This hockey phenom made an unusual career choice. Why she could be ‘one of the greats’

Chloe Primerano had a choice to make.

Less than two years after making the switch from boys to girls hockey, Primerano was already one of the sport’s best young players, leading her team in scoring and winning Canadian Female Prep High School MVP in her 10th grade debut season. And after her international debut at the 2024 U18 worlds — where she led the tournament in scoring, set a record for points by a defender (16) and was named best defender and tournament MVP — Primerano already needed a new challenge.

She could return to RINK Hockey Academy in Kelowna, B.C., the hockey school that churns out NCAA talent, national team hopefuls and NHL draft picks such as Tij Iginla and Ryder Ritchie, or she could make a highly unusual move for a teenage women’s hockey player: graduate from high school early and start college at 17.

While a move like that is not uncommon in the men’s game — think Macklin Celebrini going to Boston University early — in the women’s game it is an unconventional choice. But for Primerano?

“She had outgrown the league she was playing in,” said Byron Ritchie, the former NHL forward and current skills coach at RINK.

And now, when the University of Minnesota opens its season on Friday, Primerano will be making her college debut a year ahead of schedule as the most highly anticipated rookie in the NCAA.

Last week, she was voted the WCHA preseason rookie of the year by six of eight coaches in the conference. With Primerano and American star Abbey Murphy, Minnesota heads into its season as the No. 2 team in the nation with eyes on making the Frozen Four, which will be hosted at the Gophers’ Ridder Arena.

Primerano is still only 17 years old, but she has already established herself as one of the most promising prospects in women’s hockey. She is dynamic on the blue line with elite skating and edgework and sees the game at a very high level. She was the youngest player invited to the Canadian senior women’s national team training camp in September and — with a good start to her college career — could force herself into consideration for a spot on the 2026 Olympic team.

Amid a wave of top hockey prospects coming out of Western Canada — fellow North Vancouver products Connor Bedard and Celebrini were the No. 1 picks at the NHL Draft in 2023 and 2024, respectively — Primerano is expected to be the next top player to come out of British Columbia, and poised to become one of the best defenders — and players — in the women’s game.

“She has that drive and ability to become one of the greats of the female game,” said Ritchie. “Now, whether she fulfills that potential, that’s going to be up to her.”

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Primerano first made headlines in May 2022 when she was drafted by the WHL’s Vancouver Giants (268th overall), becoming the first female skater ever selected in a Canadian Hockey League draft.

At 15 years old — in her ninth-grade season — Primerano was still playing boys hockey for the Burnaby Winter Club in the U15 prep league and finished second in team scoring among defenders. “Chloe’s play in the top U15 league in Canada made her fully deserving of this selection today,” Giants general manager Barclay Parneta said at the time.

Primerano said she was excited to be drafted to the WHL, but she never intended to play there, opting instead to play in the NCAA. For top men’s hockey prospects, the CHL — the top major junior men’s hockey league in Canada — or NCAA is typically part of the path to the NHL. For top female players in North America, college hockey is the best route to a professional or international career.

Primerano started playing hockey when she was 4 years old. She was initially on a girls team, but the rink was so far from the family’s home in North Vancouver that her parents put Primerano with boys at a more convenient rink. “We would drive all the way there and (the kids) could barely skate,” her mother, Fiona Primerano, said with a laugh.

When Chloe was 6, the family — including her older brother, Luca, and her father, Joe — joined the North Shore Winter Club, a members-only facility in North Vancouver that has become something of a breeding ground for elite hockey talent. Columbus Blue Jackets winger Kent Johnson has trained at the rink. So have Bedard and Celebrini.

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The 2018-19 North Shore Winterhawks PeeWee team included Primerano, Celebrini and San Jose Sharks third-round pick Carson Wetsch. Growing up around elite players like Celebrini — they use the same offseason coach, Cole Todd — has been impactful for Primerano.

“(Macklin) just works so hard,” she said. “It’s really easy to want to get better when you’re with him because of what he does on the ice.”

Typically female players will make the move from boys hockey when body checking is introduced at the U14 level. Additionally, it’s easier to get scouted by college coaches or the national team in girls hockey. But Primerano stuck with it, playing up to Bantam in the top prep U15 league.

“I remember when she was Bantam and she’s in the (top) league against boys and you can see how competitive she is, how dialed in she is, how hard she battled. It’s propelled her,” said Jarome Iginla, the Hockey Hall of Fame forward who coached on the boys side at RINK for three years.

While Primerano never looked out of place, it was hard to know exactly what kind of player she could be when she ultimately made the move to the women’s game. You could see her skillset — she was a good skater, smart with the puck and could make a good first pass out of the D-zone — on display enough to be optimistic about the transition, but when she got to RINK, she was quickly in a class of her own.

“When I switched to girls I thought I had a lot more time and space out there,” Primerano said. “So I kind of just started playing more offensive and took off from there.”

Primerano led her 2022-23 RINK team to the CSSHL championship, and led Team BC to its first-ever win at the Canada Winter Games against tougher competition like Ontario and Quebec — provinces with higher registration numbers than British Columbia, and more national team players, like Caitlin Kraemer and Abby Stonehouse.

“The spotlight seems to shine bright on her … And she’s a kid that definitely rises to the occasion,” said Primerano’s RINK coach Kris Hogg, who also coached Team BC.

When the window opened for college coaches to talk to potential recruits — June 15 heading into a player’s junior year — Primerano was a sought-after commodity. The family limited the calls she took to her top choices but still, the process was “very overwhelming,” Fiona said.

Primerano ultimately chose Minnesota because she “felt at home” when she visited the campus. She had talked to head coach Brad Frost about the possibility of attending Minnesota a year early, given she was ahead in school — she took extra classes online when schools were shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic — but it wasn’t yet the path Primerano was set on taking.

Then, in her junior year, Primerano was on another level. She set CSSHL single-season records in goals (35) and points (89) in 29 games — around three points per game — en route to another league title and MVP. In two seasons at RINK, she finished third all-time in league scoring, and first among defenders.

That year, Primerano lived with the Ritchie family. Every night there was hockey on TV, Primerano was watching — “It’s not the happiest night when there’s no games on,” she said — or in the garage shooting pucks, or stickhandling and working on her game.

“She’s always learning from the best in the game,” said Ritchie, who is also Primerano’s family adviser with CAA Hockey. “She’s not just somebody that goes home and turns it off and doesn’t think about hockey the rest of the night. I think that’s part of what separates her.”

Primerano, who grew up a Vancouver Canucks fan, spends a lot of time reviewing tape of team captain Quinn Hughes — the NHL’s reigning Norris Trophy winner — to try to take pieces of his game into her own.

“His skating is one of the biggest things I look at,” Primerano said. “All the creative stuff he does at the blue line. That’s stuff that I’ve really tried to pick up over the last year. I don’t want to be too straight line, I want to be more creative. It’s just watching what players are doing out there and bringing that into my game.”

For a precocious young athlete, the way Hughes attacks, the creativity he brings to the offensive blue line, is a perfect model.

“She’s actually able to pull off some of the same blue-line maneuvers, some of the same zone exits, zone entries,” Ritchie said. “Because she is that good.”

Primerano’s own playing style can simply be described as dynamic. She is that rare breed of defender who can make something out of nothing.

“There’s players that are elite skaters, there’s players that are elite puck handlers, there’s players that have a really high hockey IQ or they’re goal scorers or they set people up — Chloe is a culmination of all of it,” said Frost. “There’s nothing that we don’t like about Chloe Primerano.”

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When Primerano makes her NCAA debut on Friday, she’ll face the challenge she was looking for.

At 17 years old — she won’t turn 18 until January — she will be the youngest player in the league, and she will face bigger and stronger competition on a daily basis. And she will be playing in the WCHA, the most grueling of the five women’s hockey conferences, with powerhouse Wisconsin, reigning champions Ohio State and in-state rival Minnesota-Duluth (who swept its opening series against the Buckeyes last weekend).

But Frost isn’t worried about all that.

“You wouldn’t know she’s 17 versus 18 because of her ability to play,” he said, noting that if Primerano had been born only a few weeks earlier, she’d naturally be in the 2024 class anyway. “As I look at other players that are coming in, she’s just as mature as they are from a physical standpoint. She’s just as mature as them from a personality standpoint.”

There’s certainly going to be a learning curve in the NCAA, and Primerano will need to adjust to not always being on the offensive side of the puck and building on her defensive game. But that’s exactly what she is hoping for: to continue to develop her game.

“I always want to be playing in a league that is going to push me,” Primerano said. “It’ll be tough, but that’s something that I’m looking for. Having the opportunity to go a year early, that’s something I couldn’t say no to.”

In the men’s game a player might go to college early to fast-track their journey to the NHL. But for Primerano, it’s about growing as a player to reach the ultimate goal: the Canadian women’s national team.

“She has nothing really to prove at this U18 level, and going to the college level she can really see what she really needs to work on at that level to continue to grow throughout the Canadian national program,” said Hogg. “Sometimes you gotta dive right in with two feet and then see where everything goes.”

Primerano attended Team Canada’s September training camp that will be used, in part, to pick the roster for the Canada-USA Rivalry series in November and the 2025 world championships. The Canadian braintrust gave Primerano every opportunity to showcase herself, playing on both special teams and pairing her with Jocelyne Larocque, Canada’s long-time top pair defender. And while Primerano might prove to be good enough for the senior team, Canada will also need to consider what is best for a young player at this point in an Olympic cycle, with Milan only 17 months away.

Is it better to elevate her to the senior team and potentially shelter her behind veteran players for the experience? Or let her grow as a player in college and dominate another year at U18 worlds?

The latter would set Primerano up to take the reins after 2026, especially if some veterans opt to retire from the national team. But a solid start in college and a potential look at the Rivalry Series could make her case for the senior team undeniable. It’s not unheard-of for Canada to elevate a young player. While she was a bit older, Sarah Fillier — the former Princeton star and 2024 PWHL No. 1 draft pick — made her world championship debut in 2021 and was one of the top scorers at the 2022 Olympics.

And there’s reason to believe Primerano will be set up for success in her freshman season.

Minnesota has a deep blue line with Finnish national team defender Nelli Laitinen and Team USA’s Sydney Morrow, who transferred from Colgate. Primerano won’t be thrown into college and expected to do everything on her own, though she can be expected to play meaningful minutes and special teams. She’ll have her RINK teammate and fellow freshman defender Gracie Graham in the locker room to ease the transition. But mostly, Primerano’s speed and skating ability in particular will allow her to be impactful at the college level, even as an underage player.

“She’s ready,” said Frost. “She’s elite and is going to be a tremendous freshman.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos courtesy of the Primerano family)