“The best players want to play against the best, and (they) aren’t afraid of those challenges,” said Ohio State women’s ice hockey coach Jackie Barto.
While Barto was speaking of the types of players the Buckeyes recruit, she very well could have been talking about herself.
In December of 1998, Barto resigned as head coach of her alma mater, Providence College, where she compiled a 64-51-8 record in four years, to take on the challenge of starting the OSU program from scratch.
“The biggest (reason for coming to OSU) was the challenge of starting a new program, and starting from the beginning and reaching the ultimate goal of winning a championship,” Barto said. “(OSU) has a great athletic department and great leaders, and I thought it would be time to experience something of this level.”
Now in her eighth season at the helm of the Buckeyes (14-9-3 overall, 9-8-3 WCHA), Barto overlooks a nationally-ranked program she built from the bottom-up.
In the Buckeyes’ inaugural 1999-2000 season, they went 6-15-3 with a team comprised of 18 freshmen.
“The first year was tough,” Barto said. “It’s like every day you were just trying to teach the basics.
“We had a lot of mini-goals that year, we weren’t really looking a lot at wins. (The team focused on) little statistics, because if we’d just focused on wins we wouldn’t have felt successful.”
But after a rough first year, the hard work immediately started to pay dividends the next season, as several new recruits helped spark the Buckeyes all the way to the Western Collegiate Hockey Association finals, before losing 3-0 to Minnesota Duluth.
“We had a great recruiting class and exceptional players that came in,” Barto said. “It really helped raise the level of play. That was great, it was one of the highlights of our year’s here.”
Although the team had some rough seasons since, top recruits continue to come to OSU, now making it a premiere school for women’s hockey. To bring in top players, Barto has sold the team and the school perfectly.
“She just recruited me as a player and presented the school well,” junior defenseman Tessa Bonhomme said. “She sold it to me perfectly and told me everything I wanted to hear, and all of it was exactly true.”
Senior defenseman Amber Bowman said, “She basically sold the team and the school (during recruiting). The team is just so close, and I’ve never seen another team as close as we are.”
With the infusion of better talent, the Buckeyes have established themselves as an annual threat in the WCHA. And while that’s quite an accomplishment for a program only in its eighth year, Barto keeps pursuing the success.
“We’ve come a long way,” she said. “But I’m a pretty competitive person, and don’t want to settle. You always want to get better and see how I as a coach can get better, how the staff can get better, and how the players can get better. There’s always room for improvement.”
Jon Wagner can be reached at [email protected].
