Murrysville girls mind the goal for 16U national championship contenders

Two Murrysville teens will be protecting the net when the Steel City Selects 16U girls’ ice hockey team heads to Denver for the Chipotle-USA Hockey Tier II National Championships at the end of the month.

For the team’s starting goaltender, Abby Manzewitsch, 16, it will be the third time in four years she’s helped her team earn a trip to nationals. But it will only be the second time she gets to compete, after the tournament was canceled at the last minute in 2020.

“It’s taken a while for them to accept that this is actually going to happen this year, since it was taken away so quickly last year,” said Jason Evans of Emsworth, who coached this group of girls for the past four years as they’ve moved through the USA Hockey age ranks.” This is the culmination of about nine months of team effort, three to five times a week on the ice.”

Both Manzewitsch and fellow goalie Ella Venters, 15, got their starts playing dek hockey at the Murrysville SportZone, before making the transition to the ice.

“I spent three or four years learning how to skate before I went into ice hockey,” Manzewitsch said. “You just have to learn a bit more, position-wise. In dek hockey there’s more standing, and in ice hockey it’s more sliding back and forth and more lateral movement.”

This is Venters’ first year with Steel City Selects, after a year with the Pittsburgh Vipers girls’ hockey team.

“I think it’s going to be really fun to play teams we haven’t played before who are really good,” she said.

With a season record of 34-5-4, and a ranking of 14th in the nation according to MyHockeyRankings.com, both girls said they are looking forward to some stiffer competition.

“At a national level, the games are really close, so you have to be aware that every single shot matters, and you have to have the mindset where you’re in the right position and not making mistakes,” Manzewitsch said. “You have to do a lot of practice and work hard every day in order to get to that level.”

Evans said, in addition to a four-year veteran like Manzewitsch, he’s happy to have a first-year goalie in Venters, who shows a strong desire to learn.

“She’s developed a lot,” he said. “Practicing against better players and getting more coaching on the skill sets, she needs to be a contributing goaltender, has been a real benefit. She’s quiet, but very coachable.”

This year’s Girls Tier II National Championship will be broken up into two separate brackets whose teams will not play one another due to covid-19 health and safety measures, resulting in co-champions for 2021.

Evans, Manzewitsch and Venters are ready for the puck to drop.

“It’s like they’ve been studying for a test all year long, and now they finally get to sit down and do it,” Evans said. “I just hope that they do their best and represent themselves and the team well.”

For more, see Nationals.USAhockey.com, and click on the “16U” link under the “Girls Tier II” banner.