Three youth hockey teammates reunite as Minnesota Frost draftees

No one cheered louder or hugged harder when the Frost picked Mercyhurst’s Vanessa Upson in the PWHL entry draft than the team’s first-round pick from earlier Tuesday night, Quinnipiac defender Kendall Cooper.

They played youth hockey together for a stacked Stoney Creek Sabres junior team from Ontario whose most threatening opponent might have been a pandemic. They went their separate ways to play college hockey — some 500 miles apart, from Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean — before the Frost and the PWHL draft brought them back together.

They were reunited and became a professional trio when the Frost took their former Stoney Creek teammate Brooke Becker, a Providence defender, in the sixth and final round, 46th overall. They all had played youth hockey in Hamilton, Ontario, about an hour from Toronto.

In St. Paul for a Friday introduction, Cooper was asked just how high she leapt when pal Upson’s name was called in the fifth round by the two-time Walter Cup champion Frost.

“It felt like a [personal record], honestly,” Cooper said. “I was so excited. I didn’t want to take the spotlight away from her. Hopefully, I didn’t. We were talking about it afterward; it was so cool.”

The Frost’s draft-night decisions included connections beyond that, too. They took two former St. Lawrence teammates, too: Abby Hustler in the second round and Anna Segedi in the third.

Hustler and Segedi hung out together before the draft in Ottawa.

“We’re just super supportive of each other,” said Segedi, who has played for China’s national team. “We’ve been friends since she came to St. Lawrence. We played together for the last couple years. She’s really a special player. I really am looking forward to continuing working with her. Maybe we can live together or something like that.”

Both St. Lawrence players also played there with current Frost defender Mae Batherson, who signed a new two-year contract after her 2024 pro rookie season.

“Me and Mae are close buddies,” Hustler said. “I always send her a text here and there. She said only good things about Minnesota. She made a little joke about me possibly joining the Frost, and I didn’t think too much about it. It’s super amazing.”

The Frost’s first three draft selections came from the East Coast Athletic Conference. The team didn’t draft a Minnesotan for the second consecutive season.

Five University of Minnesota Duluth players were drafted, and three each from St. Cloud State and the Gophers.

“It’s not something that happened intentionally,” Frost General Manager Melissa Caruso said. “Obviously, there’s a lot of great hockey here in Minnesota. Whether high school connections or college ties. We had a solid draft plan, and it was not part of our plan to pick players ahead of where we thought they should fall in the draft.”

Caruso said Tuesday’s drafting of players who had played with each other in junior or college hockey was “a bit of coincidence.”

“It’d be impossible for us to realize every connection amongst drafted players,” Caruso said.

The Frost chose Cooper sixth overall to fill holes in a defense created when they lost stars Claire Thompson and Sophie Jaques to Vancouver in the expansion process. They took Upson with the sixth pick in the fifth round to boost their scoring up front.

“We actually played together before we left for college,” said Upson, a 5-5 forward. “She’s still my best friend to this day. We train together two or three times a week together in summer. We live 15, 20 minutes from each other, so it was a really cool moment.”

Assistant coach and international scout Mira Jalosuo is leaving the Frost to return to St. Cloud State, this time as head coach to replace Brian Idalski. He is the coach for the PWHL’s new Vancouver franchise. Jalosuo is a former St. Cloud State assistant.

“She’s been a great part of our team in various ways, very knowledgeable at scouting and roster building,” Caruso said. “We’ll miss her, but I’m very excited for her.”