For a small village of fewer than 8,000 residents, Briarcliff Manor will have a nice share of the spotlight during the upcoming Winter Olympic Games.
Aerin Frankel, who grew up in Briarcliff and attended Chappaqua schools — leaving for prep school after her freshman year at Horace Greeley — was named Friday, Jan. 2 to the U.S. women’s Olympic ice hockey team. The announcement of the team roster was made on The Today Show on NBC.
With her selection, the 26-year-old goalie will join 24-year-old curler Danny Casper, another Briarcliff-raised athlete, at the Games, which will be held next month in Italy. Casper captains Team Casper, which secured one of two remaining men’s Olympic curling slots via an eight-team playoff last month.
Frankel’s selection was less stressful. A member of the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s Boston Fleet, she has played for the U.S. senior women’s national team for several years.
She was the U.S. starting goalie at the last three world championships, earning a gold, a silver and a gold, although leaving the last championship early with an injury incurred in a collision.
Few, if any, American goalies can approach Frankel’s still-developing resume.
Aerin Frankel’s hockey journey started in Elmsford
Some of its first pages were written on the ice at Elmsford’s Westchester Skating Academy.
She played for four years on Rivertown Legends high school coach Kevin Hagen’s Westchester Vipers youth club team.
Hagen, who said he thinks Frankel was the only girl on the team during that period, noted she made a mark all four years.
“The boys couldn’t even score on her. She was special from the get-go,” Hagen said.
While it wasn’t a surprise, Hagen called her Olympic selection “awesome.”
Frankel, who didn’t play for Greeley, transferred from there to Minnesota’s Shattuck-Saint Mary’s School, where she starred in net.
She was recruited by Div. I Northeastern University and was an award-winner there each of the five seasons she played.
That included a COVID-19 grad year for 2021-22 after she became the nation’s top women’s collegiate goalie as a senior the previous season with 20 wins and a microscopic 0.81 goals against average.
Her senior year, Frankel was named the winner of the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award as the nation’s top female NCAA Div. I ice hockey player. That was one of multiple national awards she garnered.
With her quickness and strong angle play making up for her relative lack of size (Frankel is 5-foot-5), she went on to record a career-high 25 wins as a grad student, including a personal-best 11 shutouts. She then won the Women’s Hockey Association’s National Goalie of the Year Award for a second straight year.
The U.S. is scheduled to open Olympic play Feb. 5 against Czechia. The gold medal game is slated for Feb. 19.
Nancy Haggerty covers sports for The Journal News/lohud.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Aerin Frankel, goalie from Briarcliff, named to U.S. Olympic team
Reporting by Nancy Haggerty, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
