Head coach Nadine Muzerall speaks to the media at the 2024 Frozen Four in Durham, New Hampshire. Credit: Courtesy of Ohio State Athletics
On Feb. 17, the day the Ohio State women’s ice hockey team clinched the regular season conference championship, head coach Nadine Muzerall called this year’s team the most skilled group she’s coached in her 13-year career.
Now, the No. 1 Buckeyes have a chance to stake their claim as the most skilled in the country.
Ohio State (34-4-0, 26-2-0 WCHA) will face the No. 2 Wisconsin Badgers (35-5-0, 23-5-0 WCHA) in the national championship game at the Whittemore Center in Durham, New Hampshire, Sunday at 4 p.m. It will be a rematch of last season’s national title game and this year’s Western Collegiate Hockey Association tournament championship, both of which Wisconsin won.
“Motivation will be how the last game was against them,” Muzerall said. “It’s not going to be a lot that has changed. We might tweak some things, but it’s going to be the mental side, and that’s where I hope we persevere with how many seniors that we have and have been at this stage before.”
Ohio State’s roster contains 16 seniors and graduates, and nine players who were a part of the Buckeyes’ national championship-winning squad in 2022.
Muzerall said the upcoming championship game will be important for Ohio State to continue making a name for itself. Muzerall compared her program to a “hot new night club” that attracts young talent but still needs to cement itself among bluebloods like Wisconsin, which has seven national titles.
“We’ve won one, which is fantastic and very difficult, but I think we still have our motivation to get over that hump of just the one because we don’t want to be that one-hit wonder,” Muzerall said. “We’ve definitely been to the championship game a couple times now, but I think that that still motivates them, to try to leave a legacy and grow the tradition at Ohio State.”
Ohio State will have a long list of players to keep at bay in Sunday’s championship. The Badgers have six players who average over a point per game, including sophomore forward Kirsten Simms and senior forward Casey O’Brien, who were finalists for the Patty Kazmaier award, granted to the top player in NCAA Division I women’s hockey.
“I think we’ve got to approach it head on,” Muzerall said. “We can’t sit back on our heels; we’ve got to push fast and control the pace and understand we might get scored on and that’s going to be okay. They’re going to have their moments, but then how do we respond?”
The first time Ohio State and Wisconsin met this season, the Buckeyes swept the Badgers in a two-game home series on Nov. 17 and 18, 2023. Wisconsin head coach Mark Johnson said the two losses were important for his team’s growth.
“It’s a learning opportunity for our young freshmen to go into an atmosphere that in college hockey on the women’s side doesn’t get any tougher,” Johnson said. “It’s an environment that if you’re nervous or you’re a little bit shaky and you go in there, it can be two, three-nothing really fast. And so for us, as a team, you get to learn about yourself.”
Among those freshmen is goaltender Ava McNaughton, who is the expected starter for the national title game. In the Badgers’ 3-1 semifinal win against No. 3 Colgate, McNaughton made 25 saves and was named the second star of the game.
“She’s a fantastic goaltender, but it’s not anything that we’re not used to in our league,” Muzerall said. “We face great goaltending every weekend. We’ve had our fair scouting on her and we know the areas that we feel that we’ve got to target.”
After the Buckeyes’ sweep in November, the two teams met in the final week of the regular season and split the two-game series. Ohio State won 3-1 on Feb. 23 before losing 4-2 the next day.
In the team’s most recent meeting, Wisconsin captured the WCHA Final Faceoff championship with a 6-3 win on March 9. The conference title loss gave Ohio State a “bitterness” that Muzerall said fueled its 9-0 NCAA quarterfinal win against No. 8 Minnesota Duluth.
Now facing the Badgers for the sixth time this season, Muzerall said the Buckeyes are fueled more than ever before.
“I just want to make sure we throw down, and that if it doesn’t come out our way, at least we went down swinging,” Muzerall said. “We’re not going to punch ourselves in the face like we did two weeks ago. No disrespect to how Wisconsin played, but I think a lot of it was self-inflicted, and we have to control that. That’s where I’m saying the mental side of the game is going to be key.
