching her play and that looked like nothing, but it turned into a chance… And it just goes in because of her quick little skills and her instincts.”

Ryan and his coaching staff have challenged Spooner to make changes to her game in the last five years, cutting out a tendency to force plays in the offensive zone, eliminating turnovers in the neutral zone and embracing her role as a power forward who gets to the front of the net.

“She used to be, I felt, a player that would try to generate her offence through the neutral zone, or off the rush, and I just never thought that was using her skills, or her advantage, or the team’s advantage,” Ryan says. “And then I think, like anything, she made some little adjustments and had some quick success with it. I think it made her buy into and commit to it a little bit more.”

“Her ability to get to the front of the net is incredible,” says Toronto teammate Alexa Vasko. “She likes to play in the blue. She’s not afraid to get physical. The way she plays, she’s going to get in front of the net and she’s not going to stop until the puck’s in the net.”

Asked what sets Spooner apart, Stacey points to the winger’s hands around the net. “She has that finishing touch to her. If it’s on her stick in and around the crease, around the net, it’s generally trending in the direction of going into the net.”

Often at the end of practice, you’ll find Spooner at centre ice standing by the glass while a coach or teammate fires pucks at her and she tips them, working on her hand-eye coordination. She’s had more than a few discussions with Toronto’s goalie coach about how best to position herself, how to make it hardest on the netminder.

“A lot of people believe it’s not a compliment when you say you play net-front and you screen goalies,” Ryan says. “It’s all the difficult things that most people, to be honest, are just not willing to do. But it’s such a skill, it really is. She has a ton of skills in a really small area. She finds a way to score. She’s really committed to being effective in that area.”

Because of that commitment, Ryan believes Spooner will remain a key asset on the ice for a long time. “I think it’ll put years on her career, because she’s invested enough time in this specific way that other players just can’t catch up to,” he says. “I believe that she’ll score a lot of goals, and she’ll also create opportunity for other people to score goals because she’s doing such a good job in front of the net.”

The coach doesn’t think there’s a better player in the world at taking away the goalie’s eyes, and that’s among the reasons you’ll find Spooner on the ice when Team Canada or PWHL Toronto needs a goal.

“Even on our power play with Team Canada, we’ve put Spooner at that net-front and generally we put the puck in Poulin’s hands,” he says. “If Poulin doesn’t score, at least if she can get a shot directed at the net, we’re comfortable with Spooner putting it in from there.”

No. 24 is consistently among the top scorers on the national squad. Ryan isn’t surprised. “It’s funny but with her, not in a rude way, I’ve grown to expect this. I’ve been around her long enough to know that this is what she does,” he says.

And yet, the coach believes she still doesn’t always get the recognition she deserves.

“When it comes to the international stuff she’s accomplished, no one’s ever really fully given her credit for being the offensive player that she is, because she does it different than some other players do.”

The cheers that ring out throughout Mattamy Athletic Centre when “Natalie SPOOOOOO-NER!” is announced ahead of home games make it clear she’s also a fan favourite. She’s among the most recognizable players in the women’s game today, too. “Are you Natalie Spooner?” she says, parroting what she most often hears from strangers and fans on the street, or at the grocery store. “Yes, hi!” she’ll say.

It was after she and Mikkelson appeared on The Amazing Race Canada, both on TV without their helmets, that Spooner started getting recognized a lot more in public. Auditioning for the reality show was her idea, and Mikkelson says it wasn’t until they were competing on that stage (they finished second) and sequestered in hotels that they became the best friends they remain today.

They’d met six years before that, at Spooner’s debut senior team training camp, which was held over Halloween. “I remember she dressed up like a giant baby,” Mikkelson says, laughing, her rookie teammate’s costume complete with a soother in her mouth and her hair in pigtails. “The other thing I remember about the first time we met is just the way she played. She’s Mach 10 out there all the time. She’ll skate through a brick wall. That peak intensity.

“Well, that’s how she does life, too,” Mikkelson adds. “She’s all-in, always.”