MILAN — The women’s hockey competition at the Olympics has an influence you might not have expected.
Ohio State.
Perhaps you know the Buckeyes best as a football powerhouse. Yet with 12 current or former Buckeyes playing for five different countries at the Milan Cortina Olympics, “it’s a women’s ice hockey school, for sure,” said Joy Dunne, an Ohio State junior who scored for the U.S. on Thursday in its 5-1 win against Czechia.
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Since Nadine Muzerall became the school’s coach in 2016, the university has developed from a hockey also-ran into the NCAA champion in both 2022 and 2024. The team also appeared in the 2023 and 2025 title games. This season, it’s ranked second nationally.
Five players from this season’s team are now foes. Three current Buckeyes play for Sweden alone. Trash talk has been kept to a minimum, said Hilda Svensson, a Swedish forward who has become one of the NCAA’s top scorers in her freshman year at Ohio State.
“We have been pretty nice to each other so far,” she said, “but I think if we play against them, we’re going to be a little bit more mean, maybe. And especially maybe against Joy.”
The U.S. and Sweden aren’t scheduled to face each other in the preliminary round, meaning any meeting between the squads would come in the knockout round. That possibility was discussed immediately after the tournament’s draw was announced, Dunne said.
“Me and the Swedish girls really want to play each other because one’s a big chirper and I think it’d be fun,” Dunne told NBC News. “We battle a lot in practices, so it would just be nice to actually do it against each other in a game.”
Dunne and the U.S. faced off against a current Buckeye teammate Saturday, when the U.S. played its second preliminary game against Finland. Its roster includes Sanni Vanhanen, a freshman forward at Ohio State who was part of Finland’s 2022 bronze medal-winning team at the Beijing Olympics.
Muzerall’s allegiances might lean toward her native Canada, where she has coached within the national team’s developmental system. But holding ties to five teams makes rooting interests more difficult.
“You feel like a parent, an immense amount of pride,” Muzerall told reporters in Ohio this week. “So, it’s going to be tough to choose who I’m cheering for.”
Ohio State’s outsize presence at these Olympics should be seen as a credit to Muzerall’s coaching, Dunne said. But the school is just one example of collegiate hockey’s role as a de facto feeder system for national teams. Of the 230 total women’s hockey players taking part in these Games, 122 have NCAA experience, according to the governing body, including 40 active college players.
The Western Collegiate Hockey Association, a hockey-only conference that includes Ohio State, has the most representation among conferences, with 54 athletes.
Dunne isn’t even the first member of her family to represent both Ohio State and the U.S. Her older sister, Jincy, was part of the U.S. hockey team that won a silver medal at the 2022 Olympics.
This is the first Winter Olympics since the creation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and with 61 PWHL players heading to Italy to represent their countries, the league opted to take a three-week break from competition.
The NCAA season, however, did not pause.
“A part of me actually wants to fly over there and just go,” Muzerall said.
Instead, the Buckeyes will play four games between Thursday’s opening of the preliminary round and the Feb. 19 gold-medal game. Svensson said she was watching from afar as the Buckeyes try to compensate for their Olympic-sized roster hole.
“I’m so impressed how they did their last game against Duluth,” Svensson said. “I hope they can just keep going and win against Wisconsin this weekend.”
