Just Asking...Natalie Darwitz

After interviewing Team USA hockey captain (and Eagan native) Natalie Darwitz, I’m actually looking forward to watching Olympic women’s hockey next month. Her stats certainly got my attention: At 26, this is her 11th year on the national team, and Vancouver will be her third Olympics, her first as captain. She’s won a silver and a bronze with Team USA, as well as three world championships, and she was an All-American for the Gophers, winning two NCAA championships and setting the collegiate record for total points (goals and assists) in a season. She’s third in career NCAA points, behind two women who played four seasons compared to Darwitz’s three (she left after three to prepare for another Olympics). Just for fun, look up her Eagan high-school stats on Wikipedia; they’re too ridiculous to print.

Hanging out with Darwitz in person (I caught a Team USA practice at the National Sports Center in Blaine), I saw how quickly and decisively she moves, and heard how heavy her shot is when it cracks the boards. She’s got it. After practice, we sat on the hill outside of Rink 7 and talked.

Your stats at the U of M were insane. You’re like a female Wayne Gretzky.
Yeah, I had a good line. (Laughs.) I mean, if I had to chalk up memories, that’s a great year. We had one of the best lines in the country—myself, Krissy Wendell, and Kelly Stephens. We just tore it up.

Are they on the Olympic team?
No. They were on the 2006 team; Krissy has a kid now, and Kelly just got married. They’re done with hockey.

Why aren’t you?
Well, I’m younger than them. I mean, Krissy wanted to get married and have kids and I’m just not at that point yet.

Is that how it goes? Because guys have kids and play forever. Chris Chelios is like 50 years old.
Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. But with women you can’t . . . well, I don’t want to say you can’t, but there’s no financial stability involved [in women’s hockey]. We get a stipend so we can pay rent and go to the grocery store.

Do you get sick of the comparisons?
Um, there’s nothing else to compare it to. Right now, women’s hockey is in its infancy. This will be only our fourth Olympics. For guys, it dates back to 18-whatever.

Do you like other women’s sports?
I’m not a huge basketball person, so . . .

I grew up on women’s tennis.
I love women’s tennis. I like it better than watching the guys, actually.

Yeah, me too. I grew up worshipping Martina Navratilova. Now, Navratilova was a lesbian—do you have to deal with that stigma as a female athlete?
Oh sure! I have a boyfriend. I just did a bunch of radio in Spokane, Washington—we had a game there—and the first thing that came out of every disc jockey’s mouth was, “You don’t look like a hockey player—you’re small.” And I was like, what am I supposed to look like? Burly with hair growing out of everywhere?

Like Bob Probert.
Yeah, the perception of women’s sports is that we’re masculine. And I think if you look at our team—I mean, we just got off the rink right now—but we’re a pretty feminine team. We all have our teeth. We’re pretty good-looking girls.

You are, but you do throw a little bit of a shoulder into it. Like Jay-Z says, you “walk like a ballplayer.”
Yeah, we’re athletes. We have a little swagger about us. We see ourselves as hockey players—we don’t see ourselves as female hockey players.

In the summertime, you run a boy’s hockey camp. What’s that like?
I do both guys and girls.

Okay, so to get a guy’s respect, even an 11-year-old’s, do you have any special techniques?
I have the girls and boys skate together, because that’s how I grew up. I grew up with the boys until I was in second-year Pee Wees. So I played a year checking. And then the boys hit their growth spurt and I stayed about as high as I am now. So I moved over to the girls.

What kept you hungry? Because you must have dominated the girls right away.
Yeah. Girls hockey was so new when I was playing with high-schoolers. For some of them, it was only their third or fourth year playing, whereas I’d been playing since I was 5. What kept me going was, when I was 15, I got invited to play with the U.S. [Women’s National] Team—so I was playing with girls who were 10 or 15 years older than me. Then I had a goal—it was women’s hockey, and it was the highest level I could be at.

I have a theory—a lot of great players in every sport have a fanatical parent involved.
(Laughs.) You know what, I wouldn’t be where I am right now without my dad. He coached me growing up. I wouldn’t say he’s “crazy,” but he is “passionate.”

Yeah. We’re not going to call dad “crazy” on the record.
I never wanted to disappoint my dad. So, when my dad was on the ice, I was going 110 miles per hour. I didn’t want to screw up.

Was he stern? Encouraging?
It was almost like a dog and their owner. The owner doesn’t have to say anything—all he has to do is look at the dog and the dog will sit. It was kind of like that for me. I got that look from him, and I knew what to do.

This is your third Olympics. The Olympic Village has to be intense. We’re talking about the best-looking people in the world, in a few-block radius.
I guess. . . . We’re kept under pretty tight wraps. I think what you see with the partying, it’s the people who have one event and they’re done in two days and then they’re not competing. Hockey goes a week and a half out of two weeks—and we’re there to win.

So what’s your day like? A non-game day.
We’ll probably have a practice in the morning. So wake up, have breakfast, go to the rink for a few hours. The cafeteria is the most happening spot.

That’s where you can ogle a luger.
That’s where you check people out. So you spend half the day in the cafeteria.

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Natalie Darwitz
1. She can juggle fire and knives, a skill she learned in elementary school in Eagan. “Obviously, you start with bean bags.”
2. In summer, she loves to wakeboard and water ski in Southern California or on Prior Lake.
3. She and her boyfriend are getting a dog—a Springer Spaniel from a breeder in Brainerd.
4. She loves Chelsea Handler. “Half the team is reading Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.”
5. She modeled her game after her favorite Gopher, former defenseman Mike Crowley. “That’s why I wear number 20.”