A Crimson Dream Come True

Just over midway through the first period in the Harvard women’s hockey team’s exhibition game against McGill on Saturday, Jillian Dempsey readied herself for a faceoff in the Martlets’ zone.

The puck dropped, and Dempsey pounced. The freshman zipped a pass behind her to co-captain Kathryn Farni, who found junior forward Kate Buesser streaking towards the net. Buesser went top shelf for the goal, and just like that, Dempsey had her first assist in a Crimson uniform.

There will be more assists for Dempsey, and goals too. But for the Winthrop, Mass. native, that one point in an easy 4-1 Harvard win represents the realization of a dream that’s been a long time coming.

“It was just surreal to hear ‘Dempsey’ on the loudspeaker,” she says. “Just the whole experience—putting on the jersey in the locker room...all the pregame rituals that the Harvard team does. Being out there on the ice was amazing.”

In a sense, the beginning of Dempsey’s Crimson career is an end—an end to a seven-year-long quest to play for Harvard. Since she saw the Crimson women take the ice for the first time as a sixth grader, Dempsey knew she wanted to play college hockey in Cambridge. From that point on, there was no debate about where she would end up—despite her high school coach’s attempt to initiate one—only the question of how she would get there.

“When she came in as an eighth grader,” says Kristen Harder, Dempsey’s coach at the Rivers School in Weston, Mass., “a lot of decisions she made in terms of what courses she was going to take, how hard she was going to work for her grades, all of those decisions were driven by a decision to go to Harvard. I couldn’t even get her to visit another campus.”

But while Harvard was always the final destination as she mapped out her future hockey plans, Dempsey certainly did not take a well-traveled path in getting there.

For a young skater from Massachusetts striving to play for a perennial national contender like the Crimson, one of the myriad New England prep schools with established girls’ hockey programs might have provided an ideal fit. But a boys’ coach from Rivers who was scouting Dempsey’s brother informed her that the school was starting a girls’ varsity team.

While Dempsey anticipated the challenges of playing for a brand new program, she was attracted to Rivers’ strong academic environment and felt comfortable at the school after interviewing.

“It was a great school, and it looked like something I would really like to attend,” Dempsey says. “I was going pretty much because of the school. I knew the hockey team was brand new.”

In Dempsey’s first season, when she was an eighth grader on the varsity team, the Rivers squad struggled mightily, consistently falling in blowouts to more experienced teams.

“That first year, we weren’t terribly competitive because all of our best players were eighth and ninth graders,” Harder says.

But even in that trying season, signs of the determination and intensity that would define Dempsey’s playing style and inspire the rest of her teammates began to emerge.

“One game we had held a tough opponent to only seven goals with a minute left to go,” Harder recalls. “Jill got a breakaway and scored...Our celebration was as if we had tied it up to put it into overtime.”

Over the next few years, Rivers began to win games, and Dempsey began to establish herself as the team’s leader and one of the nation’s top prep school prospects.

“When she was 13 and first started here,” Harder says, “most people could count maybe 20 13-year-olds who were clearly better than she was—not my words. [But] I watched her drive and knew that anyone better than her as an eighth grader would have to seriously challenge themselves to be better as a senior.”

Dempsey’s progress not only caught the attention of her coach, but Team USA evaluators as well. After attending several national team development camps, Dempsey was selected to the United States U-18 squad, which took gold at the 2009 World Championships in Germany.

“Singing the national anthem on the blue line,” Dempsey recalls. “It was a dream.”

Dempsey’s ultimate goal is to make the U.S. Olympic team, but for now she’s living another, older dream: playing for Harvard.

While the Crimson is by no means rebuilding and expects to remain among the nation’s top squads this season, some aspects of Dempsey’s situation at Harvard reflect her early days at Rivers. Since the Crimson has graduated its top three scorers (Sarah Vaillancourt ’08-’09, Jenny Brine ’09, and Sarah Wilson ’09), it will be looking to its freshmen—especially Dempsey—to make an immediate impact.

“[The freshmen] are going to get opportunities right off the bat that other kids have not had in the past because of numbers or elite players being in the program,” Crimson coach Katey Stone says.

Stone says that for Dempsey, the key is “for her to just kind of get herself comfortable and realize, ‘Hey, I can do this.’”

Dempsey’s early showing against McGill, and the confidence of her coach and teammates, seem to indicate that she’ll be up to the task. But while she’s poised to contribute right away, her success at Harvard will still be determined by her ever-present desire to improve.

“She’s always looking to get better,” Crimson co-captain Cori Bassett says. “We make fun of her a little bit for asking so many questions, but it’s just because she’s constantly looking for ways to get better and to challenge herself.”

It’s an approach that Dempsey has employed from Day 1, and because of it, she’s living the dream—or at least one of them. But there are others, and precedent indicates that whatever Jillian Dempsey dreams up seems to come true.

“She is a very talented player, but because of how hard she works, neither Harvard nor anyone else has seen the best that she is going to be,” Harder says. “She’s starting off at a very high level, but I would not count this player out for anything in the world. She can do whatever she wants.”

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.