Last March in Duluth, Minn., Wisconsin forward Brianna Decker won the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award, the Heisman Trophy of women’s hockey. Decker, a junior at the time, was asked almost immediately after winning the award if she thought she would do so again as a senior.
Despite Decker’s success that season—and also the team’s, which played in the national championship game the following day—her senior-season expectations and storylines had already begun sprouting. Since that day the pressure on Decker to succeed has only increased.
Decker’s hockey career began back when she was just four years old, scrapping on the ice or in the driveway with her older brothers. Like any younger sister, she wanted to mimic her two older siblings, Ben and Brian, who loved any form of competition and therefore included Brianna in their after-school games.
Brianna was naturally the underdog; there was no pressure on her to skate well or score goals. If anything, the pressure was on her brothers to keep her from outplaying them. For that reason—and also because of the innate, unspoken older brother hierarchy—they didn’t take it easy on her.
Ben said the two-on-two games (Brianna’s younger brother, Brody, eventually joined) often led to pushing and shoving, but Brianna wasn’t afraid to shove back. Although she refined her hockey fundamentals during her years playing in organized competition, Decker’s toughness on the ice links back to the games with her brothers.
“You look at her now on the ice, she usually comes out of the corner with the puck,” Ben said. “I probably should take credit,” he joked.
Hockey initially sparked Decker’s interest because she admired her older brothers; she enjoyed the competition and developed a deep passion for the game the more she played.
Now a senior captain on the No. 4 Wisconsin women’s hockey team, expectations—and pressure, at least in some fashion—for Decker couldn’t be higher.
Her Badger teammates and coaches chose the Dousman, Wis., native to lead them on the ice, where it’s assumed she will be the best player each night.
The LaBahn Arena, a $34 million facility and new home to Wisconsin women’s hockey, will open Oct. 19 and Decker has just one season to leave her mark. However, she’s managed to flip any pressure that might come with the preseason storylines in a positive light.
“It’s a lot of things to factor into this year, but dealing with pressure is kind of a privilege,” Decker said. “I know what my role is, and I just need to stick to everything that I know. I can’t think of [this season’s goal] as trying to back up last season.”
Decker will wear the captain ‘C’ patch this year, courtesy of the votes from her teammates and coaches. All returning personnel, including head coach Mark Johnson, are allowed a write-in vote, on which they must list whom they believe would make the best captain and assistant captains.
Beyond a simple ranking of players, however, the votes include explanations for why each player deserves a captaincy. Johnson believes in giving his personnel extensive input, and he reviews the compilation of votes with his coaching staff before ultimately choosing the team’s captains.
“It usually tells a story. Sometimes you get surprised by the story, but certainly Brianna has grown as a player and matured as an individual,” Johnson said. “Now is her time to lead this team.”
Decker’s leadership starts with her consistent approach to preparation. She has acquired a genuine desire “to do the extra little things,” according to senior defenseman and assistant captain Stefanie McKeough. As cliché as it sounds, Decker is routinely one of the last players on the ice after practice, either putting in extra repetitions for herself or zipping passes to a teammate who’s working on her slap shot.
That’s the type of example every coach wants to see from all of his players, regardless of whether she’s won the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award.
“If you want to be a better player and you’re confused how to do it, you just have to watch her,” Johnson said.
Decker doesn’t flip the switch on her practice and training regimen once the Badgers’ season wraps up, either. Between preparation for another collegiate season and commitments to USA Hockey, one would be hard-pressed to define Decker’s offseason.
“She’s always had the mentality the offseason is just as important as the regular season and that, you know, she’s gotta bust balls,” Ben said.
When Decker returns to Dousman to visit her family—time most would spend relaxing, regardless of whether their plate was as full as Decker’s—she makes time to complete her workouts. Even after the weight lifts and sprints, Decker and the extra repetitions somehow cross paths. In this case, they intersect in the basement, where Decker pounds hockey pucks with her brothers into a net against the wall.
“When we’re home, we’re always bored,” Ben said. “We probably shoot 300 pucks each time we’re down there.”
While Decker primarily leads by example, she vocally directs her teammates if her actions don’t offer enough guidance. She isn’t the type of captain who incessantly barks directions, and she doesn’t coddle her teammates with an overdose of encouragement.
Instead, Decker’s verbal leadership falls somewhere between the two: She senses when someone needs a boost after making a good play, but she certainly isn’t afraid to take charge and hold her teammates accountable.
“Off the ice she’s a jokester, but on the ice you don’t want to mess with her,” McKeough said. “The freshmen are coming in, and she’s earning their respect that way.”
It’s a common theme across all sports: When teammates practice against one another, it incites competition. And perhaps no team benefits more from practicing against a specific player than the Badgers do with Decker.
In particular, junior goaltender and assistant captain Alex Rigsby especially gains an advantage. After just two seasons guarding the net, the Delafield, Wis., native has already established herself as one of the nation’s top goaltenders. Rigsby posted more saves than any other goaltender in the nation last season, and her .949 save percentage was second only to Northeastern’s Florence Schelling, who posted a .950 mark in her senior season. The All-American-caliber matchups between Rigsby and Decker don’t take place in too many rinks across the nation.
“Every day in practice I challenge myself against her,” Rigsby said. “That good, healthy competition between us is what’s going to take us both further in our game.”
Although her teammates are well aware of Decker’s abilities, winning the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award was perhaps an unexpected achievement for Decker, who knows that remaining humble is paramount to achieving success.
“I’ve never looked at myself as a good player,” Decker said. “I just go out there and play.”
That’s easy for her to say, but Ben Decker—Brianna’s older brother, who may be her toughest critic other than herself—recognized Brianna’s elite talent years ago.
“She was gonna be good since she was a squirt,” Ben, now 23, said.
Decker was, unsurprisingly, named the WCHA conference’s preseason player of the year. However, the senior doesn’t allow her accolades to affect her personal expectations, most of which are team-oriented. As far as Decker is concerned, both her individual and Wisconsin’s team success last season ultimately came up one game short.
“I don’t view myself as an individual, I view myself as a team,” Decker said. “If my team’s not successful, I’m not, either.”
It makes perfect sense, then, that the last thing on Decker’s mind is bringing home another Patty Kazmaier trophy. However, it’s completely feasible she could win the award this season, and doing so would arguably cement her as the best women’s hockey player in Wisconsin history. After all, she was the fourth Badger to win the award in its 15-year history, and each of the three previous winners won the trophy just once.
Further, the prospect of a women’s hockey player winning back-to-back Patty Kazmaier awards would do wonders for the sport, which has simply not reached the same level of popularity as others across campus.
Wisconsin running back Montee Ball was, like Decker, up for his sport’s highest individual honor last season. Although Ball wasn’t awarded the Heisman Trophy, his image was spread across the side of a Madison Metro city bus as a campaign tool this fall.
Decker said she didn’t expect to be advertised on a bus, acknowledging women’s hockey is still gaining publicity and she’s “recognized in the hockey world,” but back-to-back Patty Kazmaier awards would nonetheless speed up that growing process.
“I don’t think you can get enough people like Brianna to help promote the strength of the sport,” John Decker, Brianna’s father, said.
Despite the laundry list of personal awards Decker has garnered during her hockey career, the senior’s deep-seated humble approach has helped her realize any individual successes will always come from the team’s success.
“She’s been pretty much the same person since I first met her,” said senior forward Lauren Unser, who grew up playing with Decker for the Madison Capitols youth hockey organization.
In addition to serving as team captain and entering the season as the sport’s best player—two pressures not many collegiate athletes will ever deal with—Decker and the Badgers will open the LaBahn arena this season.
The new venue’s 2,400-person capacity is significantly smaller than that of the Kohl Center (where the women’s hockey team previously played its home games), but the amplified energy from a packed house will make for a more significant home advantage.
Decker admittedly feels nervous before the bigger, national championship-type games, but even then it’s in a “good, excited” way. The Oct. 19 matchup against Bemidji State may stir those nerves for Decker, who said it will probably take a week or so after opening night for the Badgers to shoo away the butterflies and settle into their new facilities.
While Johnson also acknowledged opening LaBahn brings some distractions during the early stages of this season, the vast majority of consequences are positive. Regardless of any pressure that might come with it, the arena will certainly make Decker’s senior year at Wisconsin more memorable.
“I want to make sure she enjoys the season,” Johnson said. “She doesn’t have many games left in Badger jersey.”
That senior season playing for the Badgers is an experience Decker has envisioned since at least fourth grade, when she wrote a school paper explaining how badly she wanted to play hockey for Wisconsin someday.
The pressures Decker may or may not shoulder during that experience are, as strange as it sounds, welcome hurdles. After all, she wouldn’t face them at all if it weren’t for her hockey achievements.
“Everything she does, she’s earned,” McKeough said. “From where she was freshman year to where she is today, it’s crazy how being this self-disciplined and working really hard to want to be better can get you very far.”
