When Canada lost the gold medal game to the USA in the 2025 World Championship, one of its star offensive players, Natalie Spooner, was watching from the stands. Although Spooner at her best is one of the top goal scorers in women’s hockey, she was scratched for the crucial final game.

Coach Troy Ryan explained, “it's never personal. I think she understands that we're just trying to put the best lineup together.”

Spooner’s return from an ACL tear in last May’s PWHL playoffs has been an arc of forward progress and slight setbacks. The elements of her game are there, but rounding into power forward form has taken time.

“I think a lot of people, when they assess a player coming back from what she's come back from, they think when the injury is fixed, she's back,” said Ryan.

“And (yet) the timing, the explosiveness that her game needs, I think that just takes a little bit of time.

“If you look at the success that she’s had, a lot of times there's an initial shot that she screens, she retrieves a puck in the corner, takes it below the goal line, back to the net, that's her type of game. So when she's not at 100%, it's tough for her to execute the things that she's used to executing.”

After leading the PWHL in scoring, being named top forward and league MVP in the inaugural season, Spooner spent the summer rehabbing and getting her body back to working form. It was a grueling nine-month process which Spooner has said is still a work in progress.

“I knew I wasn't just going be able to jump right back into it and it's going to take time, so just taking the season to feel like I can get a bit of that power back,” she said this week after Sceptres’ practice as they prepare for their second playoff run.

“The timing and just getting back into the speed of the game and everything, when you sit out, it's all just going to take time.”

The concept wasn’t unfamiliar to Spooner, who also rehabbed and returned to elite hockey just four months after giving birth to her son Rory in December 2022.

Spooner also joined Team Canada at the 2023 IIHF Women’s World Championship a month after that, and found that the return came with challenges:

“Coming back from pregnancy I went through the exact same thing in those first six games I played with the PWHPA and my first world championships back. It’s like everything is just a little bit more effort, but I think it's those times when you just keep working through those and eventually it becomes just like riding a bike again.

“So just having that experience and knowing what it felt like before, and that it feels very similar now, knowing to stay positive and just keep working. I'm going to make mistakes; I'm going to probably fall, I'm going to do all those things, but it's just part of the process.”

Ryan said there were no secrets in the communication with Spooner, and why the coaches of both Team Canada and the Sceptres have used her in different spots and sometimes lessened her role as she climbs back.

“A little bit of her timing [needs to return]. Most of it is, she hasn't had a summer of training in three or four years. So she'll do her best this year to give us a chance of success. But I think a year of summer training to get the speed back is going to help her a lot.”

“Honestly, I think we chatted for about two hours, so obviously about a lot more than just the news. We talked a little bit about her career and what she's done, how she's probably going to approach a few things moving forward, talk to her family, everything.

“I think she understood it's not good news,” Ryan said about his discussion with Spooner during the World Championship.

“There's extra emotions that come with it, too. She had probably ten family members and friends that made the trip over to Czechia, and that can be disappointing knowing that you're not providing them the experience that they originally had. So there's just so many factors that come into it and she'll find a way to come out of it.

“It’s different than someone who's not playing well, like she's playing how we expect her to play. And so it's just a little bit of a process. For high performance people; it's hard for them to even envision themselves not playing to the best of their ability. So she just needs to take it in stride. And easier said than done.”

Spooner said her skating is the part of her game that hasn’t quite returned.

“I think it's just the power I have in my stride, my knee is not the same yet. I came back early for this type of surgery. So just getting the time for it to heal – an off-season for it to heal will be nice. And then being able to strengthen my body and have that same powerful stride that I had before.”

“The last two summers have been a bit of a grind and I mean, this will still be probably a bit of focus on the knee, but just being able to get back to doing the regular stuff to feel good and to feel strong on the ice, I think will feel really good coming into next season.”