If Holly Lorms has a Wisconsin accent, it’s barely detectable. Although she hails from Brookfield, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, she often wears a worn-out Red Sox hat and says she wants to stay on the East Coast after graduation.
After four years with the Boston University women’s hockey team, the senior forward and captain who was born in University of Wisconsin Badger territory is one of the defining figures of the program’s early years and hopes to stay around Commonwealth Avenue for years to come.
“I was actually at prep school in Connecticut for three years prior to college, and something about the East Coast and the opportunities, academically but also athletically, kept me out here,” Lorms said. “I did look at Wisconsin – it was one of my official visits, it was one of my top choices to go there, but something about Boston University – my official visit was actually really short here.
“I had just torn my ACL and I think I was here on campus for less than 12 hours…but there was something about coach [Brian Durocher] and how he took a chance on me, and the city that I just fell in love with.”
When Lorms arrived in Boston, the program at BU was just two years old, in contrast to the Wisconsin, University of Minnesota and University of Minnesota-Duluth programs, the established powerhouses in the world of women’s college hockey. Those three schools have combined to win all 11 national championship games since the establishment of the women’s Frozen Four in 2001, and they have drawn heavily from local talent in building their programs.
“A lot of my friends played for Wisconsin and Minnesota, but coming to prep school on the East Coast, in Connecticut, opened up a lot of doors for me to meet people that also stayed here on the East Coast,” Lorms said.
Partly due to a lack of strong girls’ programs in the area, Lorms, like many elite female players, played for both boys’ and girls’ teams throughout middle school before going to the Pomfret School in Connecticut for high school.
“I [played on boys’ teams] a lot, but most of the teams that I competed with at tournaments were girls’ teams, because there weren’t a lot of college coaches coming to boys’ AAA games to watch a girl play,” Lorms said. “Most of my exposure was through USA festivals and national camps, so coaches would see me.”
Many female players who have played on coed teams cite a difference in the speed of the men’s and women’s games, and Lorms acknowledged a difference in the team atmosphere as well.
“I think guys are a little bit…every game’s a Stanley Cup Final for them,” Lorms said. “They lose a spring league game and it’s the end of the world, whereas for us, girls can take that loss with a grain of salt and move forward and build on that, I think a little bit more readily than guys can. It can be a double-edged sword, too, the intensity that guys play with when there’s a girl on the team – they’re always sticking up for you if another guy tries to hit you or pick a fight or something. But at the end of the day hockey players are hockey players, no matter male or female.”
When Duroucher coached Lorms during one of her trips to the U.S. girls’ national development camp in Lake Placid, N.Y., he began to think that she would be a valuable addition to the fledgling Terrier program.
“I could see sort of a personality and a charisma that was engaging, seemed to be fun to be around, and she was also a kid who had talent, on top of that,” Durocher said.
Despite the fact that Lorms was battling an ACL injury in her final year of high school hockey, Durocher liked her skating ability and defensive reliability enough to make her a part of the team’s third recruiting class in 2007, along with fellow forwards Lauren Cherewyk and Jillian Kirchner.
Since her first days here, Lorms has lived and worked with Cherewyk and Kirchner. The three played their final game together, a 4-1 loss to Wisconsin in the national championship, on March 20, but they’ll graduate with the program’s first Hockey East championship and first national championship appearance on their resumes.
“I think I would put it to words, if I could… as the closest thing to sisters as you could possibly get,” Lorms said of the friendship between the three seniors. “We’ve lived together now for four years, and we’ve been with each other through the hardest and darkest times we’ve had here as students, and athletes, and people, and we’ve become a part of each other’s families…I know that I couldn’t have been luckier in terms of two people I got to spend four years with.”
The tough times for the trio may often have come in the form of on-ice struggles, but likely the darkest time for Lorms began last February, on the last weekend of the regular season in a game against University of Maine.
Late in the game, Lorms collided with an opposing player, fell to the ice awkwardly and did not move for several minutes. She had damaged the ligaments between her fifth and sixth vertebrae, briefly losing feeling in her lower extremities, and was taken off the ice on a stretcher. She missed the postseason that year and had to wear a neck brace for the next month.
“The injury at the end of last year was something that took as much a physical toll on me as a mental toll,” Lorms said. “The game I love and the game that I trusted was taken from me, and the reason that I had been afforded the opportunity to go to college was taken from me, in a fluke accident, an accidental bump on the ice.
“The hope and promise of the team that came here this year, the team that we became, was really what pulled me out of the mental toll that that injury did take on me. They made me a better hockey player every day, but they made me a better person and a better leader, and I’m truly grateful for that.”
After the ACL injury in high school, a nagging issue with her wrist that persisted through her first few years at BU, and the neck injury at the end of her junior year, Lorms finally enjoyed a full season in her senior year, and she took full advantage, putting up career highs of 14 goals and nine assists for 23 points in 38 games.
On a team stacked with offensively explosive players like junior forward Jenn Wakefield and freshman forward Marie-Philip Poulin, Lorms may never have led the team in scoring, but she kills penalties, often centering the first PK unit for a team that finished with a 92.9 percent success rate, best in Hockey East and second only to Cornell University in the nation.
She blocks shots: 19 on the year, second to Wakefield’s 22 among BU forwards. And despite regularly matching up against other teams’ top lines, drawing the responsibility of shutting down national top-10 scorers like Boston College’s Kelli Stack and Wisconsin’s Meghan Duggan, she finished the year a plus-10.
For much of this year, Lorms centered a line with freshman wing Louise Warren on one side and a rotating door of underclassmen wingers on the other. Although she saw time with Poulin and Wakefield occasionally, including in the third period of the national championship game, she was called upon most often this year to anchor a less flashy, more defensively oriented line.
“Not that many people could sort of police a line or maintain the defensive balance in a line the way that she did, and do it with the conviction and the pride that she did it with,” Durocher said.
“She easily could have walked in my office multiple times and said ‘I’d like to be on a more high-profile line,’ or, ‘could I play with her or could I play with her,’ but never once did she come ahead of the team.”
As the new captain of a relatively young BU team, Lorms stayed in Boston over this past summer, getting to know new additions like Wakefield and Ward and later meeting the freshmen who had come to school early to take summer classes and learn their way around the city. Durocher said the fact that she was able to connect with the new players over the summer went a long way toward creating the tight-knit team that would eventually contend for the national title.
“I think Holly’s been right up there with one of the best captains I’ve ever seen in 33, 34-odd years,” Durocher said. “She probably thought about the team two or three times before she ever thought about herself.”
While she’s hoping for a chance to play for the U.S. national team in the coming years, Lorms said she doesn’t have a set path she plans to follow after graduation, although graduate school and coaching jobs are potential options. Despite a relative lack of opportunities for women to keep playing competitive hockey after college, she’s optimistic.
“Like I tell my mother, when I know, everyone else probably will,” Lorms said of her future plans. “But I’m looking currently for a job in this area so I can continue to train and play. Grad school, possibly in the future, but I have no definitive, ‘this is what I have to do and if I don’t do it, I will be a failure’ kind of thing. I definitely know I do want to keep playing and hopefully get an opportunity to be around Boston University and see where it takes me.
“I need to get to Minnesota-Duluth next year to see these girls play in the Frozen Four, so as long as I’m there watching, I think I’ll have had a successful year.”
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