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NYR's Sojung Shin: Blazing Trails
Sojung Shin: Blazing Trails
Throughout her career, after Sojung attained one goal she would pursue another and continued to blaze a trail for women's hockey in Korea. After high school, she yearned to play college hockey in North America (there were no college teams for women in Korea).
This is a fantastic article. We all know that being a pioneer/trail blazer in anything is hard, but Shin's journey was even harder than most.
According to IIHF statistics, Canada has 87,500 registered female hockey players; United States has 73,076; Finland has 5,950; Sweden has 5,014; Japan has 2,586; and Korea has 259!
She started playing at age 7 as a forward and switched to become a goalie, making her the first female goalie in Korea. That was the first of many firsts this incredible woman would have.
The women's national hockey team is the only women's hockey team in the entire country, so she started playing for them at age 12 (!). The national team only plays a few games each year, so she honed her skills on boys teams; however, she was only permitted to practice with them, not play in games.. She went to every single tournament and championship which the national team was part of, but she knew if she truly wanted to develop further, she'd need to play regularly, so she set her sights on North America, even though she barely spoke English.
She personally emailed NCAA and CIS schools, and was accepted to a school in Nova Scotia, becoming the first Korean born female hockey player to participate in the CIS program or to play in North America. Her English skills were limited, but she went, and four years later, after very hard work, she graduated with a degree and she had developed her hockey skills.
Prior to this season, she learned that Korea is hosting the 2018 Olympics, giving them an automatic spot in the Olympic hockey program (their hockey team has never managed to qualify for the Olympics before, but host nations always get to participate in each sporting event). She wanted to be prepared so she contacted Dani Rylan of the NWHL, who put her in touch with Chad Wiseman, the New York Riveters coach, and she became the first Korean born female hockey player in a professional league.
You should really read the entire article. She's an amazing woman!




It is inspiring to read stories like this. Her journey must have seemed impossible at times, but here she is. It will be interesting to see if other women from Korea and other countries follow a similar path. Kudos to St Francis Xavier for taking a chance on her as well. That was a huge step in allowing her to move forward. So it is a feel good story all around.
I'm extremely excited to see her in the upcoming Olympics. I was bummed that she was injured for the majority of the NW season, but from what I saw she's is an amazing talent. Also major props for everything she's done to pursue her hockey dreams.
I'm so happy that these brave ladies (I'm including all of the Japanese players, as well as Gavrilova) love hockey so much that they're willing to jump into the unknown in order to learn new skills which they can bring back to their national team. As Team Japan has demonstrated over the past few years, such efforts are absolutely worth it! The combination of hiring North American coaches, and sending players to join North American hockey programs will be the factor that elevates the hockey skills in those nations. In ten years, I'm hoping we won't see those crazy blow-out games whenever one of these teams plays Canada or the US.
Additionally--somebody mentioned this somewhere--it's really neat getting to know these players in the North American programs, and then seeing them play for their national team. Up to this point, I haven't really known any players on other teams, but I'm slowly getting to know players on non-Canada/USA teams.