Post Bulletin Sports Person of the Year: Taylor Heise reached rare heights in 2022

Dec. 30—LAKE CITY — Nate Heise sat near his sister, Taylor, on the University of Minnesota campus on the morning of March 26.

The siblings were watching the NHL Network, along with their brother Ryan, the youngest of the three Heise siblings, and their parents, Tony and Amy. Nearly all of Taylor's teammates from the Gophers' women's hockey team were there, too.

Heise said she didn't expect to hear her name called that morning, when the winner of the 2022 Patty Kazmaier Award — the honor given annually to the best player in women's college hockey — was announced on a nation-wide broadcast.

Heise's oldest brother, the one who spent countless hours playing one-on-one basketball with her in the family's expanded driveway as young kids, had a different feeling.

"Maybe she's just being modest when she says that," said Nate Heise, now a sophomore on the University of Northern Iowa men's basketball team. "I didn't really have a doubt. I wasn't too surprised when they called her name. I'm not that much of a yelling or screaming type of guy, but that was pretty cool, pretty exciting."

The excitement, and perhaps a bit of shock, are feelings that the Heise siblings can agree upon, not just when Taylor won the Kazmaier — the equivalent of the Hobey Baker Award in men's college hockey — but for everything else she accomplished in 2022: Helping the Gophers to 29 wins and an NCAA tournament berth, being named a First Team All-American, leading the country in scoring, and becoming the breakout star for Team USA and the tournament MVP at the Women's World Championships in Denmark in September.

For all of those reasons and so many more on an ever-growing hockey resume as lengthy as Santa's "Nice List," Heise, a Lake City native and former Red Wing High School star, is the 2022 Post Bulletin Sports Person of the Year.

"Sitting in that room that day, not sure if I was going to win ... I don't have a lot of situations where I'm unsure of something," Taylor Heise said of the day she won the Kazmaier Award. "My friends will say I'm overly prepared, that I always have a plan, but I feel like that benefits me at the end of the day.

"Not winning wouldn't have been embarrassing, but I knew I could do it and I wanted to make my friends and family proud."

As those thoughts were going through her head, Heise heard her name called and saw her Gophers teammates, classmates and best friends Abby Boreen and Catie Skaja tear up. Heise nearly broke down, too, but she kept her composure as she shared a group hug with her Gophers teammates, then with her family.

"I have a video saved of (Boreen and Skaja) coming up and hugging me," Heise said. "I feel like I must be doing something right if I'm fortunate enough to have teammates who are that incredibly supportive. The work I put in was all worth it.

"When you're working and training and doing things that no one sees, it's those little things you do in the dark that are the most rewarding."

And after the initial shock of winning "The Kaz" wore off, it was time to celebrate.

"We all went and got burgers," Heise said. "It was great."

When Taylor was 7 years old, Tony and Amy Heise remember coming to the realization that their young daughter was different, in a good way, from most kids her age.

"Taylor, when she was little she always wanted to try all different kinds of sports," said Amy Heise, who, like her husband, played college basketball at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. "We're a 'sports' family and we encouraged the kids to be active, to try new things."

One day, Taylor found her dad's pedal tractor, the small, made-for-children type of tractor that is pedal-powered.

"She would take that tractor, hook a wagon up to the back of it, add bricks to the wagon," Amy Heise said, "and we have a little gravel hill by our house. Taylor would drive her tractor with the bricks in the back up and down that hill."

Taylor so enjoyed the challenge of pulling more and more weight with her pedal tractor, and trying to get up and down the hill as quickly as possible, that her parents helped her enter pedal-pull competitions at nearby county fairs.

"She was pretty young at that age," Tony Heise said, "and she was competing against girls who were older and bigger than she was. There was a girl who was older and bigger, and they'd go back and forth beating each other. At that point, we knew how competitive Taylor was."

"She actually won a Minnesota state competition once," Amy Heise added. "So we drove her all the way out to South Dakota for a national pedal-pull. She was 7. And she took second place or something like that.

From then on, the Heises saw that same competitive fire in their daughter no matter what she was doing, whether it was volleyball or basketball with her Lake City classmates, or one-on-one against her brother Nate in the driveway.

"I'm a teacher and I know what 'normal' kids are like," Amy Heise said. "That wasn't normal. Even now she's constantly working on her craft, working to get better and knowing what she needs to work on. And she always knows what drills she's going to do. She always has a plan."

Tony and Amy Heise thought hockey would be a fad for Taylor, a quick few skates at the outdoor rink that gets flooded every winter in Lake City, then she'd be back on the basketball courts.

"It was like anything else," Amy Heise said. "She'd say 'I want to play volleyball or basketball,' and I'd say 'OK, go do that.'

"Then she said 'I want to play hockey' and I said 'no, you're not doing that.' Her dad said 'oh, just let her try.'

"She loved it so much every time we'd go skate (in Lake City)," Tony Heise said. "You think about that, in a town with no hockey and just that outdoor rink ... we'd go down there with our shovel and clear it off so she could skate."

"Within a year," Amy said, "people were saying that she's so naturally good, you need to look at other avenues for her to play."

With no youth or high school hockey teams in Lake City, that meant traveling to the Twin Cities to play youth and AAA hockey. Heise's parents estimate that, outside of the high school hockey season, Taylor would travel to the Twin Cities an average of four times per week from the time she was in fifth grade until she finished her high school career.

"I was a little bit of a psychopath about hockey," Taylor said with a laugh. "My parents were great supporters of me and my brothers growing up, and they pushed us every day to be better as athletes and as people. I was held accountable every day.

"I don't regret the times I spent as a kid shooting pucks for hours in the garage instead of going to birthday parties or something. I've put in the work; I don't need to work with a shooting instructor or personal coach now every week because I've put in the work. I did that as a kid."

When Taylor was in third grade, knowing there was no organized hockey in Lake City, she told her parents "I'm going to play hockey and I'll need to go to a different school."

"And I kept saying 'you're not switching school districts to play a sport,'" her mom said. "When she was in fifth grade I finally said 'I know. I get it.'"

After many internal family conversations as well as discussions with other friends and family, as well as hockey parents and coaches outside of southeastern Minnesota, the Heises decided Taylor's best bet was to open-enroll in the Red Wing school district as a seventh-grader.

Her grandpa, Ken Heise, lived just a mile away and had just retired from being a bus driver when Taylor open-enrolled at Red Wing.

So Ken would drive his granddaughter to and from school many days in the years before Taylor had a driver's license.

She joined the Wingers' varsity in the 2012-13 season as a seventh-grader and scored five goals and nine points on a team that was led by future Division I players Nicole Schammel, Paige Haley and Reagan Haley.

It was the start of one of the greatest high school careers ever for a girls hockey player in Minnesota. Over her six-year career, Heise helped Red Wing reach the state tournament four times (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018), scored 216 goals and had 370 points. She recorded 74 of those goals and 104 points as a senior, when she was named Minnesota's Miss Hockey and the USA Today national Player of the Year, in 2018.

"We had a few people say it's probably not the best thing to have her go to Red Wing," Tony Heise said. "It was a tough decision, but now looking back on it, it's by far the best thing she did. Red Wing ended up being really good for her and it was fortunate that the Red Wing program was on the rise when she started there. She had a lot of good players and coaches to learn from."

Brad Frost could see what everyone else was seeing. As he watched future Gophers Schammel and Paige Haley play throughout the latter stages of their high school careers, his eyes were also drawn to the young, skilled forward, who could make dazzling plays, but still needed to mature physically.

"From a young age, in seventh grade, Taylor was playing high school hockey and at that time she was kind of slight, taller, skinnier," said Frost, now in his 16th season as the Gophers' head coach. "You could tell she had the skills and ability, but just knew that once she continued to grow and mature, that she'd be a special player.

"To see her now, you look at her off the ice, she's an athlete. She's big, strong, powerful and her confidence has grown."

Heise has been everything — and more — Frost and the Gophers hoped she'd be when she arrived on campus in the fall of 2018, with plenty of hype. Heise was named the WCHA Preseason Rookie of the Year and she lived up to that honor, producing 35 points in 39 games.

She has grown as a player each season she's spent with Minnesota, entering this season with 67 career goals and 93 assists, for 160 points. After winning the Kazmaier Award — joining Krissy Wendell (2005) and Amanda Kessel (2013) as Gophers to win it — and being named the WCHA Player of the Year last season as a senior, Heise chose to take her optional fifth season that the NCAA granted players affected by the COVID pandemic.

"It's great having her back," Frost said. "Anytime you can get the Player of the Year back in college hockey, it's a good thing. More importantly, though, is having someone like Taylor, and her personality, and what she brings to the table on and off the ice, it's pretty special.

"It's been fun to see her continuing to become more comfortable and confident."

The decision to return for a fifth season has worked out well, as Heise leads the fifth-ranked Gophers (14-3-2 overall) in goals (13), assists (21) and points (34). She is just six points away from the 200-point mark for her career, but her sights are set on something other than individual honors.

"I want to take advantage of this (final) year," Heise said. "Hockey-wise, it's five years of my life that I'll never forget.

"A (national championship) is what I and we wanted last year, and it's what I want this year."

Heise has held onto a year-old box of apparel from USA Hockey. From shirts to sweatpants and jackets, it's all marked with the symbols of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, an event held in Beijing back in February.

The U.S. women came home from that event with a silver medal. Heise watched those Games from thousands of miles away, here in the U.S. She was left off the team's final roster, but was named an alternate. In the event a U.S. player wasn't able to play in the Games, Heise was eligible to be called in.

That call didn't come.

"That disappointment can either break people or it can make them stronger," Frost said. "Taylor is the type of person who, she used that as motivation.

"She's one of the best players in the world and she's only 22. I can see her with that (U.S.) national team for a long time. She will only grow and get better and become more comfortable at that national team level."

Heise channeled that negative emotion from being left off the Olympic team roster and turned it into a Kazmaier Award-winning, All-America and WCHA Player of the Year season.

She also used it as fuel last summer to make the U.S. national team for the 2022 Women's World Championships, which were held in Denmark in late August and early September.

"If you fail, you try again," she said. "I'm blessed to not have had a lot of failures, in that sense, with USA Hockey. Being left off that team is something I don't want to feel again."

Heise excelled at the camp in Buffalo that coach John Wroblewski and his staff used to pick the roster for last fall's World Championships, saying she wanted to not give the coaches a choice about keeping her this time.

She earned that roster spot and made happy phone calls to her parents, grandparents and brothers. But...

"The next morning I tested positive for COVID," she said. "I was sitting in my room with (fellow Gopher) Grace Zumwinkle, playing cards, when I got the news, and I just said to her 'you should probably leave now.'"

Instead of being isolated to her hotel room, Heise rented a car and drove, non-stop, 13 hours back to Lake City. She quarantined at her parents home, where she could still get outside to stay active and shoot pucks. Once her quarantine was lifted, she flew straight to Denmark, arriving the day before the tournament opener against Japan.

After what she called "the worst practice of my life," Heise went out and had a game to remember against Japan. In her debut at the international senior level, Heise had five assists in Team USA's 10-0 win. She didn't slow down, leading the tournament with 18 points (seven goals, 11 assists) and being named the tournament MVP as the U.S. brought home a silver medal.

"I went to all of her games when I was younger and I remember when she was a freshman, she looked like the best player on the ice," Heise's youngest brother Ryan, a 6-foot-9 senior guard/forward on the Lake City boys basketball team, said. "I was only in second or third grade, but I remember thinking how good she was then.

"It's been crazy, watching her along her journey. It's hard to believe sometimes."

More international competitions await Heise, for certain, when her college career concludes. She's expected to be a mainstay for the 2023, 2024 and 2025 World Championships, and she has her sights set on being in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, in February of 2026, for the next Winter Olympic Games.

"Until my body tells me I can't, I'll continue to do what I love," Heise said. "If I wake up one morning and realize it's not for me anymore, I won't force it. Every time I come home from (playing for Team USA), I have a smile on my face. I've had 22 years of fun and I'm looking forward to more."

------PAST SPORTS PEOPLE OF THE YEAR

2022 — Taylor Heise, Lake City / Red Wing, University of Minnesota, Team USA women's hockey.

2021 — Brody Lamb, Dodge County / University of Minnesota hockey.

2020 — Southeastern Minnesota senior athletes.

2019 — Alyssa Ustby, Lourdes multi-sport star.

2018 — Marcus Sherels, John Marshall, Gophers and Vikings football.

2017 — Brady Berge, Kasson-Mantorville wrestling.

2016 — Lucas Schott, USRA racing national champion.

2015 — Andrianna Jacobs, Rochester Century multi-sport star.

2014 — Maddie Damon, Kasson-Mantorville softball.

2013 — Sam Stoll, Kasson-Mantorville wrestling.

2012 — Mitch Brown, Rochester Century and professional baseball.

2011 — Caleb Leichtnam, Grand Meadow and RCTC football.

2010 — Aaron Senne, Rochester Mayo and professional baseball.

2009 — Maggie McNamara, Zumbrota-Mazeppa and Concordia St. Paul volleyball.

2008 — Alex Kangas, Century and Gophers hockey.

2007 — Zach Sanders, Wabasha-Kellogg and Gophers wrestling.

2006 — Ed Hruska, Rochester Amateur Sports Commission director.