Skating ahead

WASILLA — When Jordan Elkins skates onto the ice as a member of the Wasilla High School varsity ice hockey squad, Elkins stands out.

And it’s not just because she’s a girl playing on a team made up predominately by boys. To Elkins, her teammates and her coaches, she is just another hockey player

The difference is, Elkins is a standout player how now has the opportunity to skate at the Division I level.

On Monday — with her family, friends, teammates and coaches by her side — Elkins signed a National Letter of Intent to join the Quinnipiac women’s hockey team.

Elkins will attend the university based in Hamden, Conn., in the fall.

A four-year member of the Wasilla varsity squad and the captain of the Anchorage North Stars U-19 girls’ competitive team, Elkins — a 5-foot-5 blueliner — has seemed destined for the Division I level.

“We’ve always known it’ll only be a matter of time before she gets picked up by some big DI school,” Adam Friese, a teammate of Elkins’ for the past four seasons, said on Monday.

Seeing Elkins find a home at the top level of women’s college hockey came as no surprise to her team and coaches.

“It’s exciting,” Wasilla head coach Bill Sturdevant said. “I think everyone has been expecting this for Jordan.”

And on Monday, that expectation became a reality.

“It’s real overwhelming,” Elkins said after friends and members of her family waited in a line to hug the newest member of the Quinnipiac Bobcats. “It’s a dream come true, but kind of hard to grasp at the same time.”

Following in the path of her mother and older brother James, who also played hockey at WHS, Elkins’ hockey career started as a 5-year-old.

And ever since, Elkins has been hooked.

“There’s just something inside of me,” Elkins said. “I can’t get enough of it.”

By the age of 11 of 12, Elkins knew she wanted to play hockey as long as she possibly could.

“It’s really a passion,” she said. “I decided I’d let it take me as far as I could.”

When Elkins was 14, she was selected to attend a national hockey camp in Rochester, N.Y. She was one of the top 120 players from across the country in her age group invited to the camp.

“As soon as I made that (camp), I knew this is definitely something I could do,” Elkins said.

Elkins skated in both the Matanuska Amateur Hockey Association and the Big Lake Amateur Hockey Association, normally on boys’ teams, until she was asked to join the Team Alaska girls’ squad when she was 14.

And since she has skated for the Warriors and the North Stars. Elkins said both have played a big role in her development into a Division I hockey player.

On the North Stars squad, she gets great exposure — the team attends three of four tournaments Outside each year — and her time on the boys’ squad has simply made her a better hockey player, Elkins said.

Elkins learned how to adjust to the boys game, and now her head coach doesn’t think of her as a girl on a boys team.

“I don’t think of her has having any more limitations than any of the boys have,” Sturdevant said. “She’s a hockey

player.”

And that’s the way Elkins sees it herself.

“Ever since I was really little, I had to compete with the guys,” Elkins said. “It wasn’t that you’re a girl out there playing with the boys’, it’s you’re a hockey player.”

Elkins has been checked hard into the boards, slashed and knocked to the ice.

“I’ve been knocked out three times,” she said. “You just have to keep going.”

A key she said, is her Wasilla teammates not thinking of her as just a girl on the squad.

“They don’t take it easy on me,” Elkins said. “It’s not going to help to take it easy on me.”

Elkins’ contributions to the team were recognized at the beginning of the season when Sturdevant and her teammates named her an assistant captain.

“Everyone respects her,” Friese said. “She’s definitely earned her place.”

When Elkins takes the ice for Quinnipiac next season, she’ll be one of three Mat-Su Valley athletes skating for Division I hockey teams. A pair of former Palmer High School standouts — Brie Baskin and Katy Applin — are also on Division I hockey teams.

Baskin is a junior forward at Boston College, while Applin is a sophomore blueliner at Northeastern.

Another Palmer alum, Kerry Weiland, starred at the University of Wisconsin and later played for the U.S. National Team.

Contact Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.