PWHL
“I feel the least amount of pressure I’ve ever felt in my life,” Brandt said. “I can just play free, and I’m having so much fun.”
Fleet center Hannah Brandt enters her final playoffs with one goal: to win the Walter Cup. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
April 28, 2026 | 11:17 AM
5 minutes to read
Hannah Brandt showed up five days late to her first day of physicians assistant school in an unfamiliar city, physically and mentally exhausted, with a broken bone in her left hand.
She was only about 36 hours removed from losing the decisive fifth game of the 2024 Walter Cup Finals. If there’s ever a reason to cut school, that may be it.
Brandt and the Fleet — then called PWHL Boston — lost to Minnesota, 3-0, on May 29, 2024, to end the league’s inaugural season. The following afternoon, she hopped on a flight to Madison, Wis., and by the next morning, she was sitting in a lecture hall — in someone else’s seat, because she didn’t know they had been assigned at the beginning of the week.
It had been nearly a decade since Brandt was in school, and she felt like she was learning everything for the first time. A classmate had to show her how to download recorded lectures onto her iPad.
And to top it all off, the first exam was in three days.
“I was not doing well, but hey, I survived,” Brandt said. “I knew if I could get through that exam I would get through school, because I was like, ‘This is going to be the hardest thing I have to do.’ ”
Brandt, like many women’s hockey players of her era, spent years juggling hockey and a full-time job, pining after a world in which she could focus all her energy on her sport. Just as that dream became her reality with the advent of the PWHL in 2023, Brandt returned to balancing full-time school with full-time hockey — but this time, on her terms.
She never expected to make it this far. Brandt’s original plan was to play one PWHL season before retiring, but here she is three seasons later, watching lectures on the plane to road games and getting quizzed on exam questions by the Fleet’s athletic trainers.
At the end of this season, Brandt will hang up her skates for good as she prepares for her final year of PA school at Wisconsin — but she’s going to fight tooth and nail to make her final season last as long as possible.
“I believe in this team,” she said. “I want to win it all in my last season.”
Brandt’s story was common in previous iterations of professional women’s hockey in North America. The 32-year-old was part of the push in the late 2010s that laid the foundation for a legitimate professional women’s hockey league in North America, meaning she was on the front lines as league after league cropped up and then folded.
That’s why the timing made sense to apply to PA school before the inaugural PWHL season in 2023. She knew she’d have something she’s passionate about to fall back on should the league fail like so many others before it.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2016, Brandt lived with her parents and played for her hometown Whitecaps in the National Women’s Hockey League, a precursor to the PWHL. The team practiced a couple times a week at 10 p.m., and drove rented vans around the country for games, often scrimmaging college teams.
She trained for the Olympics by herself in empty rinks and worked as a certified nurse assistant at a children’s hospital. In 2019, she signed on with the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, which led a boycott of the NWHL over inadequate salaries and resources such as health insurance.
Heading into the 2022 Olympics, Brandt was nearing the end of her rope. She was one of the last cuts from the World Championship team. Hanging up her skates and starting school began to feel like the only option.
“It was kind of like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ” she said. “I felt no purpose because I wasn’t even playing hockey — not really — and I could’ve been helping people and working. It was hard to be at that age feeling like I could do so much more with my life, and I wasn’t.”
But she decided if she didn’t make a push for the Olympic team, she’d regret it. Brandt made the team and won her second Olympic medal, a silver. She was cut from the World Championship team the following year, and that’s when she decided to send in her PA school applications.
Hannah Brandt (center) won her second Olympic medal, a silver, in 2022 in Beijing. – Elsa
There were rumblings of the PWHL starting up at the time, but after enduring one failed iteration of women’s professional hockey after another, Brandt was a healthy skeptic. Five-time Olympian Hilary Knight encouraged her to keep the faith, telling her a better future wasn’t far off.
“I should never doubt her, but I was just like … how?” Brandt said. “I went through so much bad stuff that I never thought we would get to this point.”
Boston drafted Brandt in the fifth round, and she was up front with general manager Danielle Marmer about her plans to leave hockey for school the following summer. But then the possibility of attending a hybrid program at Wisconsin popped up, and Brandt seized it.
Last season, during her first year of PA school, Brandt spent 4-5 hours each day on school work. That number is now closer to 2-3 hours. Brandt tries not to study while the team is together, so she gets most of her work done on flights while everyone else is sleeping.
As the only one on the team in her situation, it’s hard to tear herself away from the living room of the house she shares with Megan Keller and a rotating cast of other players, only locking herself in her room when she must cram for an exam.
Brandt prioritizes team dinners and outings when she can, and she’s soaking up every second she gets on the ice.
“I feel the least amount of pressure I’ve ever felt in my life,” Brandt said. “I can just play free, and I’m having so much fun.”
The center has three assists and is yet to score this season, marking a significant drop in production from her first two PWHL seasons (10 points in 2024, 11 points in 2024-25), but she’s not worried about the numbers.
Neither is coach Kris Sparre, who said her value isn’t rooted in her point total. When his friends visited Boston for the Fleet’s game at TD Garden, he encouraged them to isolate her on the ice and watch for her craftiness, intelligence, and her ability to perform in high-pressure situations.
“I put her in every shootout, and she scores,” Sparre said. “There’s a reason for that.”
Now, Brandt enters her final playoffs with one goal: to win the Walter Cup.
“With Hannah, she’s all on board to win in her final year,” Sparre said. “When you have that type of buy-in, what a great way that would be for her to go out. We can rally around that as a team.”
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