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Former NWHLer Blake Bolden finds hockey happiness in Switzerland

16 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by William Douglas in Uncategorized

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Blake Bolden, Boston Blades, Boston Pride, Canadian Women's Hockey League, HC Lugano, National Women's Hockey League

Subtract the final two letters from Blake Bolden’s last name and you’ve summed up the type of move she’s made this hockey season.

After two seasons with the Boston Pride, defenseman Blake Bolden is playing this season with HC Lugano (Photo/NWHL).

Bolden has left what she’s known for more than eight years – history-making stardom in the National Women’s Hockey League, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and Boston College –  to start over in a different league and different country.

The first African-American player  in the NWHL and CWHL is patrolling the blue line this season as a defenseman for HC Lugano, a professional women’s team in southern Switzerland.

“I just wanted a fresh start, something I’ve never done before, a new experience,” Bolden  told me weeks before she boarded a Swissair flight from Boston to her new hockey season home. “I’ve played in every league I could possible play in North America. I didn’t think it was time for me to quit and I really just wanted to put myself out of my comfort zone and experience new things and be able to travel in a basically different environment.”

Bolden discusses her move, the decision behind it, and her hockey future in the latest Color of Hockey podcast.

She stresses that her desire to have an international hockey experience was the main factor in her packing her stick bag and heading off to Switzerland.

But Bolden added that the feeling that she wasn’t given due consideration by USA Hockey for a spot on the 2018 U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team that will compete in South Korea in February made her decision easier.

HC Lugano defenseman Blake Bolden, right, in Swiss women’s league action.

Bolden figured she had the hockey pedigree to at least earn look. She won a CWHL championship with the Boston Blades in 2014-15 and was a league all-star. She hoisted the NWHL championship trophy in 2015-16 and earned all-star honors with Boston Pride.

She captained Boston College’s women’s team 2012-13, and skated on gold medal-winning U.S. national teams at the International Ice Hockey Federation Women’s Under-18 World championships in 2007-08 and 2008-09.

An April 2017 Boston Globe piece questioned why Bolden wasn’t in the mix for the Winter Olympics, quoting former teammates and coaches who said she deserved a shot at a roster spot.

From her native Ohio to Boston to Lugano. oh, the places hockey has taken defenseman Blake Bolden.

The story added that Bolden’s “supporters say Team USA not only has wronged Bolden but has squandered an opportunity to broaden its appeal to girls of color, who are chronically underrepresented in the game.”

Bolden’s says she was cut from the U.S. national team program about three years ago and doesn’t know why.

“I’ve spent a lot of time, I guess, coping with that,” she told me. “Not being kicked off, but cut from the team, it’s been hard. I can’t imagine all of the girls who have been cut from the national team and have gotten their dreams kind of ripped out from underneath them.

HC Lugano defenseman Blake Bolden, right, shares a moment with one of her new teammates.

“It takes a really long time to believe in yourself again, to find that confidence after someone said, basically, you’re not good enough when you really know that you are,” Bolden added.

A USA Hockey official told me last week that Bolden was looked at for the 2018 Olympic team but declined to comment further on player personnel matters.

In April, Rob Koch, a USA Hockey spokesman, told the Boston Globe in April that “As part of the National Women’s Hockey League, Blake has been heavily scouted along with other potential U.S. players and therefore will continue to receive the appropriate consideration.”

With no Olympics invite in sight, Bolden said that embarking on a new hockey adventure in Switzerland is helping her look forward, not back.

Que bella! Love it here 💛

A post shared by Blake Bolden (@sportblake) on Sep 2, 2017 at 9:46am PDT

“I don’t really think about the past, ‘Well, I didn’t make the Olympic team, poor me.’ That’s not really my personality,” she told me. “I’m going to make my own path. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was seven years old and I picked up a hockey stick. I’m going to make my own path, blaze my own trail. That’s what Blake Bolden does best.”

Follow the Color of Hockey on Facebook and Twitter @ColorOfHockey. And download the Color of Hockey podcast from iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud and Google Play.

 

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Blake Bolden says goodbye to NWHL and Boston, and hello to Lugano, Switzerland

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by William Douglas in Uncategorized

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Blake Bolden, Boston Pride, CWHL, HC Lugano, NWHL, Swtizerland

For Blake Bolden, it’s a matter of curing a case of wanderlust and fulfilling the desire to keep on keeping on in hockey.

After two seasons with the Boston Pride, Blake Bolden will play in Switzerland in 2017-18 (Photo/NWHL).

The all-star defenseman began thinking last September that she wouldn’t return to the Boston Pride of the National Women’s National Hockey League after two seasons and she started to look for a new team – and a new country – to showcase her skills.

“I was on the women’s hockey profile website that lets you know all the professional teams and where they are,” Bolden told me recently. “I see Lugano, and I Googled it, and I just told myself ‘I’m going there.'”

Bolden, 26, recently signed on to play for the HC Lugano women’s team in Switzerland. Located in southern Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino region, Lugano is the country’s ninth-largest city and is about a 50-mile drive from Milan, Italy.

“I am extremely excited just for a new change, just to be in a different environment,” said Bolden, who’s already started to learn Italian. “I think it will be fun. It will be scary, it will put me out of my comfort zone. So that’s why I wanted to do it: just to get another box checked before I get too old, which isn’t coming anytime soon.”

Former Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden says the time is right for her to experience playing hockey overseas (Photo/Meg Linehan courtesy Blake Bolden).

Time and timing were the biggest factors in packing up and heading to Lugano. After four years as a hockey standout at Boston College , two seasons with the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League after being the first African-American selected in the first round of that league’s draft, and two season’s with the Pride, she feels it’s time to leave Boston.

She admits that the decision to go was made easier when she didn’t receive an invite from USA Hockey to try out for the women’s team that will compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

“I  had been in the CWHL for two years, I’ve been in the NWHL for two years, and I’ve been in Boston for seven so I wanted to do something else and I didn’t get an invite to the Olympic tryouts, so I figured ‘Why not?'” she told me.

Very excited to announce I'll be playing for @hclugano in Switzerland 🇨🇭next year! Thank you everyone for your support, let's get that cup 🏆 pic.twitter.com/L2bszjRZxV

— Blake Bolden (@SportBlake) May 13, 2017

Bolden said she didn’t expect to get an invite because she wasn’t invited to prior pre-Olympics camps, even though “people were saying that I was getting looked at” by USA Hockey.

A Boston Globe article in April questioned why Bolden didn’t appear to be under serious Olympics consideration by USA Hockey.

A Stow, Ohio, native, Bolden tallied 2 goals and 13 assists in 35 NWHL games over two seasons. She had 8 goals and 24 assists in 45 games over her CWHL career and 26 goals and 56 assists in 139 NCAA Division I women’s hockey games.

“It’s hard to say why they haven’t given her an opportunity,” Boston College hockey  Coach Katie King Crowley told the newspaper. “Blake is awesome in every way. I would always want her on my team if I’m the coach.”

“Yeah, it is frustrating and it’s a big pill to swallow and it seems to come up in almost every conversation I that have with a reporter,” Bolden said to me about the lack of an Olympics look-see. “It’s fine. It’s just something I have to deal with. I can choose to be upset about it or I can choose to take the lemonade that I’m making from the lemons that I have right now, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m happy and I think everything happens for a reason, and I’m on a different path. I really have no regrets or wish that things turned out differently. At first, as a younger adult, it was troublesome for my family, and closest friends, and myself. But it’s okay now. It’s all good.”

Embed from Getty Images

 

Bolden said moving to Lugano will help fulfill her deep desire to compete internationally. She’s only done that twice, playing for the United States at the International Ice Hockey Federation World Women’s Under-18 Championships in 2008 in Canada and 2009 in Germany.

Bolden said the state of the NWHL’s finances didn’t play a factor in her decision to go overseas. The NWHL, which completed its second season, is the first North American women’s league to offer players a salary, ranging from $10,000 to $26,000.

But league officials informed players in November that their pay would be cut because of money troubles. An anticipated 50 percent pay cut was averted by a $50,000 contribution by Dunkin’ Donuts.

SWHL: Confirmed – Blake Bolden will join the HC Lugano Ladies #HCL #SWHL https://t.co/uNyOphIgaY

— swisshockeynews.ch (@SwissHockeyNews) May 13, 2017

Bolden said she’ll receive about $3,500 a month playing for Lugano during the 2017-18 season. In addition, the team supplies lodging, health insurance, and access to a vehicle.

“It’s not like I’m making a crazy amount of money in Lugano,” she told me. “My pedigree, I have some great accomplishments as far as firsts, especially being an African–American in these leagues. I just want to keep experiencing new opportunities. So that’s another box that I’m excited to check off. Maybe I’ll go out there for one season and return to the NWHL, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m taking it one season at a time at this moment.”

Follow the Color of Hockey on Facebook and Twitter @ColorOfHockey.

 

 

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Blake Bolden stars at Outdoor Women’s Classic

01 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by William Douglas in Uncategorized

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Blake Bolden, Boston Pride, Julie Chu, Les Canadiennes, Montreal Canadiens

The Game That Almost Didn’t Happen became a happening Thursday afternoon for Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden.

Bolden scored the tying goal of the first Outdoor Women’s Classic presented by Scotiabank, an abbreviated running-time match between the professional National Women’s Hockey League Pride and the rival Canadian Women’s Hockey League Les Canadiennes that ended in a 1-1 draw.

Despite the game being a last-minute addition to the the 2016 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic festivities at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and despite USA Hockey not making several Pride skaters available for the game because they were engaged in the last day of training camp ahead of a world championship competition, those who played and watched the outdoor game enjoyed themselves.

Perhaps none more than Bolden, a former Boston College women’s hockey team captain and the first African-American to play in the NWHL and the CWHL.

Thursday’s game almost didn’t happen because of tension between the NWHL, a first-year league that pays its players, and the more established CWHL, which doesn’t offer its skaters salaries.Think pre-merger National Football League-American Football League or National Hockey League-World Hockey Association hate.

Throw in USA Hockey’s stance on not releasing national team players for the classic, and the odds of the women’s outdoor game coming off looked dim.

Talks between NWHL Commissioner Dani Rylan and CWHL Commissioner Brenda Andress and intervention by the NHL helped make the game a reality.

“I think this was a great first step. I would say that the NHL was standing in the middle, holding our hands, as we walked to Gillette, so to speak,” Rylan told Yahoo Sports’ Puck Daddy blog. “But it was a good first step.”

Still, things weren’t ideal. The ice conditions for the afternoon game were problematic. Pride forward Denna Laing suffered an injury when she stepped on a stick and crashed into the boards.

The historic game wasn’t televised or streamed online. And instead of three 20-minute periods, the game was two 15-minute periods played in running time.

Three women of color played in Thursday’s game: Bolden, Pride forward Rachel Llanes and Les Canadiennes forward Julie Chu, who carried the U.S. flag during the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

“I think that this was an incredible first stepping stone for all of us,” Chu told reporters after the game. “Hopefully, next year we’re introduced into the game a bit earlier so there’s more promotion of the event. We always have to start with one step and hopefully take the next step and continue to move forward and grow.”

 

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Blake Bolden, Jessica Koizumi bask in a pro league of their own

24 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by William Douglas in Uncategorized

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Blake Bolden, Boston Pride, Connecticut Whale, Jessica Koizumi, New York Riveters, NWHL

It’s in a picture frame hanging on a wall in Blake Bolden’s Boston apartment, the historic and happy reminder that she is indeed a professional hockey player.

Bolden looks at her first paycheck for playing for the Boston Pride of the first-season National Women’s Hockey League from time to time and still can’t believe it.

Boston Pride's Blake Bolden (Photo/Meg Linehan courtesy Blake Bolden)

Boston Pride’s Blake Bolden (Photo/Meg Linehan courtesy Blake Bolden)

Elite female hockey players with professional aspirations finally have a North American league of their own in which they play and get paid. The league consists of four teams –  the Pride, Connecticut Whale, Buffalo Beauts, and the New York Riveters.

“It’s still kind of like a pinch me-type feeling,” Bolden said of her paycheck and the league’s inaugural season. “It’s an awesome little reminder of how far we’ve come and the dreams you have when you’re a little girl. It’s surreal.”

At 24, Bolden is a perpetual hockey history-maker. The defenseman was the first African-American player in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League – which doesn’t pay salaries to its players –  as a member of the Boston Blades in the 2013-14 season.

After two seasons with the Blades, Bolden became the NWHL’s first black player when she signed on with the the Pride as a free agent.

“My family likes to kid around, they say ‘Blake, you like to do a lot of firsts.’ I say ‘I’m trying over here,'” she said. “I love when younger black girls come up to me and talk to me. I always give them my contact information because it is a responsibility. I strongly encourage black girls to pick up a stick because hockey consumes me. It’s my favorite thing to do, it’s my home, essentially.”

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bolden starred for Boston College from 2009-10 to 2012-13 and wore the captain’s “C” for the Eagles women’s hockey team in her senior year. She tallied 27 goals and 56 assists in 138 NCAA hockey contests, ranking her third all-time in scoring among Boston College’s women defensemen.

Bolden said one of the joys of being at BC was playing with Kaliya Johnson, an African-American defenseman who grew up in Los Angeles and Arizona. Johnson is a senior at BC this season and will be eligible for the 2016 NWHL Draft.

Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden in action (Photo/Kaitlin S. Cimini).

Boston Pride defenseman Blake Bolden in action (Photo/Kaitlin S. Cimini).

“People used to say ‘Oh, the twins,’ not in a disrespectful, racist way,” Bolden said. “It was just funny that we both decided to go to the same school. I love that she went to BC and I was able to play with her for a couple of years.”

Bolden said she never would have become a hockey player had it not been for her mother’s boyfriend, a man she considers a father. He was a hockey enthusiast who worked part-time for the Cleveland Lumberjacks of the old International Hockey League.

“I used to go to all the IHL games in Cleveland,” she recalled. “Because he worked for the team, I used to get to go into the locker room, they (Lumberjacks players) would come to my birthday parties, the mascot would show up everywhere, and I was just totally enthralled. Hockey became my life ever since.”

Forward Jessica Koizumi is another hockey-lifer and NWHL player who framed her first pro paycheck as a keepsake. Probably the best professional hockey player born in Honolulu, she captains the currently undefeated Connecticut Whale.

“I never thought a paid professional hockey league for women would happen in my lifetime and I feel blessed every day I get to put on our jersey,” said Koizumi, who picked up the sport when her family moved to Minnesota and later to California. “Being a part of history in the making is special and I am having a blast.”

Koizumi, aka “Tsunami,” has a prominent place in the NWHL record book as the player who scored the league’s first goal, a power play tally against the Riveters in October.

“Knowing what it stood for was very emotional for me,” she told me. “The Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto just asked me to send my stick that I used to score the first goal a few weeks ago. It makes for a very fun trivia question and a neat memory to have.”

It's a powerplay goal for the @CTWhale_NWHL by Jessica Koizumi (@jzumi56) pic.twitter.com/Hu5Jrq9k9u

— NWHL Gifs (@nwhlgifs) October 11, 2015

Not that Koizumi, 30, is short on hockey memories. She was a member of the United States team that won the Gold Medal at the 2008 International Ice Hockey Federation World Women’s Championship in China.

She captained the University of Minnesota-Duluth women’s hockey team and is seventh on the school’s career scoring list with 84 goals and 71 assists in 132 NCAA games from 2003-04 to 2006-07.

She helped power the UMD Bulldogs to the NCAA Women’s Frozen Four championship game in 2006-07, a 4-1 loss to the rival Wisconsin Badgers.

Like Bolden, Koizumi gravitated to the CWHL after college, playing part-time for the then-called Montreal Stars and the Boston Blades.  She helped lead the Blades to Clarkson Cup championships in 2012-13 and 2014-15.

When not leading the Connecticut Whale, forward Jessica Koizumi is an assistant women's hockey coach at Yale University.

When not leading the Connecticut Whale, forward Jessica Koizumi is an assistant women’s hockey coach at Yale University.

Still, Koizumi views the NWHL as the perfect vehicle to take professional women’s hockey to the next level, especially if the league raises its $270,000 team salary cap to better enable players to devote all their time and energy to the game.

With practice twice a week and one game a weekend, NWHL players juggle hockey with full-time jobs to make ends meet. Koizumi works as an assistant coach for Yale University’s women’s hockey team.

Bolden is employed by Inner City Weightlifting, a non-profit program that provides education and job training in the physical fitness field for Boston’s at-risk residents.

“I would like to see more investors and sponsors supporting our league and keep growing the fan base to make sure it’s sustainable,” Koizumi told me. “I don’t need to get too greedy, but it would be nice to have our salary cap grow so that in due time we can be paid full time and not have to supplement our income with another job.”

Koizumi represented the U.S. at the 2008 IIHF World Women's Championship in China.

Koizumi represented the U.S. at the 2008 IIHF World Women’s Championship in China.

And with success on the ice and at the gate, Koizumi envisions the NWHL expanding to other cities in the not-too-distant future.

“I see franchises growing in Minnesota, Chicago, and possibly Vermont,” she said. “I hope one day we can merge with the CWHL because that would make the most sense having a few Canadian cities in our league.”

The league already embarked on an international adventure when the Riveters traveled to Japan earlier this month to play games against Smile Japan, the country’s national women’s team that competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2015 IIHF Women’s World Championship in Malmo, Sweden.

Smile Japan goaltender Nana Fujimoto, who was named top goaltender at the IIHF tournament, is on the Riveters’ roster.

“This league has built a platform for young girls to aspire to,” Koizumi told me. “It certainly is fun for us players to have fans and young girls aspiring to be like us.”

 

 

 

 

 

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