The First Year Of A Paralympic Quad Is All About The Process For The Para Alpine Ski Team →

November 22, 2022 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles

The Para alpine skiing calendar can best be described as condensed and relentless.

The highly competitive, almost non-stop schedule is not particularly conducive to focused, consistent and quality runs. The best-trained skiers spend nearly all four years in a Paralympic quad repeating their habits, refining their technique and honing in on the smallest details so that when they’re at the start gate in the Paralympic Winter Games, they are able to replicate their best personal performance under the most intense circumstances.

Upstart kitchen, in Sherman Park, has a line of entrepreneurs eager to start food businesses →

January 12, 2022 by Nicole Hensch in Food, Features/Profiles

At any given moment, the entrepreneurs who rent prep space in the shared commercial kitchen at Upstart Kitchen, 4323 W. Fond du Lac Ave., could be making barbecue, Nigerian cuisine, liquor-infused ice cream, baked goods, potato chips or community meals.

In the 15 months since it opened, Upstart Kitchen maxed out with 40 tenants using the space 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The wait list for entrepreneurs, which sat at an impressive 75 names about a year ago, has ballooned to more than 220 names.

Wisconsin chef is among the creators of new indigenous food publication →

November 29, 2021 by Nicole Hensch in Food, Features/Profiles

A groundbreaking Indigenous multimedia publication and cookbook has begun publishing, and a Wisconsin chef plays a central role.

Chef Kristina Stanley, an adjunct professor at Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton and former business owner in Madison, is project manager of The Gathering Basket, a new online indigenous community journal.

'Food is the connector': UW-Madison chef aims to reinvigorate traditional African meals →

October 26, 2021 by Nicole Hensch in Features/Profiles, Favorite Pieces, Food

On a warm Friday night in October, jazz music mingles in the air with the smell of collard greens at Cafe Coda, a Black-owned music venue in Dane County.

Out front, the Adem Tesfaye Band has patrons dancing, and in the back room, Chef Yusuf Bin-Rella is preparing collard greens for the musicians and VIPs to have at their set break.

Inside a pressure cooker, greens, Scotch bonnet peppers, onions and garlic that were pulled from the dirt at Troy Farm on Madison’s north side by Bin-Rella about an hour prior were blending with bacon and smoked turkey. The result was a mouth-watering scent that lured people backstage.

Bin-Rella hadn’t necessarily planned to cook. He was at Cafe Coda to see friends and unwind, but he can’t resist feeding people.

‘Hockey isn’t that important,’ Gophers’ Brad Frost says on eve of NCAA title game →

March 23, 2019 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

Minnesota’s Brad Frost is one of the most successful coaches in college women’s hockey. This is his 12th season, and his team has made the NCAA tournament every year he has been at the helm. This is the program’s ninth Frozen Four under his direction, and on Sunday the Gophers will be in their sixth title game in eight years.

Minnesota has won four of the past seven national championships and will face rival Wisconsin for an opportunity to win Frost’s fifth and the program’s eighth title.

There’s no arguing that Minnesota is one of the premier programs in the nation.

That’s why it’s so jarring, on the day before the title game, to hear Frost tell a room of reporters one of his coaching principles.

Hockey Humanitarian: Training Future Guide Dogs Continues Long History of Wisconsin's Annie Pankowksi Giving Back →

March 21, 2019 by Nicole Hensch in Features/Profiles, Favorite Pieces, Sports, Women's Hockey

Wisconsin redshirt senior captain Annie Pankowski is standing outside the Badgers locker room, giving an interview to a handful of reporters, when a she gets distracted for a moment and then pauses her answer to lean down and scratch the head of a dog that’s now happily wagging its tail and sitting at her feet. Pankowski gives the dog a quiet command and then stands up to pick up exactly where she left off in giving an answer.

It’s a scene that has become familiar around the Wisconsin women’s hockey locker room the past few years as Pankowski has become involved with OccuPaws, an International Guide Dog Federation accredited in-home program that trains and places fully trained guide dogs with visually impaired Midwesterners at no charge. She has logged more than 2,000 hours training guide dogs and readying them for a life as a service animal. These days, it’s rare to see Pankowski without a dog by her side, so much so that she said her teammates often express disappointment when she shows up at the rink without a four-legged friend.

The daughter of two veterinarians, Pankowski has been around animals her entire life.

NCAA Highlight: Sarah Potomak →

October 24, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

Had she made the Canadian Olympic team, Sarah Potomak would have been the youngest player on the team by two years. Though making the team so young would have been a stretch, it's also something Potomak imagined was within her grasp over her last couple of seasons.

She made her debut with the senior team in 2015, winning silver with Canada at the Four Nations Cup. She was a fixture of the senior team in 2017, winning silver at the IIHF Women's World Championships and had high hopes – and expectations of herself – when she was named to the centralization roster prior to Pyeongchang.

Tariffs, China and American Ginseng: A Case Study in Wisconsin →

October 23, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Food, Favorite Pieces, Features/Profiles

Marathon County is ground zero for the American ginseng industry, growing 98 percent of the country’s crop. But that may be in jeopardy if buyers start to walk away from deals in response to Chinese import tariffs.

Driving through central Wisconsin, it’s impossible to miss the shade structures that go on for acres through this somewhat remote part of America’s heartland. After miles and miles of livestock and corn, the farmland here looks different. Wooden stakes hold up mesh fabric to create the 80 percent shade that ginseng needs to grow. Originally foraged in forests, this niche crop is cultivated by recreating the tree cover environment in which it thrives.

NCAA Highlight: Cayla Barnes →

October 09, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

Cayla Barnes' second freshman year at Boston College is likely going to go very differently than her first.

She has started her red-shirt freshman season at Boston College after winning gold with Team USA at the Pyeongchang Olympics. Heading into last year, Barnes enrolled at BC after not being named to the initial USA centralization roster. She played in five games for the Eagles before she got a surprise phone call asking her to join Team USA in Tampa.

Barnes left school on October 28 and, less than two weeks later, tallied two goals and an assist with the national team as they took gold in the Four Nations Cup. Just more than four months later, Barnes was suiting up for the Olympics as the youngest player on the team, having just turned 19 in early January.

NCAA Highlight: Annie Pankowski →

October 03, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

When the Wisconsin Badgers took to the ice to open their season last Friday, it had been 551 days since Annie Pankowski had put on her familiar white sweater with a large red W on the front.

Taking a year off of college and deferring eligibility in an Olympic year isn't that unusual – her teammate Emily Clark did the same thing in order to play for Canada in Pyeongchang. The 18-plus months of toil and sacrifice had a payoff for Clark as she won silver with Team Canada.

Not so for Pankowski, who was cut from Team USA in early December, just 64 days before the team's first game in Pyeongchang.

When Team USA named their roster for centralization in May 2017, there were 23 women on the roster – the number of players they were allowed to take to Pyeongchang. It was an unusual move to not have a larger pool of players that would be whittled down during the residency process, and many assumed that this roster was the one that would eventually and officially become the Olympic team. Then, in November, three additional players were added to the roster and it was clear cuts would need to be made prior to leaving for the Olympics.

It was a frustratingly familiar situation for Pankowski, who was one of the last two players cut from the Team USA roster prior to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Then still in high school and the youngest player on the roster, Pankowski had come to terms with that cut. Before her 2018 experience, she referred to the 2014 cut as "The Setback" and said it helped her learn what it was like to go through adversity, which seems almost laughable now.

NCAA Highlight: Kassidy Sauve →

September 24, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

In the course of Kassidy Sauve's four years at Ohio State, the program had three head coaches, nine assistant coaches, and four goalie coaches. She committed to two different coaches before she stepped on the ice as a rookie. Her body has taken a beating. As the last of the players and closest friends that she started her Ohio State experience with graduated and moved on, Sauve, who graduated from Ohio State in May, began to consider that there might be other options for her.

The previous few seasons had left her emotionally, mentally, and physically drained. She was feeling a bit lost and disconnected. She normally takes time after the hockey season away from the ice to rejuvenate, but that had become difficult for her. So she reached out to the NCAA to be granted release and gather all the information she needed to start to consider transferring. The more she thought about the benefits, the more it felt like the right decision.

"There was a lot of reasons to go and obviously, there's a lot of reasons to stay to. It wasn't an easy decision. There are so many things that contributed to this decision," she said. "I had no idea what I was getting into. I kind of just took the gamble and hoped for the best."

NCAA Highlight: Kelly Pannek →

September 13, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

In December 2016, Kelly Pannek had never been invited to a senior camp with USA Hockey. Fifteen months later, she won an Olympic gold medal. Her coaches at the University of Minnesota weren't planning on her missing the 2017-18 collegiate season. It wasn't that they didn't think she was skilled enough–it was just practically unheard of to have a player go from outside the pool of prospective players to Olympic roster in such a short time.

The timeline is actually even more compact than that. Though Pannek was invited to her first senior level camps–the December 2016 development camp–she was not put on the roster for the series between the US and Canada that took place that month. Her first senior level tournament was at the 2017 IIHF Women's World Championships, where Team USA won gold.

It all happened so fast that Pannek said she didn't really ever have time to freak out or get too far in her own head about it, though she said her family had a bit of a gut-check for her when they saw the speed of play at the World Championships, worrying if Kelly was prepared for what she was getting into. She didn't tally any points that tournament, but was had nine shots on goal. Less than a year later, she was winning Olympic gold.

Hockey Humanitarian Award finalist spotlight: For Minnesota’s Peters, the extraordinary is just part of daily life →

March 22, 2018 by Nicole Hensch in Features/Profiles, Sports, Women's Hockey

Peters is one of five finalists for the 2017-18 Hockey Humanitarian Award, which is presented annually to college hockey’s top citizen for his/her service contributions to their team, school and community. The winner will be announced at the 2018 NCAA Men’s Frozen Four in St. Paul, Minn., in April.

The Path Forward for Elite Female Officials →

June 06, 2017 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

Krissy Morrison wants to officiate in the Olympics. In order to reach that goal, she has to become the best official she can be. She has to work a ton of games and she has to be used to the physicality and pace of high-level play. She has to reach the pinnacle of her own trade in the same way that the athletes do.

And she can't do that by officiating women's college hockey.

Sports Illustrated: Robb Stauber brings a goalie's point of view behind the bench for Team USA →

April 03, 2017 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Favorite Pieces, Women's Hockey

PLYMOUTH, Mich.—A catcher in baseball. A point guard in basketball. Soccer and hockey goalies. Each of them has their own set of challenges, but anyone that’s played any of those positions shares a mindset and frame of reference with all the others. They’re the 'big picture' people.

A striker has a singular focus on the net. A centerfielder sees their slice of the outfield. But the 'big picture' folks see the whole field of play. A goalie sees not just the person with the puck, but whether the lane is open, how the defenders are converging and where the other forwards are heading for passes. They watch the full width of the ice and synthesize all those pieces of information instantly. And they do it without thought. It becomes inherent to who they are and how they participate in the game.

NCAA: Sidney Peters Is a Backup No More →

March 16, 2017 by Nicole Hensch in Sports, Features/Profiles, Women's Hockey

Sidney Peters is living a lot of young goalies' dreams. She's the starting goalie for the University of Minnesota women's hockey team, and she's about to play in the Frozen Four with a chance at another national championship.

But it's been a long road to happiness and success. Beyond the regular struggles, both mental and physical, Peters has had difficulty adjusting to life in college -- not just because of the elevated level of play, but because she found herself in an unfamiliar role as a backup.