From Fremont Tribune
By Randy Speer
Randy Speer
Ally Rakowski couldn’t get on the ice her freshman year. It wasn’t a matter of talent or getting playing time; no, she literally struggled with going from the bench to the rink.
In Manitoba, Canada, where the now-senior grew up, the boards in front of the team’s bench are too tall to hop over, the customary way of getting on the ice in American hockey. Players just cycle onto the ice via the gate at the end of the bench for shift changes. The gates still exist at American rinks, but for efficiency’s sake, leaping on and off the ice is the norm.
“I was like, ‘Jump?’ what do you mean,” Rakowski said.
The struggle was real for the 5-foot-6-inch senior.
“It was scary, I kept falling on the ice,” she said.
Rakowski’s story mirrors the program she’s helped lead to national prominence as the No. 1 team in the American Collegiate Hockey Association’s Division I.
The Midland women’s hockey team wasn’t always soaring. It took commitment from within the team and the university, hard work and proper timing to get a fledgling program off the ground.
“We’ve earned everyone’s respect,” said Midland head coach Jason White. “It’s taken us a little bit of time. But we’ve now earned everyone’s respect, and I think everyone’s realizing that we have a pretty solid program here.”
The Midland women’s hockey team was announced in the spring of 2013, making it the 27th sport offered by the university at the time.
“We are excited to bring quality college hockey to Fremont,” then-Midland President Ben Sasse said in a press release announcing the program. “We aren’t content to field a team. We want to establish a championship program that embodies the discipline and sacrifice necessary to attain excellence in competition and in life.”
Championship hockey was not what Midland produced in it’s first official season in 2014.
The Warriors didn’t win a game in their first season, with blowouts being a regular occurrence — only one game was decided by one goal.
Year two wasn’t much better, though the program did record its first victory 40 games into the team’s history, ending the year with a 8-25-1 mark.
The third year ended with a 9-20-1 record. It’d be the final losing season for the program.
White had a sideline view of things as part of the staff at Sidner Ice Arena as he coached in Fremont’s youth hockey organization and helped upkeep the rink after spending time in Omaha as a youth hockey coach.
“I remember, I’d get to watch the team while working at the rink and the women’s team would come out and it’d be ‘oh, they don’t look very strong,’ and they didn’t have a lot of players,” White said.
Midland’s first big commitment to the program was making the women’s hockey coach a full-time position within the university after three years of the role being a part-time position.
That enticed White to make the jump over into the coaches box again.
The first point of order, building up the basic skill sets of the team — passing, shooting, skating.
“I really went back to the bare bones, grassroots of building skill sets,” White said. “Our practices today, compared to seven years ago and the group of girls I was working with, it’s drastically different.”
It wasn’t the first time White had been a part of an upstart program. The Stittsville, Ontario native was a part of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s inaugural Division I men’s hockey freshman class in 1997 for coach Mike Kemper.
“I remember my dad and I, we had to literally pull up the map,” White said on getting an offer to play for UNO. “Like the only thing that I remember was Counting Crows having a song back around that time, right? The song was called Omaha. Somewhere in the middle of America.”
He played four years for the Mavericks, then stuck around to coach at UNO for two more seasons before moving into youth ranks as a coach.
White’s first team rattled off five-straight wins to begin the year — unheard of success for the program — and ended up above .500 at 18-14-1.
The following year, Midland caught fire in the Western Women’s Collegiate Hockey League postseason tournament, winning the conference tournament to earn a bid into the national tournament.
Midland went 0-2 in its first appearance on the national stage, losing a pair of games to Liberty, the opening notes of rivalry that endures today.
The trip, however, was another benchmark for a program hungry for success.
“And that was another notch in that foundation of building the house that we wanted to build here,” White said.
To sustain the program’s upward trajectory, White went looking for hockey talent in the Great White North, plucking players from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario to bolster the roster.
It’s easier now to scout talent more than 500 miles away with the rise of filmed games and video calls, in addition to White building relationships with people in the area to get eyes on players.
“They start calling me and saying hey, you might want to take a look at this girl and this girl,” he said.
As Midland landed more Canadian talent, word spread throughout the provinces about the program in Fremont.
When White first took over the job, rarely did he have players reaching out with interest in the program; now, he has a steady stream of recruits reaching out to him.
“We brought in more Canadians, they enjoyed it, they had a great time here,” White said. “ And then word of mouth started to spread, hey, there’s a really, really amazing school that offers a lot of great things, especially for a women’s hockey program.”
The program caught a break during the 2020 season, as COVID shut down games for the most part in the early portion of the season that stretches from late September to early March typically.
White estimated Midland turned in nearly 100 practices during that shutdown, which coincided with the Warriors bringing in one of their more talented freshman classes ever.
“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, Rakowski said. “We did, like, skills practices and mini games and little tournaments to kind of mix it up. We were on the ice a lot that first semester.”
Among that freshmen group was Rakowski and Kayla Flanigan, who both are on track to go down as two of the best offensive players in Midland history.
The duo were paired as roommates freshman year, Rakowski from Canada and Flanigan from Omaha, leading to an early culture shock.
“She calls her shoes runners and it’s just like those little things where it’s like, ‘what are you doing?’” Flanigan said.
It took a couple of months before each understood the other’s idiosyncrasies and got on the same wave length. (Four years later, Flanigan admits she’s picked up a bit of a Canadian accent with all the time she’s spent around her teammates from up north.)
The same can be said about their performance on the ice.
The pair were put on a line — a group of forwards that play in a shift together, going on and off the ice at the same time — during their freshman season and rarely have been separated on the ice since.
“We weren’t a line right away and then, once he put us on a line together, it was pretty obvious,” Rakowski said.
Add in Kamryn Hayhurst, a current sixth-year senior who hails from Hickman, Nebraska, and the Warriors top trio was set.
“Kam Hayhurst’s line with Flanigan and Ally really has been the backbone of our program,” White said. “They put up a lot of points; they’ve been one of our top lines here even when they came in as freshmen, they had such an impact.”
Rakowski currently leads the division in goals with 17, while Flangian holds the top mark in assists with 20 and points with 30, adding 10 goals of her own.
Rakowski currently ranks second all-time in career goals with 76, needing 11 more to pass current record holder Isabelle Uhl-Chmiel.
Flanigan already has the No. 1 spot in a career statistical category, becoming the program’s all-time assist leader earlier with 81 and counting. Hayhurst isn’t far behind, ranking third with 75, needing four more to pass the former record holder Ally Conybear’s 78 for second all-time.
Flanigan also ranks third all-time in goals with 61.
All the practice time led to the team’s best season by winning percentage at the time, going 17-12 with a trip to a modified national tournament, where the Warriors reached the semifinals before being bounced by Liberty.
In 2021, Midland moved to Women’s Midwest College Hockey conference within the American Collegiate Hockey Association, a strong division within their level of hockey, in an effort to toughen up their schedule.
“The competition that we have within the WMCH is very strong and iron sharpens iron,” White said. “At the end of the day, you have to have competitive games every time you play.”
The Warriors posted a 20-8-1 mark that season against the stiffer competition, then followed it up with the best season in program history at 27-8-1 in 2022.
Included in 2022’s win column was the program’s first victory over Liberty — 2-1 in the conference tournament championship game.
The program’s national aspirations fell short, falling 1-0 in the semifinals to Minot State.
After that heartbreaking semifinals exit, Midland has been practically unbeatable this season, reaching a record of 20-0-1.
There was no bigger win than beating then-No. 1 Liberty, the reigning national champions, twice at home on back-to-back nights as the then-No. 2 team in the country.
Prior to the sweep, the Warriors were 1-10 against the Flames.
“That sent a message to the league that we’re the real deal,” Rakowski said. Rakowski scored the game winner in the opening game of the series to secure a 2-1 win.
Midland followed it up with a 5-0 romp of the Flames as Rakowski scored a hat-trick.
The sweep of Liberty and the subsequent ascension to No. 1 in the country for the first time in program history checked off one of the few remaining bucket list items for the program.
The final and biggest to-do item: capture a national title.
“It’s going to be hard,” Flanigan said. “We have confidence in ourselves, but last year we went into the national tournament ranked number two and we really thought we could do it and we ended up losing in the semifinals.”
Midland has eight remaining regular season games — winning all eight would set the new program record for wins in a season — to maintain and defend their position atop the rankings. After that, the conference tournament and possibly the national tournament.
It’s been a long climb for the Midland women’s hockey program from the depths of a winless season to the No. 1 ranking in the country, but the Warriors are hoping the rise isn’t finished yet.
(Originally published at https://fremonttribune.com/news/local/midland-university-fremont-nebraska-womens-hockey-college-progress/article_fa92705e-b616-11ee-9072-a3e3ccde7797.html)
