Photo by Jake McNeill Brooklyn Mauch (white) jostles past a defender for position on the puck in the first period of Marshall’s 3-1 home win over Fairmont Thursday, January 12.

The Marshall girls hockey team has found its stride late in the season after a sluggish start. After dropping six of its first seven games, Marshall has rocketed to third place in the Big South standings with a 9-4-1 conference record. While wins are a team stat and come from improvements and adjustments from all the players and coaches, the emergence of eighth-grader Brooklyn Mauch as the Tigers’ primary scorer has been instrumental to the team’s late-season success.

While Brooklyn burst onto the varsity scene seemingly overnight, her immediate impact came from years of hard work. At 14 years old, she has been playing hockey for nine years, a passion that she developed from her sisters. 

Brooklyn’s mother, Lisa, was a track athlete, and her father, Scott, played basketball. It wasn’t until her older sister, Sydney, shifted from dance to hockey that she developed a bug for the sport.

Sydney was a standout at Marshall. She scored 35 goals in her senior year, bringing her to a career total of 103 goals and 164 points upon her graduation in 2019. The oldest Mauch daughter, Courtney, also played for the Tigers, scoring 60 points before her graduation in 2018.

Brooklyn grew up going to her sisters’ games. At home, she’d watch Courtney and Sydney practice shooting at the net in their garage, oftentimes asking if she could join in. Brooklyn credits her sisters with her inspiration for the sport and her drive to get better.

“I told [Brooklyn] that she’s got to practice hard and earn her spot,” Sydney said. “But if she works hard during practice, the coaches will notice.”

While both Sydney and Brooklyn are prolific scorers, that’s about where their similarities on the ice end. While Sydney is more of a pure scorer, Brooklyn is more of a playmaker with the ability to score, Marshall head coach Cassi Weiss said, adding that the pair’s differences in play style may change as Brooklyn gains more experience at the varsity level. 

“I always joke with their family because, off the ice, they’re polar opposites,” Weiss said. “[Sydney] tells you how it is, like, ‘I’m going to do this.’ She’s very direct, where Brooklyn is, ‘hey coach, is this OK if I do this?'”

Despite being a quiet playmaker, scoring isn’t something Brooklyn is afraid to do. Her 15 goals are a team high — and seven more than her next closest teammate. During the eight-game undefeated streak that turned around the Tigers’ season, Brooklyn scored 10 goals, including a hat trick in a 5-2 win over Fairmont that started a six-game goal streak for her. 

“I feel like [my teammates] did most of the work for me, but once I did it, they were all so happy for me. That made me really happy,” Brooklyn said. 

The Tigers’ lack of egos in the locker room is something that contributed to the Tigers’ growth throughout the season. While oftentimes it’s difficult for upperclassmen to put their own numbers aside for a newcomer, this Tiger team has had no problems working together for a purpose bigger than itself, Weiss said.

“The older girls have really embraced [Brooklyn] being our goal-scorer,” Weiss said. “That kind of gave her the confidence to take it and run. Lately, she’s almost gotten more assists than she has goals.” 

“You hear them in the locker room saying, ‘I was at work and all my work buddies were asking about you, and I was pumping you up about how you’re our best player…’ it’s kind of cool to see that dynamic of the older girls just embracing her talent and knowing that it’s OK that, even though they’re older, they’re maybe not better than her,” Weiss said.

Brooklyn specifically cited senior linemate Kalyn DeVlieger and freshman Abbey Foley, the team’s other two leading scorers, as particularly helpful in her transition to varsity.

In addition to Brooklyn’s ability to have such a large impact on the game at such a young age, another thing that sets her apart from most other hockey players is how she conditions herself in the offseason. Rather than going full-speed ahead with hockey training throughout the calendar year, Brooklyn spends her fall going full-speed ahead with the cross-country team. 

Distance running can help with endurance on the ice, but it’s not always easy to make the transition from cross-country to hockey after the fall season.

“Cross-country goes into the first week of hockey a little bit if we go to state, which normally we do, but I think my legs get so used to running that, when I come back to hockey, I have to get back into skating shape,” Brooklyn said. “It takes some time, but it depends on how hard I want to push myself.”

Both cross-country and hockey are team sports, but they differ in how the team aspect presents itself. Cross-country is a group of runners competing individually for a team score, while any individual’s play in hockey directly interacts with all their teammates. Still, Brooklyn emphasizes the team aspect in both.

“In cross-country… you’re running as an individual, but you’re doing it for your team. But outside of cross-country, we’re a family. I think that’s the same for hockey on the ice,” Brooklyn said. “We’re so connected, and we just have this bond with each other. After the first couple of weeks, we get bonded with each other and work together on and off the ice for everything.”

Sometimes, this sense of camaraderie means making sacrifices. For the 2AA Sectional Cross-Country Championships in October, Brooklyn was supposed to be the team’s third runner. Yet, after feeling unwell leading up to the meet, Brooklyn made the difficult decision to sit the meet out to give her team a better chance of winning.

“What happened today was a result of a total unselfish team effort,” Marshall girls cross country head coach Marie Sample said to The Independent’s Chris Drummond after the meet. “Our third runner [Brooklyn Mauch] was under the weather yesterday. She came up to me and said she was struggling and didn’t think she was able to compete as well as she needed to to help her team today. It was a very unselfish move because she really wanted to run.”

In the more positive times, these teammate bonds are strengthened through pre-meet pasta feeds and the bus rides to games and meets, where Brooklyn and her teammates would make Tik Toks and play games, like the farming game Hay Day, on their phones.

This team chemistry will become especially important as the Marshall girls hockey team begins its postseason run. 

While this year is Brooklyn’s first time competing in varsity playoffs, she’s no stranger to the pressure, being a part of the Marshall Amateur Hockey Association’s youth team’s postseason run last year, in which the team won regionals and went to the state championships for the first time, Brooklyn said.

“It was exhilarating,” Brooklyn said. “Once we got there, we just felt like we were so overwhelmed and excited.”

Every team has its rituals, and for MAHA, it was listening to Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold.”

“We danced to it every single day. We had actions planned out and we danced to it before every single game,” Brooklyn said.

Despite a cold start, the Marshall varsity team will be looking to continue its hot streak when they host Worthington in the Section 3A quarterfinals tonight at 7 p.m.

“I think my team might agree that we need to get to the Xcel Energy Center [for the state championship],” Brooklyn said. “We just all push so hard to get there, and I don’t think we’re going to give up until the Xcel. We’re going to get there.”