Minnesota's professional women's hockey team head coach talks training, future of the team

The brand new professional women’s hockey league opens training camps Wednesday. Minnesota is home to one of the six inaugural teams.

Head coach Charlie Burggraf joined guest host Catharine Richert on Tuesday on Minnesota Now to discuss the future of women’s hockey in Minnesota.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. The following transcription has been edited for lengthy and clarity.

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What is your hockey background?

I grew up in northern Minnesota, by the Canadian border where they have nine months of winter and three months bad weather. For a hockey player, the bad weather was in the summer when the ice melted back in the day when they didn’t have artificial ice.

The town I grew up in was Roseau and it was a place where they had a lot of Swedish immigrants that brought hockey over there. And it was kind of part of the culture and we had our archrival Warroad just down down the road,

I ended up playing at North Dakota and for four years and then went overseas for a couple of years and then coached.

What’s happening at training camp right now?

We’re waiting on the players to arrive and they got to get a lot of things out of the way like medical, media and equipment, fitting the equipment, sticks, shin pads — everything you can think of from top to bottom and then we actually get on the ice on Friday.

We’ve got a lot of orientation things to do. We have 28 players coming in that are basically all rookies. So in a traditional hockey program, or sport program, that’s not a startup. You’ll have X number of seniors, seven or eight seniors, juniors, sophomores and then maybe a handful of rookie.

It’s a unique challenge because we are starting from zero. We have to make our team have an identity and that’ll take some time because you got to figure out how they play. Even though you scout them, you don’t know until you know. So it’s actually quite an exciting opportunity, because there’s a lot of good players there that are coming in.

We had three free agents that signed, Kendall Coyne and Kelly Pannek and Lee Stecklein. They’re great players and then of course you mentioned we have the drafted 15 players and then there’s a number of players that are invited. So we have to shrink that roster down to 25 by the end of December.

These are some big names and you’ve already drafted some Olympians. Right?

Yeah, there’s a lot of Olympians throughout the league. So there was intentionality, I believe, I wasn’t in any of these meetings, but six teams was what the original NHL started with back in the day. But the level of play is going to be very high. You look at our roster, and every one of these players was a star player, so to speak, wherever they came from.

We’ve got a Finnish player, we’ve got a Czech player and some Canadians on the team. And of course a lot of Minnesotans as it is the state of hockey.

Dan Casson, who’s one of the primary leaders did some research and I saw a podcast of his saying he was shocked at Minnesota. He said, “Oh my gosh, there’s like a whole bunch of Minnesota girls playing college hockey” and a lot of the Olympic team is made up of Minnesotans.

We kind of take that for granted and the programs throughout Minnesota have so many good coaches and so many players that it manifests itself in bringing a lot of players in this professional league.

It sounds like you have a lot to be excited about with this new team. But at the same time, I bet making a team is really daunting. What’s been the biggest challenge in doing that?

They use the term, it’s a blank piece of paper startup. And I like a different metaphor, like see that woods over there full of trees, and rocks and everything, you’ve got to tear all that down and level of field and you’re rid of all these challenges that are associated with building a team.

And so that has been the biggest challenge. But what’s happening here, through this process is a teamwork. Everybody is rolling up their sleeves and getting everything ready for the players to come in.

It’s a great question you’re asking because if we respond to it appropriately, then it helps build our staff together in a way that we don’t, it doesn’t matter who you are, if you need to pick up stuff, clean up stuff, or whatever it is — just get after it. Work together because when we play or show up tomorrow, it’s not going to be perfect. But it’s going to be really a great environment.

We’re at TRIA as you mentioned, and TRIA is a tremendous supporter of the program and it’s a great facility for practice and for games if we play games there.

I feel like we’ve been hearing a lot about this particular topic in the news, lots of conversation about player safety after the death of Hibbing native Adam Johnson, will the PWHL players be required to wear neck guards?

I’m not qualified to weigh in on that but it’s the likelihood. There’s been a lot of critical mass being built around that because that’s a vulnerable spot there. And it's a freak accident that happens occasionally. It’s just tragedy, thoughts and prayers for the family, and friends and teammates.

So something’s going to happen, I would imagine, particularly at the lower levels, you know, and then when they get into higher levels, it gets a little bit different. I don’t know what’s going to happen there.

There have been rumors of the team name being the Minnesota Superior. Can you confirm or deny that?

That’s over my paygrade but there’s a lot of talk, you know, and that’s part of the process plan — do, check, adjust, right? So a plan was made, they did it, they check the results. And maybe there’s a little bit of pause there. If an announcement hasn’t been made yet, I’m not sure. But there’s a lot of good names bouncing around there. So I’m just gonna be patient and wait and see what happens.