Angela Ruggiero has gone from competing for Olympic gold and NCAA titles as a player, to serving as an analyst and broadcaster for Milan 2026 and the NCAA women's hockey Frozen Four. On or off the ice, she continues to grow the game.
Angela Ruggiero knows big moments. She's one of the most decorated hockey players in history with 14 Olympic and World Championship medals, including gold at both events. She was a two-time Olympic Best Defender, and four-time World Championship Best Defender. Ruggiero also calls herself a member of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame, IIHF Hall of Fame, and the Hockey Hall of Fame.
As a player, she was part of every major event from the NCAA, to the international stage.
This year, Ruggiero made that trip again, but this time did it not from on the ice, but off as a broadcaster and analyst. Ruggiero's year included serving as a commentator and women's hockey analyst for NBC for the 2026 Milan Olympics, and covering the NCAA Frozen Four with ESPN.
It gave Ruggiero, who is used to being a game changer on the ice, and opportunity to see how far the game has come on the ice since she left the game as a player in 2011.
"It was fun covering the games," Ruggiero said of the Olympics. "The play just gets better and better, every year for women's hockey and hockey in general just keeps getting faster."
Ruggiero who captained Harvard at the NCAA level, won Olympic gold as a member of Team USA at the inaugural 1998 Olympic women's hockey tournament. She has seen the growth of women's hockey at the Olympics since the beginning, including the chance to witness a special Team USA at the 2026 games that came home with gold.
"You had the Americans, clearly coming in were dominant based on the pre-Olympic tour stuff that they did, the Rivalry Series and the World, but Canada just shows up," Ruggiero said. "You've got a young American team and a more veteran, senior team from Canada. So the gold medal game delivered. And the bronze medal, by the way, with Alina Muller's overtime goal, I think overall just the level of play was elevated."
Since leaving the game as a player, Ruggiero has moved to building and broadcasting, previously founding Sports Innovation Lab, recently working with the NHL's New York Rangers, and serving on the International Olympic Committee, along with playing a paramount role in bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028. Someday, she may find herself involved in the PWHL.
She's also seen how much the coverage for women's sports, including hockey, has grown.
"These Olympics had more eyeballs than ever watching, and it comes at a time when, in general, women's sports is on the rise," said Ruggiero.
Beyond her own gold medal experience in 1998, Ruggiero also felt that 2026 was the second most important Olympics ever for women's hockey players due to the magnified attention the sport has gained through the PWHL, and the opportunity for it to continue to explode across North America and the globe.
"This was the most important women's hockey tournament since the Olympics in 1998," she said. "In '98, we opened up the world's eyes to the fact that women played hockey. We exposed the sport, grew the sport, and it had that exponential growth afterwards. But given the time frame of everything happening in women's sports today, the elevation of the sport, the PWHL, just the general sentiment on the game, this tournament itself delivered"
Angela Ruggiero representing Team USA - Photo @ IMAGN IMAGESRuggiero Frozen In Time
When Angela Ruggiero played, college hockey players stopped their studies to go to the Olympics. Ruggiero played at Harvard in 1998-99 and 1999-2000, but missed the following two seasons of collegiate hockey to focus solely on centralizing with USA's national program ahead of the 2002 Olympics. Following 2022, she returned to Harvard and played her final two seasons collegiately.
This was the first ever Olympics for women's hockey players where there was no centralization for North American teams, and their collegiate stars simply kept playing NCAA hockey until a week before the Olympics, and rejoined their teams immediately after.
It's a group that included American gold medalists Laila Edwards, Caroline Harvey, Ava McNaughton, and Kirsten Simms who all returned from Milan to rejoin the University of Wisconsin where weeks later they won an NCAA national championship at the Frozen Four.
Ruggiero watched and worked at both events covering the competition. Ruggiero believes Wisconsin benefited from gaining a group of Olympic gold medalists who returned full of confidence, and knowing they could conquer the best in the world, not just the best in the NCAA.
"I think it changed the game because you got the benefit at the Wisconsins of the world that inherited a lot of these players back," Ruggiero said. "Having come off of that kind of training and calibre of play, to bring it back to the NCAA, that was on full display for those Frozen Four schools."
It wasn't just Wisconsin, and it wasn't just Americans. The NCAA Frozen four had Olympians from Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, and Czechia in competition. The opportunity to return from such a significant event to compete in another championship calibre tournament is something Ruggiero did not have during her career.
"I remember coming back after playing in the Olympics and you're just, you're firing on all cylinders and then there's literally nowhere to go. So the fact that those players get to come back, contribute to their programs at their schools, get the visibility benefit from playing in the Olympics, that boost on TV, and elevate the women's game, it is a very different dimension that we haven't seen before in women's hockey."
Next up, Ruggiero is excited to see many of those Olympians and NCAA stars enter the PWHL Draft and take another step in their careers. While it's unclear where their paths will cross again, Anglea Ruggiero's career has taken her from being the star on the ice, to discussing and analyzing those stars.
Both on and off the ice, Ruggiero remains a central figure in elevating women's hockey.