Although Emma Dahlgren is known in Carleton circles as a member of the women’s hockey team, her hockey skills are not limited to the ice.
The second-year Ravens forward made the Canadian inline hockey team, which returned home with a silver medal after the World Inline Hockey Championships in Toulouse, France from June 30-July 6.
Dahlgren said the entire experience was amazing, and her six-game stint saw her score a pair of goals.
“I had a lot of fun doing it. It was my first time representing Team Canada,” she said.
Dahlgren and her Canadian teammates went undefeated throughout group play, outscoring their opponents scattered around the world in Latvia, Australia, and Namibia by a 24-3 margin in three round-robin games.
After posting a 10-0 shutout victory over Italy in the quarter-final match and a 4-1 win against New Zealand in the semifinal, the undefeated Canadian side saw their gold medal dreams come up a fraction short thanks to a heartbreaking 3-2 overtime loss to the U.S. in the championship game.
When it comes to her introduction to the sport, Dahlgren said inline hockey is something she’s been playing since the age of 12.
“I played for a couple years, then I took a few years off to focus on ice hockey,” she said. “I started to play inline again when I was 18, and played in a men’s league with my brothers.”
Despite her recent silver medal in France, Dahlgren admitted the past year has not gone without its fair share of adversity.
After committing to Carleton last year, Dahlgren said she suffered a devastating injury early on with the team.
“During one of the first practices with the Carleton team, a teammate fell on top of me and my leg snapped over the boot of my skate, resulting in my fibula breaking in two places,” she said. “I was taken to the hospital, casted up, and then operated on within a day of breaking it.”
Due to two additional surgeries from injury complications, the Ravens rookie wound up playing just two games in total over the course of her first Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) season.
Dahlgren said she was able to skate on the ice by the end of March, which gave her some time to prepare herself for the upcoming inline national team tryouts in April.
With a successful adventure in France on rollerblades now behind her, Dahlgren said her focus has shifted back to the ice for the upcoming Ravens season.
“I can’t wait for the season to get started. We didn’t do as well as we wanted to or were expecting to do last season,” she said. “Being a young team with about 10 rookies, we hadn’t competed at the CIS level and didn’t know what it took to compete at that level.”
New Ravens head coach Pierre Alain also expressed his excitement for what a healthy Dahlgren and a more experienced team have to offer this year.
Alain said he expects she will be one of his squad’s top players, while Dahlgren said she hopes to take on a leadership role with the team in the upcoming season in order to help the school improve upon its historically poor 1-15-4 record in the 2013-14 campaign.
“I think now that we all have seen what it takes to compete at this level we will be a much stronger team this upcoming season,” she said.
