The 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics don’t even have host cities or venues yet. But many of the players in the women’s gold-medal hockey finals in those Games will be on display in a three-game U-18 series beginning today at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, New York. The other games are Thursday and Saturday between the two nations that have almost exclusively dominated women’s ice hockey.
Morgan Jackson of Courtenay, who plays for Shawnigan Lake School, is among eight gold medallists from the 2023 IIHF U-18 world championship Canadian team selected for the series. The others are Mackenzie Alexander, Hannah Clark, Gracie Graham, Caitlin Kraemer, Avery Pickering, Abby Stonehouse and Emma Venusio.
“We have a very fast and skilled group,” sa国际传媒 head coach Tara Watchorn said in a statement.
“We can play with creativity, we have firepower from the back end and it will be a fun team to watch. You can see the difference in this group every day, and it’s important we continue with that growth mindset.”
Jackson grew up playing hockey, lacrosse and soccer in the Comox Valley. She played for the Vancouver Island Seals of the sa国际传媒 Elite Hockey League before coming to Shawnigan Lake School to play in the Canadian Sport School Hockey League. The five-foot-eight, 136-pound forward is going into Grade 12 and committed to NCAA Div. 1 Northeastern University in Boston for the fall of 2024, where she plans on studying health and sciences.
“I can’t live without this game and the Olympics are my ultimate dream,” Jackson told the sa国际传媒.
She has a path to follow after her role model and fellow-Islander Micah Zandee-Hart of Saanichton became, at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, the first player from sa国际传媒 to win an Olympic gold medal in women’s hockey.
Shawnigan Lake School coach Carly Haggard, who played NCAA Div. 1 at Dartmouth, told the sa国际传媒 she believes Jackson has all the tools to achieve her dreams: “Morgan is so talented and her hockey IQ is one of the highest I have seen at her age. She is three times better than I was at her age. She has a very bright future.”
Jackson, known as a two-way player, scored a shorthanded goal Monday in sa国际传媒’s 10-1 victory over the Finnish U-18 team that concluded the selection and training camp in St. Catharines, Ont., before the team departed to Lake Placid.
