After prolific college career, top prospect Casey O'Brien aims to bring 'fearless' game to PWHL
Inside Casey O'Brien's bedroom closet at home in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., you'll find several pieces of paper, some with words and others with pictures, taped to the inside of the door.
They're a visual reminder of everything she wants to achieve in hockey, and a glimpse of what she's working toward every time she opens the closet door.
As she checked goals one off the list, she'd move each slip of paper from one side of the closet to the opposite.
Earning a Division 1 college hockey scholarship? She checked that off when she went to the University of Wisconsin.
Making the Under-18 Women's World Championship? O'Brien did that twice, and won gold with Team USA in 2018.
Winning a national championship? She did that three times in five seasons with the University of Wisconsin Badgers, including this past season.
Winning the Patty Kazmaier Award as the best player in college hockey? She was finally able to cross that goal off the list in her 5th year of college. Her 88 points in 41 games this past season earned her the award over Wisconsin teammates Laila Edwards and Caroline Harvey.
It wasn't on her list of goals to become Wisconsin's all-time leading scorer with 265 career points, surpassing women's hockey legend Hilary Knight in the process. She couldn't have imagined that. But she did that, too.
By next week, she'll achieve another goal she didn't know was possible when she started visualizing her dreams: getting drafted into the PWHL.
The 2025 PWHL Draft is set for June 24 in Ottawa, and O'Brien is projected to be drafted high in the first round, thanks to her hockey IQ, vision and skating.
She's a 200-foot centre who can drive her own line, fuelled by pure competitiveness and smarts.
"She's the kind of player you can build a team around," said Gordie Stafford, who coached O'Brien in prep school at Shattuck-St. Mary's.
'She plays fearless'
O'Brien started playing hockey because her older brothers, Max and Jack, were doing it. Her father was the coach of a house league team in New York City, where the family lived at the time. He let her hop on the ice to give the sport a try with her brothers.
From the moment her skates hit the ice, O'Brien knew it was going to be her passion.
When she was a kid, she set the goal of becoming an Olympian. The PWHL didn't exist back then, and O'Brien wasn't sure it was possible to be a professional female hockey player. So she decided she would become a coach after going to the Olympics.
"I knew from like five or six that hockey was what I wanted to do for my whole life," she said.
Paul Vincent met O'Brien a couple years later. Right away, he knew O'Brien was an athlete. She was wired for it.
The long-time skills and skating coach, who's worked with NHL players for more than two decades, brought O'Brien to the rink one day to show his pro group how she skates.
That group included Chris Kreider and the late Jimmy Hayes. O'Brien was only 10 or 11 at the time.
"Her vision while skating is really, really good," Vincent said. "She has great lateral mobility, the ability to cut and turn on a dime. And she's fast."
O'Brien went to a Shattuck-St. Mary's hockey camp when she was 12. After one on-ice session, Team USA players Monique and Jocelyne Lamoureux told Stafford that he had to recruit O'Brien to the Minnesota prep school. She was the best player they'd seen at the camp.
"She's always just been such a fluid, wonderful skater, but she's one of those ones who her hockey IQ, and her finesse with her hands, correlates well with her foot speed," Stafford said. "You can have kids with good hands and kind of slow feet or whatever, but she's got a combination of everything."
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O'Brien would spend three seasons at the school. Many times, coaches at the prep school focus on teaching their teenaged hockey players the fundamentals, including how to show up every day and work hard.
But O"Brien already knew how to do that. She learned from an early age how to channel her competitiveness.
Over two decades at Shattuck-St. Mary's, Stafford has coached lots of future pros and Olympians. The ones who are most successful are players he calls killers, who have the competitive fire to be at their best when it matters the most. O'Brien fits into that category.
Since she's left Shattuck, Stafford will text O'Brien from time to time. Sometimes, he'll send her a picture of a lion or another wild predator.
"Because that's what she is on the ice, offensively," he said.
Dominant Badgers team
In her final season at Wisconsin, O'Brien was one piece of a stacked roster that also included Edwards, Harvey, Kirsten Simms and Lacey Eden, to name a few.
O'Brien was cleared to play only days before the season began, after she had off-season wrist surgery to fix a lingering issue.
But that didn't hold her, or the Badgers, back. The team finished with a 38-1-2 record, and O'Brien had a dominant season offensively on the way to smashing Knight's record.
The latter is something that's hard for her to grasp, having grown up watching Knight compete in an American jersey. Knight even texted her before the game, telling O'Brien she hoped she'd break her record.
"I do think it's a reflection of the teams that I've been on at Wisconsin, the teammates I've been fortunate enough to play with and just whatever contributions I've been able to make for the team," she said.
When O'Brien, Edwards and Harvey were named the top-three finalists for the Patty Kazmaier Award, it was was only the second time in history that all three finalists came from the same school.
As competitive as she is on the ice, and as much as winning the award was a goal, O'Brien said there wasn't a sense of competition between her teammates when it came time for the award ceremony. All three knew the top prize would be coming back to Wisconsin.
"We were just kind of happy that the school was represented and all of our focus was on winning the national championship," she said.
They capped the season off with a thrilling 4-3 overtime win over Ohio State.
Using her size as an advantage
At only five-foot-four, O'Brien will be one of the smaller players in the PWHL. She'll be facing tight, checking hockey that's a step up from the NCAA.
It's not the first time O'Brien's size has been brought up, and it won't be the last.
But she's built her game around her size. O'Brien has modelled her game after players like Kendall Coyne Schofield and the late Johnny Gaudreau — undersized players who've learned to use their size to their advantage.
"Growing up, I learned pretty quickly that being smaller does have its advantages," she said. "I have a lower centre of gravity. I think that helps with my skating and just being strong on my feet, so when I get into tighter situations, I'm almost able to escape a little easier."
Vincent also drew a comparison to Gaudreau. O'Brien has the same elusiveness and ability to outsmart her opponents.
After recovering from shoulder surgery, O'Brien should have a long off-season to prepare for the PWHL. She plans to focus on her quick release, as her game has evolved from being a playmaker to a goal scorer. In the words of Vincent, she has become a more complete player. She'll return to training with him once her shoulder heals.
After the draft, she could find herself heading to New York, which has the first pick in the draft. She could team up with star forward Sarah Fillier on a line. Or she could be an offensive threat beside Alina Müller on the Boston Fleet, which will pick second.
Going first overall would be an honour, O'Brien said, but she's not too concerned with how high she's picked. She wants it to be a good fit.
"I want to contribute right away," she said. "I want to be an impact player, and I want my style of game to fit whatever the team system is."
Olympic dream
Back in her room in Martha's Vineyard, there's another goal still lingering on her closet door, incomplete.
That's going to the Olympics with Team USA and winning a gold medal.
O'Brien has gotten a taste of wearing an American jersey with the senior national team after playing in the Rivalry Series. It's the dream she's had since she started playing hockey, and the thing that drives her every day.
"I feel like I am there, just my ability and the performance that I've had," she said.
Whether it's on the world stage with Team USA or wherever she ends up in the PWHL, the coach who's watched her grow up has no doubt about one thing.
"I think she'll be a star," Vincent said. "I really do."
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