Kendall Coyne Schofield’s Northeastern legacy still drives her Olympic standard at the Milan Cortina Games

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Kendall Coyne Schofield didn’t leave the 2022 Olympics looking for closure.

She left thinking about what was missing and what it would take to come back with no room for excuses.

“Coming up short in 2022 and the overall experience in 2022 was challenging in itself,” she said, reflecting on the silver medal the U.S. won in women’s ice hockey at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. “I think leaving ’22 so unsatisfied in so many ways, I was inspired to get back here.

“I think I was also inspired to want to start a family and know that that wasn’t going to get in the way of my dream to get back to the Olympic Games. It was only going to support it and enhance it in the most magnificent way possible.”

Team USA finished the preliminary round undefeated and will face Italy in the quarterfinals Friday, with the same goal Coyne Schofield has had since 2022: gold.

The stakes are Olympic, but the habits come from her NCAA hockey roots.

Northeastern built the player, then sharpened the leader

For Coyne Schofield, a four-time Olympian, the path back to the gold-medal game still runs through the place that shaped her first.

“I carry so much with me from Northeastern. Northeastern catapulted me into the life that I’m living today,” she said. “Whether it’s the co-op program I did, getting my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree, playing in the Hockey East Conference. I loved so much. I loved my classes, my professors, the city of Boston. I really don’t have a bad thing to say about my experience.

“If I could go back, I would.”

Her Northeastern résumé is loaded. Coyne Schofield set school career records of 141 goals and 249 points in 133 games. As a senior captain, she put up a stat that still sets the bar in Boston: a school-record 84 points.

That was also the year Northeastern went 28-9-1 and reached the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history, at a time when only eight teams were invited. A smaller bracket meant less margin, and Coyne Schofield played like she knew it.

That’s the on-ice story. The college story is everything around it.

She earned two degrees and graduated summa cum laude. She also took reps that would matter later, including sideline broadcasting for men’s hockey games and a “dream co-op” in media relations with the Chicago Blackhawks. That eventually led to a surprise opportunity in Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” where she voiced a hockey announcer for a movie built around a hockey-playing main character.

“It was so special and such an honor,” she said. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself that it really happened.”

Then there’s the detail that explains why her leadership still feels so steady in Olympic moments.

Before her sophomore season, Coyne Schofield called coach Dave Flint and told him the team culture needed to change. Flint has said that conversation pushed him to invest differently in players and relationships, not only results.

“I would get so caught up a lot of times in wins and losses, and she helped me see that it’s important to invest in your players and care about them and get to know them,” Flint said in a 2023 Northeastern feature story honoring her induction into the school’s hall of fame. “The standard she set for herself, she wanted those standards for the team, and she wanted players to buy into that.”

That’s the version of Coyne Schofield that’s continued to elevate hockey across the globe. She didn’t just raise her own standard. She wanted the room to match it.

“She helped elevate the program to another level,” Flint said in the Northeastern story.

The NCAA rhythm still shows up in how she chases gold

Coyne Schofield talks about the Olympics like a daily job, not a four-year event.

“I think we’re entirely process-driven,” she said. “Yes, the outcome is a gold medal, but you don’t get there without a process. And the process is every day.”

She said that rhythm didn’t always exist after college for women’s players. Games could be scarce. International tournaments could feel like a sprint where you rely on strengths because there’s less time to experiment and work through weaknesses.

That’s why she frames the PWHL as infrastructure, not a personal victory lap.

“For me, the PWHL was always about building it,” she said. “It was never about playing in it for me.”

As for the NCAA pipeline, which included 122 of the 230 Olympic women’s hockey players in Milan Cortina, Coyne Schofield said the value is obvious. 

“You have an opportunity to make mistakes, learn and grow and get outside your comfort zone versus when there was a short window in an international tournament, you really don’t,” she said.

The PWHL, with eight teams playing a 30-game regular season in 2025-26, offers professional hockey players in North America a similar competitive consistency. 

For Coyne Schofield, the timing of the league’s creation is still surreal. She gave birth to her son, Drew, on July 1, 2023. The collective bargaining agreement she helped negotiate was ratified July 2. 

“The timing, it was crazy. It was like both babies were born on the same day,” she said. “My goal was to help be a part of creating a sustainable and viable women’s professional league that a player can turn to the person next to them and say, ‘This is my job. I’m a pro athlete, and I get treated as one. I’m compensated as one.'”

Wisconsin defender Caroline Harvey, one of the current NCAA and Team USA stars, emphasized Coyne Schofield’s impact on the game’s younger generation. 

“She’s phenomenal,” Harvey said. “She had a baby, and she hasn’t lost a step. She’s maybe even better than when she had left, and she just continues to grow the game. You think about what she did for the PWHL. On and off the ice, she’s an amazing teammate. It’s been such an honor to be her teammate. She’s someone you can always rely on and look to.”

Coyne Schofield’s “every day” mindset still sounds like college hockey: Build the habits, then trust them when the stakes spike.

“At the end of the day, that’s the goal and the task at hand, and that’s the focal point,” she said.

“Anything less than a gold medal is a failure.”