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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?