Potter's hard work, dedication paves way to U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame

Jenny Potter knew her destiny in the early 1990s, when she was at the local hockey rink in her hometown of Edina, Minnesota.

"When I was at Braemar, the inside rink in Edina, there was a poster in there saying girl's hockey is going to be in the 1998 Olympics. And I was like, 'OK, I want to be in the Olympics. I want to play in that,'" the former forward said. "So that was what spurred me. I'm going to be there."
Potter not only got to the 1998 Nagano Olympics, the first to feature women's hockey, she and the U.S. women's team won the gold medal. It was a big part of a tremendous career for Potter, who will be inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in Denver on Dec. 9.
"To me, it's hard to put in words," Potter said. "It's like winning the Olympic gold medal: it's a life-long inspiration of every-day grind, that was your ultimate goal. I don't think anyone competes to play hockey to say, 'I want to be in the Hall of Fame.' It's great, but you do it because you love it, want to be the best and want to win. It's awesome to be included in such a great group of people."
Potter, Dean Blais, Tony Granato and Jerry York, the Class of 2020 inductees, will be honored with the Class of 2021 recipients Stan Fischler, Paul Holmgren and Peter McNab, at this year's ceremony.
Potter, who was 19 years old when she won gold, won silver at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and bronze at the 2006 Turin Olympics. In 21 games, she scored 32 points (11 goals, 21 assists), the most of any U.S. women's player in the Olympics.
She helped the women's team to a first-place finish at the IIHF World Championship in 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2011 and to a second-place finish in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2012. Potter scored 237 points (101 goals, 136 assists) in 204 games with the U.S. team.
Potter was also a mother through most of her career; daughter Madison was born in 2001 and son Cullen in 2007.

"Obviously, Jenny has had a long career," former U.S. women's hockey forward Natalie Darwitz, who was inducted in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018 said. "Not a normal career, with birthing some kids along the way, that's pretty unusual. But she didn't skip a beat and that's just a testament to her work ethic.
"Not everyone can do that or would do that. Just a different path and when you dive into it and look back, it puts it in perspective what kind of athlete she was."
Potter was an all-around athlete from an early age. She played organized football from fifth through eighth grade. She also swam and looked up to Olympic gold medalist Janet Evans.
However, Potter said she didn't love swimming. She loved hockey so much that when she and her two older sisters went with their dad to the ice rink at Lewis Park, a few blocks from where she grew up, Potter would try to get into her dad's men's hockey game.
"He'd say, 'OK, you can skate along the boards, but don't get hit, stay out of the way.' So, I'd always be like, 'I want to play, want to get in there,'" she said. "So probably around fourth or fifth grade I got to get into the game more. Probably around seventh, eighth grade I took it more seriously."
Potter played one season for the University of Minnesota in 1998-99 before attending Minnesota-Duluth for three seasons from 1999-2004 (she did not play for two seasons from 2000-02 because of the birth of her daughter). She's the all-time leading scorer at Minnesota-Duluth with 256 points (108 goals, 148 assists) in 102 games and helped them win the 2003 NCAA Division I women's hockey championship.
Shannon Miller, who coached the Duluth women's hockey team from 1999-2015, got her first glimpse of Potter's abilities at the 1998 Olympics, when Miller was the coach for Canada.
"She was very small (5-foot-4, 145 pounds) but very explosive. So she's always impressed me that she could be that good and that effective with being so short," Miller said. "I noticed that right away with Team USA and of course, I really discovered that when she played for me.
"The majority of the time she was the hardest working athlete on the ice, hardest working athlete in the weight room. And it's funny, she didn't eat really healthy. Her favorite restaurant was McDonald's when she first went to college. So it always amazed me that she wasn't always putting the best fuel in her body but somehow, she had very little body fat and she just worked so hard in every area as an athlete."
Potter was in tremendous shape throughout her career and didn't miss much time after having her children: she said she played in the World Championship four months after the birth of each. Forward Kendall Coyne-Schofield was Potter's roommate when Coyne-Schofield first entered the U.S. program.

"'Potsy' had Cullen (in 2007) so this was roughly nine months later in October and we did body fat testing. I was like, 'What's body fat?' I didn't know what body fat testing was," Coyne-Schofield said. "And Jenny Potter's body fat was lower than mine. I'm a 15-year-old kid with no body fat and she just had her second child in January. It just shows how incredible of an athlete she was.
"Her overall strength of her game was there but that strength came from her skating. She was a phenomenal skater. She wasn't very big, but she was so strong on the puck. She was skilled, she was fast, she was hard to play against, and I learned that very quickly when we would have camps together and I would have play against her. She's one of the strongest people I've ever met."
Hockey is still a big part of Potter's life. She is president of the Northeast Wisconsin Jr. Gamblers, a Tier I USA Hockey program. Her husband Rob is also a board member of the program.
Potter laughed at being called a pioneer in women's hockey -- "it makes me feel old," she said. But she's also proud of it and loves helping the next generation.
"It's something that's a part of you and it's our job to teach them, 'This is how it is,'" she said. "If you want to excel at hockey, it's no different than if you want to excel at school or football or soccer. You have to be driven and you have to sacrifice and it's hard work.
"We didn't have cell phones when we were growing up, we didn't have that instant gratification, an hour-and-a-half movie and now you're the Karate Kid champion. They try to connect the dots, but they don't see all the dots. They see pieces of the dots. They see the highlight reel, but they don't see the 10,000 hours (and) it took them 10,000 times to perfect that skill. You didn't just pick it up. So, there's a lot of teaching them that it's not as easy as it looks on TV. But being one of the first, it's obviously inspiring to me to go out and share my experiences. And I love sharing it because this is what it takes to be the best."