Natalie Spooner

Natalie Spooner is the Queen of Canadian ice hockey. The first woman to play for all three levels of the national team (U-18, U-22, and senior), Spooner was also the first woman to win both an Olympic gold medal and the Clarkson Cup in the same year. Her college team, the Ohio State Buckeyes, inducted her into their Hall of Fame in 2019. She is still competing at the highest levels today, and in 2022, she won yet another Olympic gold medal with the Canadian team. She also runs a high-performance hockey academy for girls and has over 87,000 followers on Instagram.

Spooner was born in Scarborough, Ontario, in October 1990. She established herself in the junior hockey leagues of Canada before committing to Ohio State (over 30 other colleges who were interested in her). By the time she left four seasons later, she had set many new program and school records, including most career goals and most goals in a single season. She was selected by the Toronto Furies in the 2012 CWHL Draft and immediately set a new rookie goalscoring record, netting 15 times in 24 games. When the CWHL folded in 2019, Spooner joined the non-profit PWHPA as an independent and then joined a newly-formed Toronto team.

At international level, Spooner has been a mainstay of the senior Canada team since 2011. Incredibly, the team has won a gold or silver Olympic or World Championship medal every year since except 2019 (when they won bronze at the Worlds). Their most recent World Championship gold came in 2021 and Olympic victory followed in early 2022, making Spooner an essential part of the best women’s hockey team in the world.