Rockland-born GM savors Boston Pride’s second in a row women’s pro hockey title
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When Danielle Larouco first signed on to be the general manager of the Boston Pride, she acknowledged that she likes to stay busy. So even now, with her new team once again atop the women’s pro hockey mountain, the Rockland High grad’s work was not done.
“I’m at The Bog right now trying to sort through a week’s worth of everything,” Larouco said Thursday. “We’re going to the Bruins game tonight, so I’m divvying out tickets to all the players and trying to sort through what the plan might be for that. But it’s all good.”
Larouco, who still lives in Rockland, manages both The Bog, in Kingston, and Rockland Ice Rink and is the owner of the Bay State Hockey League, which is run out of Rockland, The Bog, and Hobomock Arenas in Pembroke. Taking on the Pride gig last offseason was a big commitment on top of all of that, but Larouco is happy with the way it all worked out.
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The Pride rallied to beat the top-seeded Connecticut Whale, 4-2, in Monday night’s championship game of the rebranded Premier Hockey League in Wesley Chapel, Florida. Boston also won last year’s crown, although the 2020-21 National Women’s Hockey League season was a bit of a mess. The league had to abandon its plan for a “sports bubble” in Lake Placid, New York, and eventually crowned its champ by staging a four-team weekend tournament on the Pride’s home ice at Warrior Ice Arena in Boston.
The Pride were 5-4 last season; they finished 13-5-5 this time, beating Buffalo, 6-0, and Toronto, 5-1, in the playoffs last weekend to set up their Monday night title shot.
“It’s everything you can hope for, right?” Larouco said of winning. “It’s the end goal. We had some ups and downs all year long, but the way the team played this weekend was the way we knew they could play. They came together at the right time. It was great to see them celebrate with their families because they obviously weren’t able to do that last year. They had a full season this year so it was good to get back to some sort of normalcy.”
Personally satisfying for the GM?
“It definitely makes all the hard work and all the long hours and the grind worth it, that’s for sure,” Larouco said. “It’s slightly surreal. Colleen (team president Colleen Coyne) and I were laughing, saying, ‘We gotta go back and watch the game (again),’ because there were so many emotions going on (as it happened).”
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The Pride players – including veteran defenseman Kaleigh Fratkin, who coaches the Weymouth High girls team – once again got to raise the Isobel Cup. Larouco and Coyne, a member of the gold medal-winning 1998 U.S. Olympic squad, eventually got their turn, too.
“Yeah, we did at the end,” said Larouco. “We kind of gave (the players) their moment to do their thing. It’s weird having coached and played (at Brown) and now in this role, what do you kind of do or don’t do (in the celebration)? But, yeah, we all got to touch Izzy and raise it in front of the team. It was pretty cool. It is a bit heavier than I thought.
“But you know what? It does float because she spent a lot of time in the pool.”
Backup goaltender Victoria Hanson, of Stoughton, can confirm that. After winning the title late Monday night – the final was a 9 p.m., start to accommodate ESPN2 – the Pride didn’t return home until Wednesday. Before they were feted at the Tampa Bay Lightning game on Tuesday night they lounged around the hotel to savor the title.
“Yes, she went swimming in the pool,” Hanson said of the trophy, which is named after the daughter of Lord Stanley, of Stanley Cup fame. “She got to float around on a donut floatie. She was getting some Florida sun like the rest of us.”
The extra day of rest was well-deserved. The Pride, who have three crowns overall, are the first team in the seven-year history of the league to win back-to-back. They might already have achieved a three-peat if the 2019-20 final hadn’t been canceled due to the pandemic; the Pride were 23-1 heading into that game before the plug was pulled.
“Back-to-back is honestly amazing,” said forward Meghara McManus, of Milton, who had 5 goals and was a team-best plus-7 during the regular season. “It’s a dynasty, I guess, now. It’s just awesome.”
“To be able to go through a full season, it felt lot different,” said forward Sammy Davis, who grew up in Pembroke and starred at Boston University. “We earned it last year, but it felt like we worked really hard for this one. Our team faced a lot of adversity. All that hard work paid off and you can go into the offseason being satisfied. Obviously, we’re hungry for next year, but … (we realize) this weekend was really amazing. We all came together.”
The Pride endured a maddening finish to the regular season, losing their last five games, all in overtime.
“You had to bring that up,” Larouco said with a laugh. “Crazy that that could even happen. I’m sure we set some sort of record with that.”
“It was frustrating,” Davis said of the skid. “It just frustrated all of us because we knew what we were capable of. It lit a fire under us. It motivated us. Everybody was doubting us and counting us out.”
In the final, the Pride were down 2-1 heading into the third period against Connecticut, but their championship DNA must have kicked in. Evelina Raselli tied it up at the 6:39 mark, punching in a rebound of a shot by Milton’s Mary Parker. Just 18 seconds later, Taylor Wenczkowski scored off another rebound, and the Pride were off and running with Jenna Rheault’s empty netter as the exclamation point.
“We’ve been there before, and Connecticut hadn’t,” McManus said. “We just had that belief.”
The celebration didn’t end on the ice that night. Along with being saluted at Thursday’s Bruins game, the team figures to make a fair number of public appearances over the next few months.
“We’re hoping that we have another tour around Boston similar to last year,” Hanson said. “I think everyone’s even more excited this year because last year with COVID (restrictions) only a select few (players) could go to each event. But now with Boston fully open, we can really enjoy the championship as a team at every event, which will be special.”
Closer to home, Larouco would like to bring the Isobel Cup to The Bog or Rockland Ice Rink to show it off. As with the Stanley Cup, tradition dictates that every member of the organization gets to take the trophy for a day in the offseason.
“I’ll definitely have to think about when and where, but, yeah, I would love to be able to share it (with local hockey fans),” Larouco said. “We weren’t home at Warrior any time during March so it’s been a while since we’ve seen our fans. I definitely would like to bring (the Cup) back to the South Shore and share it with all my leagues and players and families who have helped me get to where I’m at. It would be nice to share that with them and let them see it firsthand.”
This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Rockland-born GM savors Pride’s second straight women’s hockey crown
