Wendell-Pohl showed goal-scoring flair on way to Hockey Hall of Fame

Laura Halldorson couldn’t believe what was happening. Nine seconds into the third period of the 2004 NCAA championship game, her University of Minnesota women’s hockey team had taken the lead on Harvard, with a rebound goal by Natalie Darwitz off a pass from Krissy Wendell.

But the officials were gathering. Harvard forward Angela Ruggiero was talking to them, discussing whether a whistle had blown, whether the goal would count.

“I’m worked up, I’m like, ‘That’s our goal, that’s our championship goal. Do not take that away from us,’” said Halldorson, then the Minnesota coach. “I was intense.”

Wendell approached her.

“I’ll never forget, Krissy said, ‘Coach, it’s OK. Because if they don’t count it, we’ll just get another one,’” Halldorson said.

The delay was long, but the goal was good. And 32 seconds later, Minnesota would score again, a Kelly Stephens goal off a Wendell shot. Add in another Wendell goal, a Darwitz goal for a hat trick, and Minnesota had the 6-2 win and the championship.

It was classic Wendell.

“She just was so calm and confident and comfortable under pressure in big situations and that’s part of her competitiveness that I always loved,” Halldorson said of the forward.

It was who she always had been, since she was finally allowed to play hockey at age 5, counting down the days until she was old enough to sign up, old enough to join her elder brother on the rink, old enough to learn the sport that would take her through back-to-back NCAA titles, one gold and five silver medals at the IIHF Women’s World Championship, and silver and bronze medals at the 2002 and 2006 Olympics, becoming captain of the team.

And now that will take her into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Wendell, now Wendell-Pohl, will join longtime teammate Darwitz among the seven inductees into the Hockey Hall of Fame Class of 2024, with the ceremony set for Monday.

“Krissy is probably one of the best hockey players I’ve ever seen play,” Darwitz said. “She was an absolutely natural goal-scorer, had a knack for the net. She had a couple of signature moves, everybody knew they were coming, and no one could stop them.

“She was just dynamic. She had a flair to her, had a confidence in her game, and the style she played. She was a signature highlight reel.”

And Darwitz should know. The two came up in Minnesota hockey, attended the University of Minnesota together, joined the national team together, just missing the 1998 Olympic gold-medal U.S. team. They played, almost without fail, on a line together, Darwitz’s speed and shooting ability pairing flawlessly with Wendell-Pohl’s dazzling ability to rush through traffic and emerge with the puck on her stick.

It was the track she started on, at 5 years old.

“I remember asking my parents, ‘I want to play, I want to play hockey,’ and I remember them saying, ‘You’ve got to wait until 5,'” Wendell-Pohl said. “Now they tell me, it was kind of like, ‘I don’t know, girls don’t really play hockey, maybe you’ll find another sport.’”

She didn’t. They held to their word.

“I just loved it, right from the get-go at 5 years old,” she said. “It wasn’t a sport that you go to school and all your friends play. Obviously my brother played, but I definitely just fell in love with the sport. I loved to compete. I loved to skate. I loved to be on the rink. It was an immediate passion for the sport right away.”

In 147 games with the U.S. women’s national team, Wendell-Pohl had 247 points (106 goals, 141 assists). She had 237 points (106 goals, 131 assists) in 101 games during three college seasons, putting her fourth all-time in points per game (2.35) in NCAA history. She won the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award in 2005 as the top player in women’s college hockey after finishing with 104 points (43 goals, 61 assists) in 40 games.

And that came after she scored 219 goals in two seasons at Park Center High School in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, becoming the first player -- boy or girl -- to score more than 100 goals in a single season. Which she did twice.

“When I say she was a genius with the puck, she was an electric player,” said Cammi Granato, the Hall of Fame forward who spent four years playing on a line with Wendell-Pohl and Darwitz for the United States. “She was so fun to watch because of the skill that she brought, her stick-handling and her ability to play in the offensive zone.

“It was like everything came alive and you’d get the wow. People would wow. Because she’d make a move and she’d toe-drag someone and then she’d leave a defenseman sitting there, like she’s around them. She had a wow to her game.”

It came from her natural abilities, her innate hockey IQ, and from her devotion to the sport. Wendell-Pohl was always playing hockey or watching it, coming home from the rink to turn on college or professional games, training herself to see how plays developed in an ever-changing game. There were the games of pickup, the unstructured nature of them full of trial and error, learning with each success or mistake.

It was during one such game of shinny, at the John Rose Minnesota Oval, where Winny Brodt-Brown, a future teammate at Minnesota and on the national team, first came across Wendell-Pohl. She looked across, seeing a girl who was four or five years her junior, and thought to herself, “Gosh, this girl is good.”

She went up to her after. The girl had a black eye.

The black eye had come from a basketball game with her brother, a fitting monument to the kind of childhood that Wendell-Pohl had, one of cutthroat competition in the family’s cul-de-sac, an outdoor-kid experience that saw her playing -- and generally excelling -- at everything from baseball, where in 1994 she became only the fifth girl to start in the Little League World Series, to pingpong to hockey.

“Oh yeah,” thought Brodt-Brown. “She’s tough too. Good and tough.”

Not that Wendell-Pohl was a bruising hockey player. She was, instead, all about finesse and IQ and hands, someone who played with utter joy, her smile serving as both a lasting image to her teammates and a potential dagger to her opponents.

“To me, what really stood out from Krissy were her hands,” Halldorson said. “Her ability to handle the puck, protect the puck, to make moves around people. She’s famous for her toe-drags, her hands, her dekes.”

Darwitz was the shooter. Wendell-Pohl would get closer, would make a move on the goalie.

It was hard to stop.

“When you combine that hockey sense with her ability to control the puck and the strength -- she was always so strong on her skates,” Halldorson said. “She was big and strong and she could shield the puck, she could play it along the boards and come out with the puck. And then she had the ability to understand when to pass and when to shoot.”

But as much as Wendell-Pohl loved hockey, as much as it was a part of her life and the life of her husband, John Pohl, who played 115 NHL games for the Toronto Maple Leafs and St. Louis Blues, it wasn’t forever. Which was why, at 24, Wendell-Pohl retired, having crammed a Hall of Fame career in at an age when others are just getting started.

“It wasn’t that I got out because I didn’t feel like I could play anymore,” Wendell-Pohl said. “I had played competitively for so long and it was such a huge part of my life that I felt like it was at a good time where I was ready to just kind of transition to the next phase of my life.”

She was ready for kids, for a family. It wasn’t a hard decision.

Hockey had been everything to her, 90 percent of her life, consuming her. She loved it.

But when she was done, she was done.

“I don’t have any regrets,” she said.

She still coaches, still is involved in the game, serving as an amateur scout for the Pittsburgh Penguins since 2021. She was in meetings leading up to the 2024 NHL Draft when she got the call that she had made the Hall of Fame.

She had made it. Darwitz had made it.

It was fitting for a hockey player who knew her future at 5, fitting for two teammates who thrived with each other, making each other and their teams better with their presence and drive, their calmness under pressure and clutch scoring and, ultimately, what they did for all those coming after them.

“The two of them, they really did help put girls hockey on the map and get more exposure, get more attention,” Halldorson said. “To me, they are the women’s hockey Mount Rushmore, in Minnesota, in the country, and now in the world.”

NHL.com staff writer Derek Van Diest contributed to this report