Growing the Game and Strengthening Ties: Hockey's Newell Follows the Game to Family's Home
5/16/2021
When Kimberly Newell ’16 graduated from Princeton as an Ivy League women’s hockey champion in her final season and as the program’s career record holder in wins and saves, she thought that would be a fine end to her hockey career.
But, a couple years into that apparent retirement, a connection through Princeton and the Ivy led Newell back to the game, and to a country and a culture with which she had a connection. Now, she would get the opportunity to experience that connection in a much more immersive way than as the tourist she had been before.
Newell’s familial roots extend to opposite sides of the earth, and perhaps fittingly, they met in the middle, in western Canada. Newell’s fraternal grandmother played field hockey in her native Germany, and Newell’s mother came from China to earn her doctorate in Canada.
In Newell’s family, hockey had not just an advantage of one generation in Canada, but with her grandmother bringing her love for the field variation of the game to her new hometown, five hours northeast of Vancouver, where she started an ice hockey club.
“It was a completely new sport for my mom, but having moved to Canada, obviously, it’s a big thing here, so she jumped on the bandwagon for me and my brother to start playing when we were kids,” Newell said.
The game, and her performance in the classroom as well, of course, led Newell to Princeton, where current head coach Cara Morey also arrived in 2012, then as an assistant coach.
Princeton had winning seasons in Newell’s sophomore and junior seasons before taking the Ivy League title and an NCAA tournament bid in 2016, Newell’s senior year.
“I felt like, wow, that’s a really great way to end my hockey career,” Newell said. “While I had been part of Hockey Canada’s program for a number of years, I felt very satisfied with everything I had been able to accomplish at Princeton, and I felt like that was a great way to end that chapter of my life as an athlete.”
Less than a year before Princeton won that Ivy championship, in what would seem an unrelated event at the time, Beijing was awarded the 2022 winter Olympic Games. By 2017, Kunlun Red Star became a China-based professional team in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, and with Digit Murphy as its coach. Murphy was also Morey’s coach when Morey competed at Brown University, and with Murphy looking for a goalie in 2018, she called an alum who knew a good one.
Then based in New York at Credit Suisse, and now offered the chance to compete again, Newell was interested, but had concerns too.
“I don’t know if I can jump back into it,” Newell remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been on the ice in, basically, two years. I think, at the end of the day, it was like, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’ve got to at least give it a shot and see where it goes and see how far this opportunity will take me.”
Three years in, it has taken her to a place she had been before, but as a tourist. Even with a familial connection behind that tourism, competing for a Chinese-based team was a very different experience, living and working there.
“When I had this opportunity to go play for the Chinese team, it definitely was at a deeper level, a way for me to connect more with my roots, and I definitely think that I wouldn’t have had the same appreciation for various aspects of Chinese culture and the language that I have now if I hadn’t gone to play hockey there and live there,” Newell said.
Newell didn’t know at the time that she would get the experience of living and working in China, but a post-graduation trip there was a culmination of wanting to forge a stronger connection with that side of her family.
“That was actually a very personal trip for me because I had spent three years at Princeton taking Mandarin courses trying to learn how to be as fluent as possible,” Newell said. “My motivation was, I wanted to be able to communicate with my grandfather on my mom’s side.”
Within a couple years, Newell would have much more of a chance to use the Mandarin she spent so much time at Princeton studying, and she would also experience championship-level success like she did as a collegian. In 2020, now known as the KRS Vanke Rays and competing in the WHL Russian league, Newell’s team won the league title with the Princeton alum playing 17 games during the regular season and keeping a 1.52 goals-against average. The team made the league final again in the 2021 season, with Newell playing 18 regular-season games and keeping an 0.72 GAA, but the last round of the playoffs was postponed indefinitely due to COVID concerns.
Having a China-based team to compete internationally, and including players from other countries with familial ties to China on that team, was done with the aim of helping the Chinese team that will compete in the 2022 Olympics be as strong as possible in a sport where Canada and the U.S. have won all six golds and only five nations have medaled. Four countries – with Finland and Sweden joining the U.S. and Canada – have won 17 of the 18 medals awarded since women’s hockey debuted as an Olympic medal sport in 1998.
China has competed in women’s hockey at three other Olympics, but not since 2010.
Presently, China does not permit dual citizenship, a change that would need to be made in order for Newell and other players with Chinese heritage, but who are citizens of other countries, to compete for China’s Olympic team.
“As soon as they give the green light that we can hold a dual passport, then it’s just a matter of what the team is going to look like, what our training and development is going to look like, whether we’re going to play in the Russian league again or whether we’re going to centralize and train together in China,” Newell said. “We’re not sure about that yet, but we’re all working toward that goal of playing in the Olympics.”
When Newell left Princeton, she knew that she wanted to build a stronger connection with her Chinese roots. She didn’t know then that she’d have the chance to live and work in China, and less than nine months before the Chinese capital becomes the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games, the chance remains for Newell’s connection to China to gain yet another tie.
