Former Olympian Lisa Brown-Miller is thrilled with growth of women's hockey

Lisa Brown-Miller hockeyLisa Brown-Miller is shown with the gold medal she won with the U.S. women's hockey team in the 1998 Winter Games and the Wheaties box photo that followed.

HOLLAND -- Once people find out Lisa Brown-Miller was a gold medal-winning U.S. Olympian, and once they figure out she wasn't a gymnast or figure skater but instead a member of the 1998 U.S. women's hockey team, the most common question is sure to pop up.

"Where do you keep your gold medal?"

Alex, her 11-year-old son, watched the U.S. men's hockey team topple host Canada in Olympic play last weekend, and his attention turned to his mother's gold, too.

"He asked me to get the gold medal out because he had not seen it in a while," she said. "I pulled it out and we looked at it. I think he was getting the whole thing. There's the Olympics on TV. Mom was part of that. She won a gold medal."

Morgan, Brown-Miller's 9-year-old daughter, is figuring it out quickly, too.

"It's really a fun time to talk with them about it," said Brown-Miller, a Union Lake native who has lived with her children in Holland for the past 10 years.

"It brings a swarm of memories, to be honest. It took a number of years to realize what we had done, the power of it, the impact it had on women's hockey and girls' hockey."

LISA BROWN-MILLER
What: Member of the 1998 U.S. women's Olympic team, which won the gold medal in Nagano, Japan.

Residence: Holland

Hometown: Union Lake

High school: West Bloomfield, where she played hockey, basketball and softball.

College: Providence College (1988), where she was a three-time all-conference forward and Eastern College Athletic Conference player of the year in 1988 (92 career goals, 62 assists).

Experience: Played forward on six U.S. women's national teams (1990-97 for 30 games with 13 goals, 25 assists), was MVP of the 1992 national team and was named to four U.S. Women's Select Teams.

Coaching: Head coach at Princeton (1991-96), winning two Ivy League titles and earning Ivy League coach of the year honors (1991-92) with a career record of 60-45-5.

Today: Mother of two and school quality assistant in the corporate office of National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids.

Brown-Miller, 43, a school quality assistant for the Grand Rapids corporate office of National Heritage Academies, plans to gather the children in front of the television Thursday night to watch the U.S. women take on Canada for the gold medal in the Vancouver Olympics.

The former Providence College star and Princeton coach marvels that the women currently on the team remember watching her team, and that they were able to grow up dreaming of playing hockey in the Olympics.

"The current team, they were, like, 10 years old, and they watched us," she said. "I think about how we became role models in the athletic world for them. We didn't have that, at least women in hockey. We watched videos of Bobby Orr. It's empowering to see this team going for gold with the whole world watching."

In 1998, girls and women had played hockey for several years around the world. World championships started in 1990 and, in 1992, the International Olympic Committee approved women's hockey as an Olympic sport starting in '98.

Brown-Miller was 32, a veteran of six national teams, skating her final year in international competition.

"We were pioneers, but we didn't really know it," said Brown-Miller, who worked as a television color commentator at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.

"We were in Japan, a world away, wide-eyed, and everything was very, very different. People were telling us that, at home, we were the talk of the Olympics, but it was hard for us to believe. Nobody had cared about us before. Nobody had ever paid attention."

Brown-Miller, a diminutive (5-foot-1, 128 pounds) and speedy forward, helped her '98 team win six games without a loss or tie in the Olympic hockey tournament in Nagano. They outscored opponents 36-8 in the six games, and the run included two wins against rival Canada, including the 3-1 win in the final.

The performance created a significant buzz in U.S. sports about women's hockey for the first time. A team visit to the White House followed. A team picture appeared on a Wheaties box, too. In 2009, the entire team was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.

And a legacy endures.

A recent report on NHL.com said USA Hockey female registrations increased 50 percent by 2000 following the '98 games, and it continues to grow.

A total of 28,346 women were registered with USA Hockey in 1997-98, or before the Games. This season, before the Games, 59,506 are registered.

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"It was really a monumental moment in hockey for girls and women," said Brown-Miller, who helps the Grand Rapids Area Hockey Association when she can and answers her competitive needs by running road races.

"The impact was huge, and yet, we were just a group of 20 athletes with a group goal to win gold. All the other stuff was peripheral, a bonus, a ripple effect."

E-mail Greg Johnson at gjohnson@grpress.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/gjohnsongrp

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