Natalie Spooner ready to play any role for Canadian hockey team at 4th Olympics

You could try the emotion in canadian river superior general manager Gina Kingsbury’s vocalise as she told Natalie Spooner that she’ll be sledding to her fourth Olympic Games.

The cameras were rolling when Hockey Canada management delivered good news to the 23 players heading to Italy to try to defend their Olympic women’s hockey gold next month.

“Personally, I’ve witnessed the last few years and everything that you’ve been through and I think you’re exactly what this team needs,” Kingsbury told the Toronto Sceptres forward. “But certainly in the last years where you’ve had to struggle with a lot of things, injuries, coming back after [the birth of her son] Rory, and we’re really excited to have you on our team.”

Spooner reacted with tears of joy, but also relief. The call was a weight off her shoulders.

It’s been a long road for the 35-year-old from Scarborough, Ont., native to return from a major knee injury that came after an MVP performance in the first season of the PWHL.

Kingsbury and Canadian head coach Troy Ryan have seen those challenges up close. Kingsbury is also the general manager of the Sceptres, and Ryan is the PWHL team’s coach.

It means they've seen all the work she's done behind the scenes to get back to where she is now.

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“Honestly, I can’t picture myself or this group doing it without you,” he told her.

At the end of the call, assistant coach Caroline Ouellette gave Spooner, her former teammate, a piece of advice: play free and be yourself.

“We need that from you,” Ouellette said. “We need you to just go and bring all the strengths that you have. You’ve been in those moments and you’ve always embraced that pressure. We count on you to be you, and it’s going to help our team win gold in Milan.”

At her best, Spooner is a force in front of the net and a shooting threat. Off the ice, she’s the teammate who helps keep things light, using her experience from 15 years on the senior national team to bring a sense of calm.

It may be her fourth Olympics, but with everything the last four years have brought — becoming a mother, returning to play professional hockey, winning league MVP and then returning from injury — making this team felt sweeter.

“Just every single emotion probably was going through my body and my head at that moment,” Spooner said recently, while doing interviews to promote a partnership with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG), which provides support to Spooner and other athletes through its Quest for Gold program.

On the heels of a sweep by the United States at the Rivalry Series, the veteran presence of a player like Spooner, who’s seen and done it all on the national team, could be exactly what the Canadians need to repeat as Olympic champions.

After two summers of rehabbing from injury, this off-season was the first one in a long time where Spooner could focus solely on training for hockey.

Spooner returned from knee surgery a few months into last season, but never quite seemed to hit her stride.

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But this off-season, she was able to skate pain free and felt she could enjoy hockey again.

“It was really nice to have a good off-season, to be able to train properly, to get stronger,” she said. “It was huge, and now kind of just to get a few more games under my belt is nice to just start feeling like my game is coming back.”

One piece of the puzzle is regaining the speed that always made Spooner a threat in driving to the net.

"Her size makes her so hard to play against," said Canadian teammate and New York Sirens forward Sarah Fillier. "She might not look like she's streaking down the ice super fast, but she hides her speed well and she can kind of catch you sometimes."

In 15 games with the Sceptres this season, Spooner has recorded six points, including three goals.

But the underlying numbers suggest that she’s been a bit unlucky in the goals department. Spooner is shooting just a hair over six per cent, well below the nearly 20 per cent clip she hit during her MVP season and lower than last season's 9.7 per cent, too.

Only three PWHL players have fired more shots on net than Spooner this season.

She's not the only player on the team who hasn't seen results yet. The team has struggled on the power play this season, scoring only four goals with the player advantage on 35 opportunities. The Sceptres have lost six of their last seven games.

“Right from the start, we didn’t seem to have a whole lot of life,” Ryan said after the Sceptres’ 5-0 loss to Vancouver on Thursday night. “We’ve dug ourselves a bit of a hole here, and very soon we’ve got to find a way to dig ourselves out of it.”

Ahead of Spooner’s first Olympics in 2014, she was given a time to show up at the Hockey Canada offices in Calgary. The head coach at the time, Kevin Dineen, was sitting across the table when she arrived in the room. He stood up and put his hand out to her.

“Spooner, are you ready to go to Russia?” he said.

In that first gold-medal game against the United States, Spooner remembers being “a nervous wreck.” But she leaned on veterans like Ouellette, Gillian Apps and linemate Hayley Wickenheiser.

When the Canadians were down by two goals with less than four minutes remaining in the game, Spooner remembers looking over at Apps on the bench. Apps was calm, cool and collected.

“She just believes and just knows,” Spooner realized.

We all know how that game ended. Brianne Jenner scored for Canada with 3:26 left on the clock. After some help from a goal post that thwarted an American shot on an empty net, Marie-Philip Poulin tied the game with 55 seconds remaining. Poulin also scored the game winner in overtime.

Spooner has played just about every role imaginable for the Canadians, especially over the last couple of years, from top six to extra forward.

Going into Italy, she’s ready to embrace whatever role she’s given, and do her best to have an impact. Beyond what she will bring on the ice, Spooner is one of several veterans who can bring belief and confidence to the bench when things get tense.

“In that sense, it's just another hockey game and you’ve got to just play it like that,” Spooner said. “You can't get too nervous, you can't hold your stick too tight. We've played thousands of games. We're so ready for this.”

When Fillier made her national team debut as a teenager in 2018, she found herself on Spooner's line. The older player took her under her wing, and has become "a bit of a motherly figure" to her.

"If you know her, she's the nicest and bubbliest person you've ever met and has never said anything negative ever," Fillier said. "As a young 18-year-old coming on to the scene, she was just the perfect person to really help me find my stride."

At her first Olympics in 2022, Fillier scored 11 points in seven games alongside Spooner.

"I owe a lot of my success in the 2022 Olympics to her and how just confident I felt when I was playing," Fillier said.

At these Olympics, Spooner will have an extra good luck charm in the stands. Her three-year-old son, Rory, will arrive in time to watch the Canadians play the U.S. In the preliminary round, and maybe even get to see his mom compete in her fourth Olympic gold medal final.

Spooner said he’s been practicing his rendition of O Canada in preparation for the trip to Italy.

“He knows the whole song,” she said. “He sings it all the time on his karaoke machine. So, yeah, he’s pretty ready to go.”

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