GOLD STANDARD

When Lisa Brown-Miller looks at the Griffins Youth Foundation hockey program, she sees opportunity.

Having gone from the only girl on boys teams growing up to a member of the gold medal-winning U.S. women's hockey team at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, she is living proof that playing hockey can be a life-changing experience.

Working with young female hockey players as a coach in the Griffins Youth Foundation program, she is doing her best to share her experience and expertise in hopes of making a difference.

"Hockey challenges you to step outside of your comfort zone or to at least make that box a little bit bigger," she said. "I tell girls to accept the challenge and have fun with it. You might fall the first time, but you can know that you're going to get better every time you get on the ice.

"I fell down a lot when I started. Falling down is OK. Just get back up and go again."

Brown-Miller remembers learning to play with a boy who lived down the street from her home in West Bloomfield, Mich. They took turns wearing his cool hockey gear while they were playing in his living room.

"His mother must have been incredibly patient," she says, chuckling at the memory. "Looking back now, I think it was awesome because it fueled a genuine love for the sport. Every spare moment I had, I was playing, whether it was in the driveway or on the small lake behind our house."

She recalls taking an ice chipper and testing the ice on Flanders Lake when she wasn't playing at Lakeland Arena in Waterford Township. It was the same rink where Hockey Hall of Fame center Pat Lafontaine skated as a boy, roughly around the same time in the early 1970s.

Her parents initially had concerns about her getting hurt, but they were willing to ameliorate their worries to allow her to follow her passion. "I'm thankful they had the courage to take their daughter to the rink so that she could play hockey."

Brown-Miller played on all-boy teams until she was 13 or 14. "I was just another kid on the ice who wanted to play," she said. "To me, it wasn't a big deal. I proved I belonged by showing that I was able to do everything as well as them, if not better. I was so driven to play the sport."

When she became a teenager, she started playing girls hockey, playing for a Royal Oak team in a travel league out of Detroit. Between her junior and senior years in high school, she attended a girls hockey camp at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., near Boston. She discovered that the East Coast "was where it was at."

She was contacted by Harvard and Yale, but figured those schools were a little out of her league, academically speaking. She narrowed her college choices down to the University of New Hampshire and Providence College.

"I had never seen a college hockey game, so I had no clue whether or not I would get any playing time," she said. "The fact that I could continue to play hockey at the college level was all that really mattered at that point."

She chose Providence, where she excelled, earning All-Eastern College Athletic Conference accolades as a sophomore, junior and senior. She was named ECAC Player of the Year and American Women's Hockey Coaches Association Player of the Year following her senior campaign.

After graduating in 1988, she was hired by Princeton to be an assistant coach in 1989. "Through coaching, I learned a lot about the game," she said. "I think coaching made me a smarter player."

She became head coach of Princeton's women's hockey team in 1991, winning two Ivy League titles and earning ECAC Coach of the Year honors during her first year at the helm.

Meanwhile, she kept playing. A member of the United States Women's National Team since its inception, she is one of just three players to have appeared on six teams (1990, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1997). "While I was coaching at Princeton, it was like I had my own training facility," she said. "I could skate or jump into drills any time I wanted. For me, it was the perfect balance."

With the 1998 Olympics approaching, she found herself at a crossroads. She would be 31 years old at the time of the Winter Games, but it was now or never. Taking a leap of faith, she resigned from Princeton in 1996 to train full-time with the United States women's program.

"I knew the commitment to train for the Olympics would be much greater than it had been for a world championship team. It was going to require more time away from Princeton," she said.

The decision to leave a prestigious school for a possibility was not easy. There were no guarantees. She could get hurt or not make the final cut. "I would have regretted having let the opportunity pass," she said. "I could coach as long as I wanted, but I knew I didn't have much time left to play. It was a relief when I made the decision."

Canada, not the U.S., was the favorite to win gold in the 1998 Winter Games. "They won every tournament," she said. "It gets to the point where you start learning the words to the Canadian anthem. We felt it would be nice to hear our own at some point."

Brown-Miller said U.S. head coach Ben Smith did a masterful job of picking the right players and assembling the team, not based on ability – all the players were skilled – but on chemistry. "There was a connection that just happened," she said. "It was a special moment in time with special people who had one common goal, a gold medal."

Drawing equal parts of inspiration from the Miracle on Ice, Muhammad Ali, and mental training techniques from a sports psychologist, the team scored a come-from-behind victory over Canada in the round-robin portion of the tournament, then beat Canada 3-1 in the gold medal final.

Although portions of the Olympics are a blur – she kept a journal to record her thoughts, knowing there would be things she wouldn't remember – the medal ceremony will forever be etched in her mind.

"It was a really beautiful ceremony where the Japanese women walked out in their kimonos with the medals neatly in a basket," she said. "I remember nudging my roommate, Karyn Bye, and saying, 'Oh my gosh, this is real.' After all the visualization, it was surreal. I'm getting goosebumps talking about it. It was definitely a moment in time I'll never forget."

The team would later visit the White House. A team picture appeared on a Wheaties box – "My dad bought a whole case," she laughs – and the entire team was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Brown-Miller served as a color commentator for women's hockey at the 2002 Winter Olmpics in Salt Lake City, working alongside Kenny Albert and Joe Micheletti. "It was hard, but it was a lot of fun."

Her 16-year-old son, Alex, plays for the varsity hockey team at West Ottawa High School, but it was the interest of her daughter Morgan, 14, that brought her into the Griffins Youth Foundation.

She had coached the GRAHA girls program at the Patterson Ice Center for a couple of years but wasn't coaching anywhere when Morgan expressed an interest in playing hockey last year. "She wanted to play hockey and I just wanted to find a place for her to play."

Sensing an opportunity to give back to the game that she loves, Brown-Miller volunteered to be a co-coach with Wendy Foy this year. It's the first year that the girls program has had its own practices in between games. Previously, the program practiced in November and December but offered only games once the playing schedule began in January.

"I love being out on the ice with the girls," she said. "I wish we could spend even more time with them. Most of the girls just need to learn the basics of skating, stickhandling, passing and shooting.

"We're doing the best with what we have, but I wish we could get another day to spend more time with them individually. I know they are getting better. We have two exchange students who had never played, never been on skates, and the improvement they've shown over a short period of time just makes me smile."

Brown-Miller, a school quality assistant for National Heritage Academies, admits that she has had inquiries from various colleges about coaching jobs, and while she won't rule them out in the future, she is taking a pass for the time being.

"I know what it takes to coach at that level. It's evenings and weekends, and that's time with my kids. Right now, I want to be there for my own kids," she said. "Hockey has been a part of my life forever and it always will be. I'm not playing as much any more, but I can still give back to the game by coaching. Right now it's through the Griffins Youth Foundation and I'm really enjoying it."