According to Michigan born Olympic gold medalist Lisa Brown-Miller, the first hockey player from the state to represent Team USA, it's time for NCAA Division I hockey in Michigan.
According to Michigan born Olympic gold medalist Lisa Brown-Miller, the first hockey player from the state to represent Team USA, it's time for NCAA Division I hockey in Michigan.
The state of Michigan's continued absence of NCAA Division I women's hockey programs continues to draw attention, and not the good kind, from all corners of the hockey world. This week in a conversation with The Hockey News, one of Michigan's first women's hockey stars, and the first women from the state to represent Team USA, Lisa Brown-Miller, voiced her concern over the absence of programs for women in Michigan.
"I am so disappointed in the state of Michigan, honestly," said Brown-Miller.
Growing up, Brown-Miller played boys' hockey in Michigan until she was 13, when she joined a girls program. When it was time to graduate from high school however, there were no women's programs in her home state. Instead, she headed to Providence College to play NCAA hockey. That was in 1984. Nearly 40 years later, there remains no NCAA Division I women's hockey programs in Michigan.
It's astounding to me that you've got the likes of University of Michigan or Michigan State," Brown-Miller said. I mean, those are Big 10 schools. Why do we not have a woman's hockey program?"
The answer is more clear than it should be: the men in the state do not want women's hockey programs at their school. It's a long standing fact that men at schools like the University of Michigan have resisted their school's starting programs because they do not want to share ice time, facilities, or resources.
Years ago while former Team Canada head coach Shannon Miller was coaching at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, she had a conversation with then University of Michigan head coach Red Berenson. As the story goes, when Miller asked Berenson when Michigan would be getting a women's hockey team, he told her they never would, at least not while he was there. Considering Berenson's reign at Michigan lasted from the year Brown-Miller graduated from high school in 1984, until 2017, the same year USA's women's hockey team made headlines fighting for pay equity, Berenson's word stood true.
The lone NCAA Division I program to ever run for women's hockey in Michigan was at Wayne State University from 1999-2000 to 2010-2011. Brown-Miller remembers the program well, because they offered her the head coaching job when the program was launching. She turned it down at the time as she had just had her son.
Brown-Miller had also just completed her career, having played in the inaugural World Championship with Team USA in 1990, and remaining with the team through the 1998 Olympics where she helped USA capture gold.
With the PWHL setting an American women's hockey attendance record in Detroit on March 16, 2024 with 13,736 fans in attendance, the voices calling for more representation of elite women's hockey in Michigan continues to grow.
"Detroit would be a good expansion team," said Brown-Miller, claiming the city's geography as a border city, and forming a corridor from Montreal, to Ottawa and Toronto, through to Detroit and over to Minnesota.