Capitals AHL video coach Engel-Natzke blazing trail

As part of the NHL's celebration of Gender Equality Month, NHL.com will be featuring women in hockey throughout March. Today, Emily Engel-Natzke, the video coach for Hershey of the American Hockey League and the only female full-time member of a coaching staff in the NHL or AHL.

Emily Engel-Natzke could have gone to Hollywood to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Instead, she went to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to take the next step toward turning her NHL dream into a reality.
The 30-year-old is the video coach for Hershey, the American Hockey League affiliate of the Washington Capitals. She is the only female full-time member of a coaching staff in the AHL or NHL.
Engel-Natzke does video breakdowns of each of Hershey's opponents and works with other members of the coaching staff to ensure they have everything they need from a video standpoint for coaching and teaching.
"You think about all of the coaches that have come before and just how many female hockey minds are out there and it's astonishing," Engel-Natzke said. "To think that's me, it's kind of crazy. But it's an honor. It's humbling and it's something that I hope isn't a news story a couple of years from now, but I also recognize that it is a big deal."

The path into professional hockey for Engel-Natzke started in 2013. She was studying film and playing club hockey when her coach at the University of Colorado, Kristen Wright, asked her to shoot video and serve as video coach for the United States women's team at the World University Winter Games in Trentino, Italy.
"I didn't know what that meant, but two weeks in Italy for free was all I needed to know," Engel-Natzke said. "Looking back, I had no idea what I was doing but it was a trip of a lifetime and that's when I realized that a video coach is something people do for a living. After that I was just trying to figure out where I could get a job and do that full time."
That opportunity came at the University of Wisconsin, starting with video work for the women's basketball team in 2014-15. She spent the next two years working with the Wisconsin men's and women's hockey teams, which were coached by former NHL players Tony Granato and Mark Johnson, respectively.
She moved to the men's team in 2017 after Granato convinced the university to create a full-time position for a video coach.
"I remember the conversation and she said, 'I want to make this my profession, this is my path to someday making it to the NHL,'" Granato said. "That drive from within and that goal of wanting to make it someday to the NHL set the standards for how then we could put her to work for the next few years to get her ready and to help us. She did a phenomenal job.
"Of course it's great that it's a woman doing this, but it's because she's great at what she does and she's earned the opportunity to advance."
Engel-Natzke said she benefitted from working with Granato and Johnson because of their NHL backgrounds, as well as the fact they encouraged her to use NHL clips as part of her presentations.
"She was a huge part of our team," said New York Rangers rookie defenseman K'Andre Miller, who played at Wisconsin from 2018-20. "She was always on top of her game helping us to succeed. She did an outstanding job with whatever we needed regarding video."
Engel-Natzke also made an impression on Brett Leonhardt, the Capitals assistant coach in charge of video, when the two met at a 2019 conference for sports professionals who use Hudl Sportscode for video analysis and data.
Leonhardt learned that Engel-Natzke was one of Hudl's top users at Wisconsin.
"I also know the video coaches do an awesome job with Division I hockey," Leonhardt said. "They have a lot of time to get the most out of the software in terms of analytics, data. I always like to pick their brains, and I hit it off with Emily right away. She was awesome."
Tim Ohashi had been a video analyst for the Capitals but left in October 2020 to become a video analyst for the expansion Seattle Kraken, who begin play in the NHL next season. Jared Elenberger was promoted from Hershey to replace Ohashi.
When Leonhardt started to go through candidates to fill the position in Hershey, Engel-Natzke was one of three candidates to go through the interview process.
Granato raved to Leonhardt, Hershey coach Spencer Carberry and Capitals coach Peter Laviolette about Engel-Natzke's qualifications for why she was the right person for the job even though he knew it could mean losing her in the middle of the season.
"Right away there were three different people on that staff that contacted people in our organization with just glowing reviews," Leonhardt said. "They didn't even wait for our call to them. They just said, 'You have a winner here.'"
Carberry called Engel-Natzke a rising star and raved about how seamlessly she has integrated with the coaching staff.
Engel-Natzke is doing Hershey's full prescout of opponents, something she never had done before.

Each breakdown requires her to watch, at minimum, the two previous games of the next opponent to find patterns in their style and systems that then can be presented to the players in video sessions prior to the game.
"And now every single prescout she does just gets better than the last one," Carberry said.
Engel-Natzke is eager to get the chance to move to the NHL but not at the expense of rushing herself.
"I still feel like I'm getting my master's degree in hockey and I'm really happy with that," she said.
She's also blazing a trail for women who want to chase their own NHL dreams.
"There's no doubt in my mind right now if she were to interview for an NHL team that uses Hudl Sportscode, she could walk in and handle the workload no problem," Leonhardt said. "It's only a matter of time."