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Brother motivates Keseley
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Also by Jon Arens:
- Top-ranked Badger hockey takes on Wildcats (November 16, 2007)
- Brother motivates Keseley (November 14, 2007)
- UW set for playoff push (November 8, 2007)
- Wisconsin takes struggles to Chicago (October 26, 2007)
- Goodman shuts down nation's best (October 23, 2007)
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- Rookies steal playoff spotlight (March 9, 2006)
- Badgers net 15 goals in series sweep (October 30, 2006)
- Badgers take care of business in WCHA opening round (March 6, 2006)
- UW follows '05 success formula (October 26, 2006)
- Cole, Bauer carry UW against UND (October 31, 2005)
by Jon Arens
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Athletes often draw their motivation from all kinds of places.
A shot at playing time. A bad loss the year before. But no matter what level of
play, the kind of push you get from a sibling rivalry might take the cake.
When you grow up in the kind of hockey family UW junior
forward Angie Keseley did, it's nearly impossible to escape some good-natured
trash talk here and there.
"I'm always rubbing (the two national championships) in my
brother's face," Keseley said with a grin. "He's a great player, but I've got
him there."
Indeed, the rings Keseley got seem to be about the definitive
thing she can hold over her older brother Jon's head. Last year, the two
Keseleys — separated by two years, Jon the elder — had almost the exact same
stat line at the end of the year: Angie finished with 12 goals and 12 assists,
whereas Jon, a senior last year for Division III Gustavus Adolphus, was one
goal shy of the same numbers.
24 points to 23 — a tough loss for anyone, not to mention a
big brother.
But rivalries aside, the Keseley playing in Madison is quick
to credit her brother, as well as her father, who also played hockey in
college, as the two people most influential in her early love for the game she
has come to embrace.
"I was around five when I first started," Keseley recalled.
"Since both my dad and my brother played already, I just kind of fell into it."
Lucky for Badger head coach Mark Johnson, Keseley ended up
falling right into the Wisconsin program after ending a brilliant high school
campaign at St. Louis Park (Minn.) High School with nearly 300 career points in
101 varsity games.
You would think with numbers like those, Keseley's biggest
impact would be felt solely on the offensive end of the ice, but according to
her coach, this is far from the truth.
"(Keseley) has a good set of skills, so when she does get
the puck, she is able to do some things and create opportunities for the
players around her, but her biggest asset is that she understands and
anticipates really well," Johnson said. "We coaches call it 'hockey sense.'
It's something that is very hard to teach, but for those players that have it
already, they can read off what players are doing and respond to that very
effectively."
The versatility that Keseley brings to the ice is one of the
reasons she shares a line with two of the most talented players on the
Wisconsin team in Meghan Duggan and Erika Lawler, both of whom spent this last
weekend playing for the U-22 national team in the Four Nations Cup in Leksand,
Sweden.
"Angie certainly complements (Duggan and Lawler) on that
line. She knows how to position herself to create opportunities with them on
the ice," Johnson remarked.
Keseley also feels that her line has been a perfect fit for
each of them, saying that playing with Duggan and Lawyer has been "quite the
experience."
"Both of them are unbelievable players and make me a better
player when I'm out there with them," Keseley said. "They add so much to the
line. I don't know what I would do without them."
Fortunately for Keseley, that question never had to be asked
this weekend, as the women's team got a well-deserved break from the grueling
schedule while four of the UW players spent the weekend in red, white and blue.
Johnson acknowledged that while the weekend off was
certainly helpful for catching up on some rest, it has given UW's next
opponent, second-ranked University of New Hampshire, an edge in that it has continued
to play in games while Wisconsin only practiced.
"It's going to be tough to get back into game form. When you
take a week off, it gives you a chance to work on some things, but at the same
time, you can practice all you want — it's still not the same as actually being
in a game," Johnson said. "We will need to adapt to that really quickly, or
we'll find ourselves in behind real fast."
While the Badgers certainly have that to worry about,
Keseley will also look to keep her name in the box score. Keseley finally broke
out of a six-week stretch of pointless games in the first game against
Minnesota two weekends ago, notching her sixth goal of the year in the huge
rivalry game.
Of course, one should have expected Keseley to show up in a
rivalry game, after all, without her brother to battle, who else is she going
to put up goals against?
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