When the NWHL was ready to expand this spring, it made perfect sense to come to the place that is known as the State of Hockey, Minnesota.

“The thought of Minnesota started our very first season,” NWHL commissioner Dani Rylan said. “And we finally got the pieces together and now is the right time going into our fourth year and having the Whitecaps already established in the market was incredibly important for us.”

The Minnesota Whitecaps have been around since 2004, but have never been a part of the NWHL which before now was primarily an east coast league. Since 2011, when the Western Women’s Hockey League ceased operations, the Whitecaps have been a franchise without a league. It was a team where women could still play hockey, but not for any real pay or prize. Now with the NWHL, girls from the youth level to college will have professional female athletes to look up to and aspire to be like.

“This gives hope to a lot of girls who are playing the game and their college career is coming to an end and trying to figure out what they’re gonna do,” said Winny Brodt Brown, Whitecaps defender. “Now they have a place to play and that’s going to increase their ability to get better.”

No one knows the importance of having a place to play and how to make players better like Ronda Curtin Engelhardt. She has a part of the inaugural Whitecaps team after an outstanding four-year career at the University of Minnesota. She was named the newest NWHL team’s co-head coach on July 12. Joining her on the bench is Jack Brodt who co-founded the franchise and has been head coach or co-head coach since the team’s inception. Ronda was most recently the head girls’ hockey coach at Breck where she won a state title in 2018. The idea to become the head coach began a few months ago when she was actually toying with the idea of playing and coaching for the Whitecaps.

“I love to compete and I am a crazy competitor,” Engelhardt said by phone. “But I think coaching is where I should go for my brain. I’ve had six concussions. I don’t know if I want to risk that again.”

For Engelhardt, her competition off the ice is driven by an even bigger passion than scoring goals. It’s about growing the game. While winning and championships are a driving factor in what she’s doing, she wants to see the league and the game continue its fevered pace of popularity.

“The opportunity to grow the game is very exciting to me and it’s something that I have always been passionate about. It just gives me that leverage to help in any way I can,” Engelhardt said. “It’s not so much the growth, that I want to see certain amounts of teams, at this point. I just want it to be good hockey and something that people enjoy watching.”

Engelhardt and the Brodt family go back a ways, actually. Both played hockey together growing up and were even neighbors. Ronda refers to Winny as another sister. Jack believes she’s set up to be a great head coach.

“Ronda and Laura (Slominski, the team’s assistant coach) were great players for the Whitecaps in our very first season and I’m proud to be working with such great hockey minds,” Brodt said in a statement. “The three of us are committed to building a team that Minnesota can be proud of – an exciting team that will contend for the Isobel Cup.”

They’re certainly off to a great start with a roster that contains not just great players, but many that are coming off outstanding college careers or winning a gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Names like Hannah Brandt, Lee Stecklein and Amanda Leveille, just to name a few. It’s a roster that any coach would love to inherit, especially someone who is coaching at the professional level for the first time.

“It’s definitely exciting. I get to lead some great athletes,” Engelhardt says. “It’s exciting to know that these kids want to be a part of it, too. They’re a big part of growing the game too, so I think it’s awesome that they are coming on board and doing this so we can do this all together.”

That togetherness is important to Englelhardt and she believes that her background can put her in a unique situation to have success. She believes that being a woman leading other young women is important in the players’ professional and personal growth. 

“I think it’s important for women to see that women can do it,” Engelhardt says. “You know you have these role models to look up to. It helps if it’s the same gender. With females coaching females, it’s nice to have a female coach that you can relate to and they understand you, because it’s completely different. It’s also a different game and I understand the game well.”

Engelhardt says her first call upon getting the job was to two of her former coaches at the University of Minnesota, Laura Halldorson and Joel Johnson, both of whom have had great success in the women’s college game. Engelhardt hopes to be equally successful and feels pressure to both win and help make the NWHL a success. But for a competitor like her, that pressure only drives her more.

“I think there will be pressure to make (the NWHL) relevant in the hockey world. You want that respect of it being a professional team,” Engelhardt said. “But I like pressure. I’m pretty calm in pressure situations. That is one of my strengths.”

It’s a strength that could ultimately lead both the Whitecaps and the NWHL to a goal they’ve long shared: a popular and respectable women’s hockey league that spans from coast to coast.