U.S. gold medal in 1998 Nagano Olympics put women's hockey 'on the map'

When Cammi Granato looked out over the sea of faces, the piles of hockey equipment, the sheets of ice filled with girls, the pieces clicked into place. She had started to see it when the email inboxes -- still nascent technology back then -- of the United States women's Olympic hockey team had gone from sparsely populated with notes from partners and parents to crowded with messages as the 1998 Nagano Olympics progressed.

But it wasn't until that first hockey camp, back in her native Chicago after her team had won gold, that a new future unfurled before her: 115 girls from all across the country had gathered, to learn, to play hockey, together.
"It was wild to see," Granato said. "That day for me was like, 'I can't believe this whole lobby, all the ice sheets, are filled with women.' I'd played with boys my whole [childhood]. I never saw another girl, other than maybe one exhibition game, until I was 18 and went to Providence [College].
"That's when it hit me. We made an impact. People watched and they're inspired."
There was no question they had influenced women and girls, that by taking the inaugural gold medal in women's hockey in the Olympics, the U.S. team had made an indelible impact on female interest in the sport. What was less clear then and more clear now, 25 years later, is how that impact would be felt not just throughout women's hockey, but through the entire hockey world.
"I think it's no surprise that so many women on that team that had so much success and changed the landscape of women's hockey in our country are now continuing to push the envelope even further and just become involved and change the landscape of hockey," said Meghan Duggan, who would follow in Granato's footsteps and captain the U.S. to gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.
Granato, as always, has led the charge, becoming one of the first two women to join the Hockey Hall of Fame, inducted in 2010 alongside Angela James. She is now the assistant general manager for the Vancouver Canucks, one of an increasing number of women taking jobs on the men's side of the game.

But in so many aspects, that gold medal, captured on Feb. 17, 1998, was like a bombshell being dropped into the landscape of hockey -- especially women's hockey -- in the United States.
It hasn't been the same since.
"How did it change women's hockey?" said AJ Mleczko, a forward on that team and now a broadcaster with ESPN, MSG and NBC. "It put it on the map."
It changed everything, for those women who had won, for the girls they would return to impact, for those who would come next. They ended up on a Wheaties box. They got to appear on "Late Show with David Letterman." People clamored to talk to them.
Suddenly, for girls and for women, there was a path. In 1998, according to USA Hockey, there were approximately 28,000 women and girls playing hockey. Today, there are more than 88,000.
"It was big to see that women could play on the same ice that the men [could]," Mleczko said. "And at that point it was the first time the NHL was included in the Olympics, so it was the superstars. And so we were playing on the same ice, wearing the same jerseys. I think that incubated a dream in a lot of players, a lot of the players that are now wearing the red, white and blue."
These were the girls who lined up to take their photos with the 1998 Olympians, to hold their medals, stars in their eyes. There's the picture of a young Duggan standing next to Gretchen Ulian, her sister holding that Wheaties box. Kendall Coyne Schofield was a regular at Granato's hockey camp. The Lamoureux twins, Monique and Jocelyne, got to meet Lisa Brown-Miller.

For Knight it was the moment when, at Granato's camp, she realized she had broken all the wooden sticks she came with. Granato handed over her own.
"She probably doesn't even remember because it's so insignificant," Knight said. "But to me as a kid, to be able to even touch her stick was like, 'Oh my goodness.' "
These were the women who would carry USA Hockey forward, who would take the reins. The women who would go on to make inroads into the NHL, with Coyne Schofield serving as a player development coach and youth hockey growth specialist for the Chicago Blackhawks, with Duggan as the director of player development for the New Jersey Devils.
When Duggan first decided to pursue a career in the NHL, one of her first calls was to Granato.
For her, that gold back in 1998, when she was 10 years old, was "life-altering." She spoke with reverence of getting to meet Ulian, of putting her medal on and donning her jersey.
"It changed my life," Duggan said. "Like when I think back to when I set my eyes on playing for Team USA and going to the Olympics, it was that moment. I left that night and I told every person in town that was going to be me. I was going to go to the Olympics and I was going to captain Team USA to a gold medal and then I built my life around that dream."
It's hard to imagine what would have happened to women's hockey in the United States had that 1998 team not won gold. It was a question that stumped Knight and Mleczko and Katie King Crowley, a forward on that team who is now in her 16th year as coach of the Boston College women's hockey team, as they contemplated everything from a gold in 2002 to a scenario in which frustration and lack of results led USA Hockey to pull back on funding for women.
"I don't know," Knight said. "I don't know if we would have had the same growth of youth programs on the side. It's a really interesting question to think about because that win enabled more youth programs to provide a voice and say, hey, we want more specific girls' hockey teams and we want to allocate more ice to girls and women that play hockey, which wasn't a thing before."
In the summer of 2021, Granato was back at a hockey camp. She looked out over the crowd and she saw, there, how much was different; from when she was growing up, from those initial camps after the 1998 gold medal, from all the years after.
"That's actually when it hit me because I was back in Illinois," Granato said. "That entire lobby was girls, walking around with their team logos. They were walking with swagger and confidence. And the whole lobby is filled with women and young girls. I was like, this is awesome."
There it was, the proof of what they had done, the proof of where it had gone.
"That win just put women's hockey on the map," Knight said. "And, granted, it was the first time it was in the Olympics, so that was monumental as is. But if they didn't win, I don't know where the sport would be.
"So we have all of those women to thank. Little did they know, they had the entire sport on their back in the United States. They were probably just showing up to win a hockey game."