Sunday 26 April 2020

Captaining The Squad

If you're a follower of this blog, you know that I always love working the major four-day tournament here in Winnipeg known as the Female World Sport School Challenge. Seeing teams from across Canada come to the city and play in one of the toughest tournament in Canada is always fun, and we're normally blessed with rather amazing hockey from these future university women's hockey stars. What also makes this tournament stand out is there's usually a jersey quirk that we see from one of the teams. This one goes back to 2018, but check out the goalie's jersey above to see if you can catch the quirks.

That's Adrianna Brehm of the Minnesota Revolution hockey program in 2018. See if you can find the jersey quirks that caught my attention then that I apparently never mentioned on this blog.

Let's start with the obvious in that Brehm was wearing the captain's "C" on her jersey. Goaltenders have been named as captains before - Roberto Luongo most recently with the Canucks - but they rarely wear the letter on their jerseys. Apparently, the Revolution threw the rules to the wayside and decided to have their senior goaltender stand in as the captain!

Let's move to the next jersey quirk because I'm pretty sure this one was done out of respect, but it's still odd. The Minnesota Revolution, as you probably can tell, call Minnesota home. Minnesota is one of fifty US states, yet Brehm's jersey has a Canadian flag on the shoulder! This is the first time I've seen a team wear the flag of another country on their shoulder, and perhaps it was some league thing that required them to wear the flags of the two countries where teams played. Either way, it was weird to see a US-based team wearing the flag of another country.

The third quirk? Adrianne Brehm has never worn #29 in her career as far as I can tell for any team. She was listed in the 2018 FWSSC program as #32 for the Revolution, and she currently wears #32 for the NCAA Division-III Nazareth Golden Flyers. So how does she end up wearing #29? I assume there may have been some sort of jersey problem that she had at some point, forcing her to don the jersey of former Minnesota Revolution netminder Kennedy Blair who DID wear #29 and continues to wear #29 for the Mercyhurst Lakers! The nameplates, as far as I recall, were switched, but the numbers appear to be screened onto the jerseys, so Brehm wore #29 for at least one game at the tournament!

What makes Brehm being the captain of Revolution for the 2017-18 season is that when I was looking into her work with Nazareth College, the information to the left was listed in the opening line of her bio! It seems that Brehm may be the first netminder in all my hockey travels to hold captaincies at two different programs! Check out the image below!

Without a doubt, Adrianna Brehm deserves some mention here on Hockey Blog In Canada because she may eventually ascend to wearing the "C" one day for Nazareth. As it stands, she's the only goalie that I know of that has currently worn letters at the U19 level with the Revolution and now in the NCAA with Division-III Nazareth College. That alone separates her from her peers, and I think it's completely awesome!

I know this won't affect her, but I am now a fan of Adrianna Brehm, and I really hope she gets the captain's "C" at some point in her career with the Nazareth Golden Flyers!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!

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