Banner Career Still Just Beginning For Taylor Heise

There's an outdoor community rink in Lake City, Minnesota, that Taylor Heise tries to visit once a year.

Heise says it's a simple outdoor rink next to a soccer field and playground with a small parking lot. There's a side area where people can skate, which Heise describes as a half-moon. Another area is connected and encircled by wooden boards that are low enough for errant pucks to hit potential bystanders.

This rink is where she learned to skate and fell in love with hockey. But she didn't really know what hockey was until she took home a pamphlet from school.

"I got a note in my backpack from one of the kids in my class," Heise said. "His dad played, I think, juniors or college hockey somewhere. And it was very random. And he just wanted to start a little league on the weekend."

Heise showed the pamphlet to her parents and wanted to try the league out.

Heise had learned to skate midway through first grade on her local outdoor rink before joining the league, with her parents taking her indoors the following season at Prairie Island Arena, beneath where her jersey number now hangs, to sharpen her skills, and grow her confidence on the ice.

"My mom said that I thought I was really good, but I was horrible, but that's usually how kids feel," Heise said. "You have that given confidence. My mom said that's where I learned to have that confidence to get through things even when things are hard."

Then game time came, and Heise had her first taste of playing the sport for which her home state is famous for.

"The first day I got there, my mom said I couldn't stand on my feet; I was not very good," Heise said. "But I came off, and she said I was smiling, I had fun, and I said, 'Mom, I think I'm going to be good.'"

Waiting for another chance to return to the ice, Heise looked forward to Sunday mornings. Each week after church, when it wasn't too snowy and rain hadn't ruined the ice, the Heise family would travel two minutes to the local outdoor rink. Parents would hastily tie their children’s skates while endeavoring to feed snacks to their hungry kids before sending them off.

The youth of Lake City would scrimmage against their neighbouring town, Wabasha. There were no positions in the scrimmage, set goalie or set pairings on defense, meaning Heise would sometimes find herself tending the crease.

"You get tired, you get cold, you get hungry, you go into the warming hut, you eat a snack, you eat a donut, and you get back out there," Heise said. "Usually your parents are like, 'hurry up, hurry up,' And you're like, ‘well, I'm eating my donut.’"

A screen-printed tiger with 'Lake City Hockey' spelled out adorned the white jersey Heise wore while playing on those chilly Sundays. It's a jersey her family has kept to this day.

"My mom always brings it up whenever I have little gatherings at the house… you know [when I] had the (Walter) Cup and stuff, she brought up my little jersey. It looks like it could fit a three-year-old, but I started when I was seven or eight.

"Looking back at that jersey now I'm like, ‘dang, I did it.’ That's what started me in the realm of what I'm doing right now."

Her hockey career quickly evolved from skates at her community rink into something more. Two-minute treks turned into three-hour round trips to the city and back once she was 12. Her grandpa, mom, and dad all took turns driving her. The role of chauffeur was dependent on who was available at the time.

Heise says she'd bring headphones while driving with her dad since he wanted to listen to anything related to football or basketball on the radio. If her grandpa was driving, polka music was typically playing. But when Heise drove with her mother, she usually got to pick the station.

"100.7, 101.3, it's the KDWB," Heise remembers choosing. "Sometimes they had this thing called War of the Roses where they would send flowers to someone, they're just trying to see if people were cheating. This was something I listened to on the way to school, which is so funny because a young 12-year-old was listening to it. But on the way to practice, we would listen to pop music, which would be 100.7 or 101.3."

On car rides after a bad game, Heise says she never worried about getting into the car with her family.

"We talked it out,” she recalls. “I never had those times when I was scared to get in the car. If I'm going to play a bad game, it's because pucks didn't go in the net. I'm never going to not try. That's just ingrained in who I am. I always feel like if you have the right attitude and effort, you won't come out with a bad game."

The family car rides dwindled when Heise got her license at 16. She was playing on the Red Wing varsity girls' hockey team and could now drive herself to the city five days a week for school, practice, and started developing her own time management skills.

"Driving with your parents and grandparents is fun until you're a certain age," Heise said. "I think having the freedom to make sure that I'm there on time, having time management, and just doing all these things that are important to be successful as a human being.”

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Back in her childhood bedroom in Lake City, Taylor Heise's Walter Cup Playoff MVP trophy sits alongside many of her biggest achievements. Next to the MVP trophy sits Heise's 2022 Patty Kazmaier Award and the 2022 IIHF Women’s World Championship tournament MVP.

Despite her growing collection, the 24-year-old phenom isn't crazy about individual awards.

"I'm all about team achievements. If we could have taken home a mini Walter (Cup), I would have rather had that," Heise said.

Following her team winning the inaugural Walter Cup championship — and when bringing home a mini Walter wasn't in the cards — she brought the real trophy back to Lake City.

"It was a homecoming," Heise said. "This is where I go to be normal. As much as I like the city, I can walk around, and people know who I am. They always ask me how I'm doing before [asking about ] hockey; they check in on me beforehand. And I think that that's the most important thing."

As for visiting the community rink where she started, Heise is eyeing some gaps in the PWHL's schedule. Last year she visited the Prairie Island Arena for her banner-raising ceremony, only days prior to the inaugural PWHL season.

"I always skate there once a year," Heise said. "I bring my mom's friends' kids, some kids in her class, join me out there. I'll definitely be going back."

In pure Taylor Heise style, while last year began with individual accolades, seeing her number hoisted to the rafters, her second PWHL season opened with something she preferred more - a team honor. Ahead of the Minnesota Frost’s home opener at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Heise stood alongside her teammates, with friends and family in the stands, to watch the first, of what she hopes will be many, Walter Cup banners climb to the rafters in the State of Hockey.