The Olympian of Canaday A

A cold wind cuts across your nose as you skate down the ice. The colors of the audience—red, white, blue—blur into a muted shade of purple as your heartbeat makes its presence known in your throat. In what feels like the blink of an eye, you look down. Gloves and helmets are scattered across the ice below your skates. You catch a glimpse of your golden reflection on the medal that hangs around your neck. The red glow of the scoreboard burns the moment into your memory: USA 3-1 CAN. The stars and stripes that decorate your jersey appear smudged like wet paint by the tears that fill your eyes; not of disappointment, but of disbelief—you’ve done it! You’ve won gold at the Olympics!

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! 

The glaring red glow awakens you again. This time, it’s your alarm clock: 7:00 a.m. “I must have been dreaming,” you think. You grab your No. 2 pencils and head for the door. It’s the morning of your SAT. 

Although slightly altered for dramatic effect, this scene echoes Angela Ruggiero ’04’s senior year of high school. In reality, Ruggiero took her SAT on the road with Team USA before, not after, the 1998 Olympics. Regardless, it remains true that during her senior year at Choate Rosemary Hall, Ruggiero became both a gold medalist and an admitted Harvard student. Each accomplishment stands alone as something most people could only dream of. 

Ruggiero is undeniably a legend in women’s sports. It would be quicker to list the awards that she has not won than all those she has accumulated both during and after her retirement from women’s hockey. Aside from her casual four Olympic medals and induction as just the fourth woman into the Hockey Hall of Fame, Ruggiero has also served as a board member on the International Olympic Committee, founded Sports Innovation Labs, a data-driven sports strategy company where she has impacted the growth and engagement of women’s sports, and earned a spot in Forbes’s “25 Most Powerful Women in Sports.” 

The star’s introduction to hockey was the result of a hilarious two for the price of one deal between Ruggiero’s dad and a local hockey coach in her home state of California. Raised in New Haven, Ruggiero’s father played hockey recreationally. Decades later, he wanted to immerse his son in the same sport that accompanied his childhood. But as he went to sign Ruggiero’s brother up, the coach desperately asked if he had other kids that could contribute to an underfilled youth team. “‘We’ll give you three kids for the price of two if you sign them all up,’” Ruggiero joked in an interview with the “Independent.” “My dad actually signed us all up.” The rest was history. 

After their somewhat comical introduction to the sport, Ruggiero and her younger brother Bill became hooked, developing their love for the game together. Their unwavering support for one another’s hockey careers eventually earned the Ruggiero duo a spot in history in 2005: Bill was the goalie for the Central League’s Tulsa Oilers, an all-male professional hockey team. Upon hearing they needed a defenseman, he naturally recommended his sister. In her appearance, Angela accomplished three historic firsts for professional North American hockey. She was the first woman to play in a regular-season professional game. She and Bill were the first brother-sister duo to play together. And her third first, by notching an assist, she became the first woman to earn a point on this stage. 

Ruggiero’s journey to Harvard was, like most things in her career, benefited by good timing. 

Her recruiting trip fell on the night that Harvard Women’s Basketball pulled off its historic 16-over-1 upset of Stanford. “I remember going, oh my God, this is the best place for women’s sports. The whole campus went crazy that night, and I was like, well, they love women’s sports,” Ruggiero said. 

Just one year later, having just won gold at the first Winter Olympics in which women competed in hockey, 18-year-old Ruggiero took on a feat arguably just as “challenging” as earning a gold medal: adjusting to life as a Harvard freshman. 

Just like the normal Harvard student, she was placed in subpar freshman housing: Canaday A, to be exact. However, unlike the typical Harvard freshman, she grappled with the question of “How do I translate my hockey success into academics?”

Ruggiero lived out her upperclassman years first in Leverett House, and then Mather after taking two gap years during her second stint at the Winter Olympics in 2002. During her four years in the Harvard Women’s Hockey program, she practically filled a trophy case of her own, bringing home a National Championship in 1999, two runner-up titles in 2003 and 2004, multiple All-American honors, and a Patty Kazmaier Award—the women’s equivalent of the Hobey Baker award—that distinguishes the best hockey player in the NCAA.

Decades after her career for the Crimson, Ruggiero emphasizes that the duality Harvard provided, a commitment to being a student and an athlete, fundamentally contributed to her prolonged success. “I think it helped me realize I’m not just an athlete. It gave me more of a worldview, helped me explore who I am outside of the rink.”

To this day, Ruggerio remains part of a Harvard hockey legacy and community that is a stronghold in her personal life. The members of her class remain close; most attended her wedding. She even noted that their college group chat remains alive and well: “We have this text thread that blows up, a few times a week, all these little inside jokes that you can imagine happen on a hockey team,” Ruggerio said. An insight into a program defined by relationships that are not tethered to Cambridge or Bright-Laundry hockey rink.

Harvard provided an environment where Ruggiero could develop her athletic capabilities alongside her intellectual and professional competencies. Concentrating in Government, she graduated cum laude, attesting that her time at Harvard pushed her to explore her identity and ambitions outside of hockey. Among her peers, athlete and non-athlete alike, Ruggiero felt a shared fundamental motivation to be excellent at all they pursued. In the classroom, she enrolled in courses and met professors who challenged her worldviews, consequently expanding her vision of what was possible in her career. 

“Harvard allowed me to see all the different things out there and pushed me in a way that helped me develop as a person,” Ruggiero said. “You could have that true student-athlete experience, get to play elite sports, but also develop a capability as a human,” said Ruggiero. “I think the biggest benefit was, [that Harvard] taught me how to critically think.”

After the conclusion of her athletic career, Ruggiero returned to Cambridge, completing an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 2014. As a CEO, author, sports announcer, advocate, keynote speaker, investor—the list goes on, and on—Ruggiero required an education enriched by experiences that would give her a multidisciplinary toolkit for success. Both Ruggiero’s Harvard education and personal experiences as an athlete have propelled a career that contributes to the development of platforms, visibility, and investment that are actively reshaping the market for women’s sports. Grounded, ultimately, in a mission to provide opportunities to female athletes that she did not have herself.

Ruggiero’s ability to utilize her Harvard education to extend her success beyond the reach of any hockey rink she ever played in is a testament to what can come from the unconventional culture of Harvard athletics—a culture that invests equally in the value of the individual outside of their sport as it does the athlete within.

Megan Legault ’28 (mlegault@college.harvard.edu) still can’t believe her cold email to a four-time Olympian was successful—never underestimate the power of “@college.harvard.edu.”