Playing the Field: Meghan Duggan

×

Expand

USA Hockey / Nancie Battaglia

In Playing the Field, we profile women who are making an impact in the world of sports, either in competition or behind the scenes. For this installment, we spoke with women’s hockey star Meghan Duggan.

While girl’s hockey is a growing sport, few women currently playing on a college or national team had the opportunity to play for an all-girls team until their high school years. Growing the game is a common refrain. Little girls that want to strap on skates and pads need role models and to know that playing in the Olympics is a goal they can aspire to.

Meghan Duggan should know. She was one of those little girls not so long ago, and it was meeting an Olympic gold-medal winning hockey player that solidified her dreams and aspirations for her. Now, she tries to provide the same inspiration for girls across the country and around the world.

"It’s important for strong female role models just to show young girls that they can do whatever they want, reach their goals, and that they can that they can work hard for something, that they can make sacrifices and that they can get to the next level,” Duggan says. “There’s a lot of bad things that happen in the world so if I can be a positive role model for girls so they think they can work hard and achieve their goals and follow their dreams, then that’s definitely something that I want to do."

Duggan is a two-time Olympic silver medalist. She captained the U.S. women’s hockey team in Sochi. She’s a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she captained the Badgers her senior year and won the Patty Kazmaier Award, women’s hockey’s answer to the Heisman trophy. She won three national championships as a Badger and was runner-up in a fourth.

She was at Wisconsin from 2006-2011, with a year off in 2010 to be a part of the U.S. National Team that competed in the Vancouver Winter Olympics (a team coached by Badger coach Mark Johnson). In an impressive career at Wisconsin, she amassed 108 goals, good for third all-time, 130 assists, third all-time, and 238 total points, third all-time.

When she was 12, Duggan met Gretchen Ulion. Ulion played on the first every U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team. Women’s hockey was first included in the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Duggan tried on Ulion’s jersey and wore her medal and it was a pivotal moment in the life of a young hockey player.

"From that day forward, that’s where my sights were set—on playing for the U.S.. Obviously it changed my life, it molded my life. It decided where I went to high school, where I went to college and kind of where I live now and how I live my day to day, so I think it’s huge. She was certainly instrumental in my life in a positive manner and I hope I can be that for anyone else."

The women’s game is growing, with the gold-medal game between U.S. and Canada at Sochi having been streamed by more than 1.2 million unique viewers, making it the second-most streamed sporting event NBC Sports ever had, behind Super Bowl XLVI.

"It’s certainly been a big year for women’s hockey. When you look at the numbers of the people that watched the games in Sochi, that’s unbelievable. There’s millions of people watching women’s hockey and I don’t think that if you asked people 10 years that they would think that would be the case. It’s certainly something that I’m proud to be a part of. I think that win or lose on any given day, it’s good to see how far the sport has come and it’s awesome for all of us NCAA players and national team players to be great role models for young girls and grow the game. That’s what it’s about in the long run."

Though she didn’t spend any time planning a career transition from playing to coaching, when defending NCAA National Champion Clarkson University asked Duggan if she would be an assistant coach for them this season, she found it an opportunity she didn’t want to pass up, despite the strain it’s put on her life and schedule.

Duggan plays for the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. As a member of the U.S. National Team, she receives a subsidy to support her training, but the league does not pay their players. Many of the players take on other jobs that allow them to play in the league at the same time. Duggan spends her weekends with Clarkson, when the team has games, then drives back to Boston to be with the Blades. It’s a convoluted schedule that involves a lot of hours for Duggan on the road and stuck in traffic, but it’s the life of a female athlete in a sport that doesn’t have a fully supported professional league.

"I think my passion for the game just led me into coaching this year. It’s been an incredible experience for me so far. Sometimes I think I’m a little crazy, especially right now early Monday morning sitting in the car, you know making the trek back. I love the game and I want to play, I want to coach, I want to be around the game all the time. Just small sacrifices like that you have to make putting in the extra miles and the extra work, the extra driving hours and the extra training hours. At this point in the women’s game, that's kind of what you have to do—you work alongside training, especially in a non-Olympic year. You make things work. If I want to get my training in, if I want to get my games in, these are the things I have to do but I’m so happy that I took this job at Clarkson. I think it’s been an incredibly opportunity for me this year—I’m learning a ton. I just think it’s an exciting thing to be a part of."

The coaching is a natural extension of the leadership that comes to Duggan with ease. She’s a combination of serious and goofy, hard-nosed and focused that her teammates at all levels react to. She’s in the back of their tweets and videos, making faces and contorting her body. She’s at the front of team training, pushing herself and them to work harder.

"I think my leadership skills are very vocal and a lot of times I’ve been told why I’m able to be a leader is I’m not afraid to have a hard conversation and kind of get in someone’s face if they need it, but also listen sometimes if there’s things going on amongst the teams and kind of get the right feel from the team into which direction we need to move,” she says. “I’m certainly not afraid of confrontation and I’m certainly not afraid to make sure everyone on the team, myself included is doing what we need to do for the team to be successful."

Coach Johnson had nothing but positive things to say about Duggan, noting that she possessed the same skills as a teenager that she is using now using to lead the national team.

"She was a great student athlete. Really competitive, extremely hard-working. She became an Olympic player because of those traits. Leadership was probably the most important thing she gave us. Not only when she was leading us, but some of the things that she taught some of the younger players .When she left us, those leadership skills that she passed on are still here. She was probably our best captain. If you’re looking at captains—I was a captain in the NHL—her traits and her qualities and holding people accountable her work habits, all those things into a pot and you get something that’s really special and she was certainly was special."