Grace on Ice

At this time last year, South Korea hosted the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. As host country Korea could field a hockey team for the first time. This took planning: in 2013 the National Korean Hockey Association started to recruit hockey players worldwide via Facebook, looking for Canadians who had Korean names.

They found 21-year-old Danelle Im, star player for the Laurier University hockey team in Waterloo, and someone named Mr. Kim contacted her cold turkey. “Would you be willing to be considered to try out for the Korean Women’s Olympic hockey team?”

Danelle had an uncle in Korea who checked out whether Mr. Kim was a scam or a bona fide recruiter, and the answer was “It’s legit.”

Danelle has played hockey since she was a six-year-old student at Willowdale Christian School in Toronto. Her socializing in high school was absorbed by playing competitive hockey every weekend. All her young life she has been immersed in the sport as a right-wing forward. So in 2013, five years! before the Olympics, she went to Korea in the summer for a couple of months, stayed with her brother who lives in Seoul, and joined the team. For the next four years, each summer she left Canada, went back to Korea (transportation paid) for the rigorous Olympic training. In 2018 she took off the whole academic year to practice with the Korean Olympic team.

BEFORE THE GAMES
Three coaches, one Korean and two American, led the practice five days a week: two hours of an exercise workout, two hours play on ice, and two hours training off ice. “You treat it like an intensive job,” says Danelle. Perks, along with good healthy food and accommodations plus a small weekly allowance, included travel to play other foreign teams in their countries – France, Hungary, Italy and Minnesota in the U.S. – to gain experience and meld the team.

The 22-member Korean team developed good camaraderie and respect for each other, although the age differences were great: several fast 17-year-old teenagers up to a few 30-year-old experienced players. Korean mores give respect to any one older than yourself, but on ice skill is the equalizer. This made it an interesting locker-room experience for Danelle at 25 years old.

There were four other “imports” (three Americans and one Canadian) along with Danelle. And two weeks before the Games, 13 North Korean women players were added; the coaches had to try to bring them up to speed in that brief time, on game plans which had been routine to everyone else for a year. Only three of the North Koreans ended up with ice time during the Games.

The Korean women’s hockey team was not expected to win at the Olympics. And they didn’t, losing to Switzerland twice (0-8, 0-2), to Sweden twice (1-7, 0-2), and to Japan (1-4). 

“But you still played to win,” says Danelle. “The wonderful thing was, however, you didn’t have the pressure on you that you were expected to win. You just had fun playing excellent hockey as best possible, thanks to the disciplined training you had received.”

GRATITUDE & GRACE
Danelle goes on to say: because her selection to be on this Korean Olympian women’s hockey team (and to be awarded the necessary dual Korean-Canadian citizenship) was out of the blue, utterly gratuitous – she had not sought to get it herself – it has metaphorically given her insight into the nature of God’s “grace,” and a sense of sheer gratefulness for the whole experience.

She will remember the teammates – bonded in five years of extensive training camps – more than the two weeks of Olympic games. She now has a living connection with her Korean heritage and grandparents, enlarging her Canadian cultural landscape. It has built up her self-confidence, because she was able to do the exhaustive high caliber Olympic training. And it all dropped out of Facebook “heaven,” so to speak, unexpected. Thus the years of terribly hard work at a task she loves was a pure celebration in thankfulness.

This analysis strikes me as reporter as a truly redemptive way to pick up an unusual sport achievement of being an “Olympian” athlete. No boasting, no cheering of competitive success, no swagger. Just a thankful acceptance of what was put in her lap that strengthened her Christian demeanor.

In the post-Olympic World Champion Hockey Tournament held in Italy, where the Korean woman’s hockey team played against teams in its ranked bracket (Italy, Slovenia, Latvia, China and Kazakhstan) Danelle scored several goals, and Korea took silver over-all. 

Now Danelle is back at Ryerson University in Toronto, in the second year of the nursing program, playing hockey only once a week for fun.