Ice Hockey Olympian
First, she asserted herself on the ice, then in the World. “I am an Olympian, but I am also other things. Being an athlete is not my whole being.”
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Sarah Nurse is the daughter of a Trinidadian immigrant and a mother whose lineage in Canada traces for generations.
Nurse is one of the newer entries on a family tree that is a treasury of athletic talent. Her father was one of Canada’s finest lacrosse players. An aunt was a celebrated point guard at Syracuse University who married Donovan McNabb, a Philadelphia Eagles quarterback who earned his peers’ recognition when elected to six Pro Bowls. Sarah’s cousins include Kia Nurse, an Olympian and W.N.B.A. All-Star, Darnell Nurse, a top-line defenseman for the N.H.L. Edmonton Oilers and an uncle, Richard Nurse, who played in the Canadian Football League.
Editor: Family connections are only an absolute predictor of adult success among descendants of kings and queens. For athletes stepping onto the playing field, family history carries no automatic touchdowns, home runs or goals scored. An athlete may have a famous name but does the young namesake have the same agility and, more important, the intense drive to succeed on the field?
CHILDHOOD
As a child in Hamilton, near Toronto, Sarah Nurse learned to ice skate at age 3. Initially dazzled by graceful power and sparkly dresses, she imagined her teenage and adult self as either a figure skater or a pop music star. At age 5, her parents signed her up for hockey, instead, where she competed on boys’ teams and learned that other girls played the sport only when, as a 7-year-old, she watched Canada’s women’s team march to an Olympic gold medal in 2002.
To coaches and players, Nurse showed conspicuous promise but sometimes seemed too relaxed until a coach, Stacy Marnock, began coaching Nurse. Only then did Nurse, the youth hockey prospect, appreciate that a coach might take the time to understood her as a person more than as an athlete.
Preaching that no approach could fit every player, must less every teenage player, Marnock offered a blend of independence and fearsome accountability. Perhaps most important, this coach sensed that Nurse, who already prized her ability to separate her identity from the sport that would eventually make her famous, would be overly stressed if hockey was her only focus.
“She’s fiery competitive but when I started to work with her, she didn’t have that competitive edge,” Marnoch said. “She’s laid-back and super chill and turns it on when she needs to. But unlike lazy kids who don’t play defense, Sarah was catching people from behind all the time.”
EDUCATION INCLUDES ATHLETICS AND SOCIETY AWARENESS
College hockey coaches trying to recruit Nurse noticed her speed, her unflappability, and her ability to kill penalties. She chose to enroll and play hockey at the University of Wisconsin, which was a perfect fit for the superiority of its women’s hockey program while large enough for Nurse to be content in relative anonymity.
Nurse played in every varsity game as a freshman and became a prolific scorer for the Wisconsin Badgers, who reached the ‘Frozen Four’ (college hockey’s championship playoffs) in all four of Nurse’s seasons in Madison.
Off the ice, though, Nurse was wary about the society in which she was living, as America sank still deeper into tumult. She worried about police brutality, particularly when her Black father or one of her brothers would travel from Canada to visit her in the ‘States.’ As the nation’s mood darkened around the 2016 presidential election, she found herself disconcerted by some of the racist views she heard in the locker room and observed in Wisconsin, a panorama of political bitterness.
CHALLENGE – BIRACIAL
While concerned about events happening around her within American society, Nurse was not yet eager to speak out about her personal feelings. She had long been mindful of what she described as an advantage: “I’m a biracial woman so people can tell that I’m not White, but I also don’t get treated as if I were a dark-skinned Black woman.” She was also uncertain that anyone wanted to hear from her, so she said little about race, in society or in her predominantly White sport, hockey. (Nurse said she was a teenager before she learned about Angela James, a Black woman who had played for Canada and in 2010 became one of the first women to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.)
Even when Nurse was among friends, she sometimes held back from correcting slights and dismissals. And on Twitter, she typically talked about only hockey and her family.
The night before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, after a man wearing a mask of Donald J. Trump pretended to lynch someone impersonating Barack Obama within the crowd attending a football game in Madison, Nurse apprehensively joined the Wisconsin athletes who spoke of being ‘loved during competition but then being subjected to racial discrimination in our everyday lives.”
“I was a girl playing hockey. I was also a biracial Black girl playing hockey,” Nurse said, looking back at her college days a decade earlier. “I’ve just always had this weird sense of wondering about belonging where I’m like, ‘Oh, can I sit at this table? Do I belong here? Do I fit in with the whole crowd?”
CHALLENGE – DISAPPOINTMENT FOR FAILURE TO BE SELECTED TO A TEAM
Editor– There are many stories of successful adult athletes who failed – as a youth athlete – to be selected for a team or earn much playing time. One example known to this editor is former Phillies shortstop Larry Bowa’s failure to make his high school baseball team. Eventually, he was a major league All-Star!
In view of all her college hockey accomplishments and awards, Nurse was extremely disappointed to be excluded in 2016 from Canada’s next women’s Olympic hockey team. Impartial observers attributed her failure to be selected due to coaches’ concerns about her physical strength (5’9”, 175 lbs. as of 2023) to compete at the top international competition.
Soon overcoming her disappointment, Nurse dedicated herself even more to hockey, especially focusing on her strength training. The sting of exclusion from the 2017 world championship team faded once Nurse made Canada’s roster for the 2018 Winter games. But the team returned from Asia frustrated, with Canada achieving only a second-place Silver Medal in women’s hockey for the first time since the Olympic games of 1998.
SPORTING LIFE
Following Canada’s silver medal, their next hockey team efforts resulted in an even lesser reward – a third place, bronze medal. Good enough for many countries but an embarrassment to Canada as one of the world’s traditional hockey super-powers.
So, the Canadian women’s hockey team embarked on a ‘soul searching’ period, as some of them would later describe it. Asked whether Nurse, who calls sports pressure “a privilege” would have soared without Canada’s rejection of her in 2016, her coach from her college days replied, “Probably not.”
The former American hockey Olympian, Mark Johnson, added, “She probably got to the point where she was a much better player having navigated through that space (the time following her failure to make her first Olympic team) than maybe she would have been.”
Nurse had been dealing with an injured knee before the Beijing Olympic games so it was not certain that she would be able to play. She did not practice or play with the Canadian team until just before their first games. But she had two assists in Canada’s opening game, three goals in the second and a goal and an assist in the third. She recorded a single assist in Canada’s first game against the United States’ women’s squad but picked up four in a quarterfinal meeting with Sweden and another four in a semifinal against Switzerland.
As the gold medal game against the Americans approached, another veteran of her Wisconsin team also on the Canadian team, asked whether Nurse realized she was on the brink of matching the record of 17 points at a single Olympics.
No, she wasn’t. All she was thinking about, Nurse recalled later, was how, after starting the Games on the third line, she would be sharing the first line with another top-rated Canadian player, who Nurse described as ‘the gold medal girl.”
Soon in the game, Nurse scored, tying the record and later recorded an assist on the Olympic winning goal of a teammate, helping Canada avenge it’s 2018 defeat.
The gold medal Nurse craved now sometimes lives in a sock in her dresser drawer, its recipient scarcely looking at it amid a blur of sponsorships, journal writings, workouts and walks with her new dog, Romeo. Now recognized on trains and in malls, she is considering pursuing another Olympic roster. But she is not, she said, afraid to move on from the sport, or anything else. Rejection taught her to not be afraid for her future.
“We’re not,” said Nurse, “meant to be pigeonholed.”
INTERESTS BEYOND ATHLETICS
For Nurse, her involvement with high-level hockey was complex. She had an Olympic medal and prospects for another. But she also had other interests, including fashion and marketing.
“I was able to realize at 23 that the Olympics were just something I did – somewhere I went, where I played hockey, which I’ve done my whole life and will continue to do,” she said in the summer of 2023. “But it’s not who I am. It’s like, I am Sarah Nurse. I am an Olympian, but I am also other things. It’s not my whole being.”
FAME AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
When a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd – by sitting with his knee on the prone Floyd’s neck while Floyd cried out that he couldn’t breathe, as famously filmed by a bystander – Nurse was finally moved to speak out about racism, after years of admiring activists from afar and now motivated to join the voices against the international horror of the slow murder of a Black man who had been arrested for a minor, non-violent offense and was not forcefully resisting.
“It was not an accident,” said Nurse in one tweet. “It’s appalling to see another Black person murdered. His life, along with countless others – not valued. It is NOT enough to sit back and say, ‘I’m not Racist.’ We all have to be actively AGAINST racism in our society.”
Thus, Nurse’s self-diagnosed timidness was gone, done in by her maturation as an adult, the era’s urgency, and the independent streak she thought the covid pandemic had deepened within her.
“I was able – while staying alone with my parents during the pandemic – to learn a lot more about myself and where I thought that I fit into the world and put less emphasis on fitting in with a group of people and more of, ‘Hey, this is who I am’ and I can be fluid throughout these groups of people,” Nurse said.
Moreover, she said, she came to accept that her standing as one of elite hockey’s only women of color demanded that she speak more than she had allowed herself to envision. “People would not be getting this if it wasn’t coming from me,” said Nurse.
While concerned earlier in her life about fitting in as a biracial female, eventually as a prominent athlete, Nurse now has crowds following her.
CAREER SATISFACTION
Sarah Nurse is now among the most ascendant women in hockey. Her turn at the top of Canadian sports is unfolding as she is increasingly summoning her own voice. One of the few Black people in hockey’s most rarefied locker rooms, now or ever before, she is exchanging her years-long caution for candor, chasing away worries about backlash and the wrenching, lingering sense that she “never really always felt like I fit in.”
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This career story is based on a news article written by Alan Blinder, published by The New York Times newspaper on August 26, 2022, plus internet research.
