Wanna Bet? Junior Editor Amanda spoke recently with Shannon Miller, the new University of Minnesota-Duluth women’s hockey coach. Shannon came to UMD from Canada, where she coached the women’s hockey team to a silver medal in the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

Taking her hockey team to the Olympic level did not come as a total surprise to Shannon. She says, "When I was ten years old, I made a collage with pictures of female athletes from many different sports. I told my parents that I was going to the Olympics when I grew up."

Shannon’s parents always encouraged their daughter to participate in sports. As a youngster she played basketball and volleyball and participated in track and field. She liked them all. But when she turned twelve, her parents enrolled her in a girls hockey team and she says, "I just loved it."

Since there was no girls hockey team at Melfort Comprehensive Collegiate High School—Melfort is a town of 5000 people in central Saskatchewan—Shannon stuck to the sports she had played as a child. At the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, she made the track and volleyball teams. One day she was walking down the hall and spotted a poster announcing tryouts for the university women’s hockey team. Shannon admits, "I skipped volleyball practice to go to hockey tryouts." Once she made the hockey team, she told her track and volleyball coaches that she was quitting their teams. She speaks of her love of hockey as "an internal fire, a passion for the game." She adds, "Who knows where it comes from?"

Prior to being selected to coach the Olympic team, Shannon had coached Team Canada for six years, four of those as head coach. And all six of those years as a volunteer! "In Canada," she says, "women’s hockey coaches are not paid." But when she was named head coach of the Olympic team, she knew she had a big job ahead of her.

In order to support herself, Shannon worked as a police officer in Calgary. "Obviously," she says, "laws are important to me. And underage gambling is against the law, so I certainly would not approve of it. Plus," she adds, "I would hope that young people could find a million other things to do rather than gamble."

Shannon saw a poster in the weight room at UMD stating that college sports betting is wrong. She says, "College sports are so much bigger here than in Canada. In Canada, there is not much money for college sports teams and not a lot of people go to watch the events."

But Shannon’s parents were always there to watch and cheer her on. Shannon always remembers the words her father told her as a child—words that no doubt made her who she is today. He said, "When it comes to your ability to compete at sports, you can do anything the boys do."