The PWHL standout, gold medalist and Athens native grew up in the hockey community in the Buckeye State
The question of how Gwyneth Philips – a two-time IIHF World Championship medalist, four-time Hockey East champion and the 2025 PWHL Playoff MVP – started playing goalie is a hot topic of debate.
“I think I always wanted to do it,” Philips said adamantly. “I had an older brother, so he was always looking for someone to shoot pucks on. … My dad was really against it. He did not want to be the goalie dad.”
Without her father’s approval, Philips went behind her father’s back and bought a pair of goalie pads.
Or so she thinks.
“(Now) he’s like, ‘What are you talking about? I bought you those pads,’” Philips said. “So it’s up for debate, who was pushing that.”
Since padding up as a middle schooler, Philips has established quite a name for herself. After five years at Northeastern University, her standout rookie season with the Ottawa Charge earned her a two-year contract extension in Canada’s capital city, which she inked this past offseason.
But before all of that, before all the accolades and arguments about how her goaltending career began, Philips’ hockey journey began in a small city southeast of Ohio’s capital.
Her career has taken her to many places – Pittsburgh, Boston and Ottawa, to name a few.
But Athens, Ohio, is where she calls home.
“Born and raised,” Philips said with a smile.
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Philips’ youth hockey days featured car rides to rinks all around Ohio. Her memories with the Newark and Athens youth hockey programs, though, are some of the most formative.
Ironically enough, she wasn’t always stopping pucks.
“That’s kind of why I stayed with my roots a little bit in Athens and in Newark, because they provided me with that (flexibility),” Philips said. “I started playing goalie through them, and I was able to go back and (be a) player with Athens. They just kind of let me do whatever I want, which is always really fun.”
Philips was a natural, though, and ultimately transitioned to goalie full-time when she joined the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets program. Bouncing around between the three programs, Philips’ hockey beginnings are all jumbled together – sometimes she’d be lacing up the skates for Newark, other times Athens, and in some instances, Columbus.
No matter where it was, though, she made friends and memories to last a lifetime.
“I’ve been playing with those kids forever, and they’re some of my closest friends,” Philips said. “(It was) a really good group of kids. I think that was always really important being a little girl on an all-boys team – I never felt uncomfortable. I think that’s just because the boys and the kids were always so welcoming and nice.”
The PWHL didn’t exist back then, and Philips didn’t regularly tune into NHL hockey. Her hockey idol, she says, is her older brother Guy, who she followed through the same youth hockey path – Athens to Columbus to Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh.
Philips considered staying in Ohio for college when Ohio State expressed interest, but she ultimately committed to play hockey at Northeastern, where she ended up backing up another Team USA great, Aerin Frankel, for three years.
When she got her shot, though, Philips shined, leading the Huskies to the Frozen Four in 2023. Her .958 career save percentage and 0.96 goals-against average stand as the best in NCAA women’s hockey history, as does her .913 career winning percentage.
Between the pipes, she’s as calm and composed as anyone – though that might not be the case on the inside.
“The first year that they had the women’s Beanpot at TD (Garden), when my coach told me how many tickets were sold to the game, I literally threw up,” Philips recalled. “Thinking about it, like I actually threw up. I think it was just under 11,000 people, which at the time was like the biggest crowd I’d ever seen for a women’s sports (event).
“But now I like to look back and reflect and think about how that’s almost like a standard in PWHL. Little me had no idea what was coming. … Every home game on a Friday, Saturday night in Ottawa is sold out at 8,000. It’s fun to think about how fast the women’s game has grown in the two years that that’s happened.”
The little girl playing in Athens, Ohio – sometimes as a goalie and other times not – had no clue that there’d be a professional draft once her time in college was done. After years of fits and starts for pro women’s hockey, the concept of the PWHL began to come to fruition in the latter half of Philips’ career at Northeastern, and she was ultimately selected 14th overall by Ottawa in 2024.
Midway through her rookie season last year, Philips took over the starter’s crease when Charge goaltender Emerance Maschmeyer got hurt.
“I think she was on track to win, or to at least be nominated for, MVP of the year,” Philips said. “She was playing so well. So then I’m like, ‘Oh man, I have to do this now. This is stressful.’”
If that was the case, Philips barely showed it. After a strong regular season, she went 4-0-4 with a 1.23 GAA and .952 save percentage in the playoffs to earn MVP honors. With Philips standing strong between the crease, Ottawa upset top-seeded Minnesota in the opening round of the playoffs then lost to Minnesota by a 3-1 margin in the Walter Cup final, with every game going to overtime.
At the international level in April, Philips also had to come off the bench – this time, in the IIHF World Championship gold medal game. Frankel – the goalie Philips had backed up for three years at Northeastern – got hurt, giving way to Philips for the rest of the game.
“I’m like, ‘Oh man, I have to go in right now?’” Philips recalled, laughing now.
This time, overtime was her friend, as Philips stopped 17 of 18 shots before Tessa Janecke scored the winning goal for Team USA in the extra frame.
It’s fitting that those spontaneous moments found Philips, considering how spontaneous her youth hockey career was. Between the three youth teams she juggled just trying to stop a few more pucks, she flourished.
Philips attributes much of her success, though, to her roots in Athens.
“I think being in Ohio – it’s not the hockey state, but there was still plenty of training to be done,” Philips said, citing her longtime goalie coach who hailed from Ohio University’s ACHA team. “I always had access, and I think that was really important.”
Instead of being thrust into 24/7 hockey like many other kids her age, the young Philips was able to balance a bevy of sports – from volleyball to baseball to track – which she noted as an advantage. The right-catching goaltender notes she doesn’t have perfect mechanics or form and isn’t the most “fundamental,” rather leaning on her athleticism when she needs to make saves.
Philips also looks fondly back on the life she had away from the rink in Athens.
“I also am pretty out of the box a bit mentally, and I think Athens allowed me to do that,” Philips said. “I have a lot of hobbies and stuff that I use to get outside of the rink, and I think that’s been really important in my career because I’m not always stuck in the rink, even when I’m at home.
“I learned a love for rock climbing and biking and being outside and boating in Athens. And I think that has carried on in my career and kind of developed me into a person that I can be outside of the rink. I think that’s really important for athletes, because sometimes I think they get stuck in their head in the rink.”
There’s an exclusive list of professional hockey players that have hailed from the state of Ohio – former CBJ forwards Sean Kuraly, Jack Roslovic and Carson Meyer grew up in the Columbus area, while other NHL notables include J.T. Miller, Alex Nedeljkovic and Connor Murphy. Recent first-round pick Sascha Boumedienne spent two seasons with the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets. On the women’s side, Wisconsin hockey phenom Laila Edwards hails from the Cleveland area.
So if you ask Philips about people that might count Ohio out as a hockey state, she has a pretty blunt answer for you.
“I’d tell them they’re crazy,” Philips said. “I’d fight for Athens, I think I’d fight for Ohio with my last dying breath.
“You don’t need the best of the best. And I think maybe that’s why Ohio kids are so successful, right? We didn’t have all these really nice luxuries, so that made us have to work that much harder to compete with the kids that did. I think maybe it’s like a little bit of a blue-collar success.”
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