Kelsey Koelzer Has Been Breaking Barriers Ever Since She First Stepped on the Ice

When juggling a full-time job with a history-making pro hockey career became untenable, the former top pick blazed a new trail as a D-III head coach.

Courtesy of Kelsey Koelzer

Sports Illustrated and Empower Onyx are putting the spotlight on the diverse journeys of Black women across sports—from the veteran athletes, to up-and-coming stars, coaches, executives and more—in the series, Elle-evate: 100 Influential Black Women in Sports.

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Every so often there will be times when Kelsey Koelzer wanders into an ice rink, and the people there wonder whether this young Black woman from Philly is lost. “You can just tell by looking at someone’s face their level of surprise, that kind of knee-jerk reaction,” says Koelzer, who then has to explain herself to curious strangers. “I’m always open to having conversations. But a lot of times I like to hang out on the side and watch the games, and limit some of those conversations.”

She has a job to do, after all—and hers is no joke. Since September 2019, she has coached the women’s hockey team at Arcadia University, a Division III private school outside of Philadelphia. For context, that’s more than 60 years after Willie O’Ree broke the NHL’s color line.

Koelzer is among a handful of Black NCAA hockey coaches that include former NHL defenseman Paul Jerrard (an assistant on the Nebraska-Omaha men’s team), Leon Hayward (an assistant at St. Thomas University in Minnesota), Duante Abercrombie (an assistant at Stevenson University) and former Ohio State team captain Olivia Soares (a first-year assistant at Colby College in Maine).

Still, Koelzer, who landed her gig at age 24, is the only person among this august group who runs her own team—marking the first time in more than 120 years of college hockey that a Black person has occupied such a role, let alone a woman. What’s more, she’s not inheriting a program, as much as building one from scratch at Arcadia, which added women’s hockey to its athletic portfolio just before hiring Koelzer. This season is Arcadia’s first in competition, and after a wobbly start, her young charges are slowly finding their way. Beside the usual recruiting and logistical demands of running a college athletic program, Koelzer has had to do the job during the pandemic. Recruiting has been especially challenging—not least of which is looking at prospects in Canada, where COVID-19 restrictions are much tighter and forced Koezler to get creative. “We’ve had members of our current team just hop on FaceTime and give someone a tour just so they get a chance to chat with some of the players and still see the campus,” she says.

If Koelzer seems cool about the pressures of her job and the inclusionary implications at stake, it’s because she’s been blazing a trail in hockey from the moment she followed her older cousins into the sport at age 4. Her mom, Kristine, who is white, used to work the snack bar at a local rink. “Obviously, being a single mom, when she would work Saturday nights during public skate and things like that, there were a lot of times that she wasn’t getting a babysitter. I just had to come along and entertain myself in the back, or get on the ice. I always leaned toward get on the ice.”

Courtesy of Kelsey Koelzer

Early on, Koelzer’s skin color was less of a hangup in mixed-gender skate leagues than her being a girl. But she’d prove good enough to star at Princeton, scoring 100 points in 128 games from the blue line. After Koelzer made history as the Tigers’ first women’s hockey All-American, the NWHL’s Metropolitan Riveters made her the top pick in the 2016 draft, marking the first time a North American hockey league had selected a Black draft prospect that early.

By her second season with the Monmouth Junction, N.J.–based Riveters, Koelzer had capped a worst-to-first turnaround. But the euphoria of her many icebound glories was easily tempered by the harsh realities of eking out a living as a woman professional athlete, in a nascent sports league. “You go from having the convenience of playing college sports, where everything’s fun and easy and you walk five feet to the rink, to [getting to] the next level,” she says. “They don’t even pay a living wage.”

To help make ends meet, Koelzer worked a full-time sales-focused job as a corporate recruiter, braving the 90-minute Turnpike commute from Philly to Newark’s Prudential Center for practices and games. And even though her employer accommodated her NWHL career, juggling the two jobs—and the on-ice injuries—became untenable. But she wasn’t ready to give up on a career in athletics just yet. When the job opportunity came up at Arcadia, Koelzer jumped; neither she nor Arcadia was prepared for the splash she’d make. After all, her qualifications didn’t exactly scream diversity hire.

Along with the Ivy League education and her spectacular success in the pros, Koelzer was a USA Hockey Under-22 selection in 2017, and tried out for the PyeongChang Olympic team a year later. Many of the women she competed with then are now on the Beijing squad, which is set for a rematch against Canada in the gold medal game Thursday. What does she make of Team USA's chances of defending its 2018 gold? “They definitely lost a couple big pieces between the 2018 and 2022 Games,” she says. “But to have Kendall Coyne Schofield, Hilary Knight, Brianna Decker and Lee Stecklein within the program, there’s a lot of great leadership that has had experience in the Olympics, and some really strong younger voices and spark that could make a difference.”

Koelzer is making a difference, too. And in the toughest game to break the ice, to boot.

Andrew Lawrence is a contributor for Empower Onyx, a diverse multi-channel platform celebrating the stories and transformative power of sports for Black women and girls.