Ellen Weinberg-Hughes is invested in both Olympic hockey tournaments. Weinberg-Hughes, who starred for the U.S. women's national team in the early 1990s, is the mother of current U.S. men's players Jack Hughes and Quinn Hughes. She'll be in Milan in a working capacity as a player development consultant for the women's team.
What began with excited texts years ago led to her unique role at the Milan Cortina Games.
After John Wroblewski became the new U.S. women's head coach following the 2022 Beijing Games, Weinberg-Hughes messaged him, gushing about the player talent he inherited.
Weinberg-Hughes and Wroblewski already were familiar. Wroblewski previously coached Weinberg-Hughes' three sons — Quinn, Jack and Luke — as teens with the men's national team development program.
Wroblewski's response to Weinberg-Hughes' texts: "Hey, can we talk?"
Turns out, USA Hockey wanted to hire somebody to work both as a scout and in player development.
Weinberg-Hughes' vast hockey experience made her a viable candidate: winning a 1992 World Championship silver medal, covering the first Olympic women's hockey tournament as a broadcaster, raising three sons who became top-10 NHL draft picks and staying connected to the ice since through skills and skating lessons.
The timing worked, too. By then, Quinn and Jack were in the NHL. Luke also was out of the house, at the University of Michigan. She still was plenty busy, but the opportunity became more feasible once USA Hockey divided up the opening into two roles. She joined the women's national team as a player development consultant in 2023.
Weinberg-Hughes described her job as "a shoulder to lean on, kind of a mediator between the players and the coaching staff. Someone the women could trust and have a hard conversation with."
In 2024, Weinberg-Hughes helped Laila Edwards transition from forward to defense months after Edwards tied for the goals lead at the world championship and was named MVP (the move was Edwards' idea). Weinberg-Hughes said Edwards is so talented she didn't need much assistance.
"Really, the only thing I gave her was the courage to do what she wants," she said. "It's her vision, it's her life, and she needs to be the player she wants to be. And whatever position that is, we will support her."
Edwards worked with the same skills coaches who taught Luke and Quinn.
"Ellen was definitely one of the biggest factors in helping me with that switch, just being there to talk through things and make sure (I'm) making the right decision," she said.
Edwards just is one example of Weinberg-Hughes' six-degrees-of-separation type value to the national team. Edwards' coach at the University of Wisconsin, Miracle on Ice Olympic gold medalist Mark Johnson, was Weinberg-Hughes' hockey camp counselor in the 1980s.
Weinberg-Hughes also linked players with skating coaches, doled out advice on agents and even helped one national teamer with the curve of her stick.
"I just listen and see," she said. "I'm not the expert. What I can do is I'm the connector. So I can get them to the expert. I'm the person that can connect them and find the answer."
Weinberg-Hughes traces her hockey journey to wanting to play just like her older brother, Adam. There were no girls' teams in the Dallas area when she was 8 years old, so she was allowed to play with the boys.
As a 12-year-old with braces, she told a local TV station her goal was to become a professional hockey player.
But her first time wearing a Team USA jersey actually came in soccer. Her club team of high schoolers, the Dallas Sting, won an international tournament in Xi'an, China, in 1984, one year before the U.S. women's national team was formed.
Weinberg-Hughes remembers stadiums filled with thousands of spectators -- many traveling there by bicycle -- the beautiful pagodas and one cross-country train ride that lasted 24 to 48 hours.
"I was trying to do algebra and had the older girls teaching me," she said.
Weinberg-Hughes' best friend with the Sting — and still a very close friend — was Carla Overbeck, who went on to captain the groundbreaking 1999 Women's World Cup team.
She also played with a young Mia Hamm in Texas — Hamm is four years her junior, but her talent already was evident. Weinberg-Hughes said she roomed with Brandi Chastain, another 1999 World Cup hero, at a youth national team camp.
When she chose to matriculate at the University of New Hampshire in 1986, hockey became her primary sport (even though she was there on a soccer scholarship).
In April 1992, Weinberg-Hughes donned another USA jersey for the second edition of the Women's World Hockey Championship.
By the end, she made the tournament all-star team of six players. The others were four future Hockey Hall of Famers (American Cammi Granato, Canadians Angela James and Geraldine Heaney and Finland's Riikka Sallinen), plus Canadian goalie Manon Rheaume, who later that year in an NHL preseason game became the first woman to play in one of the four major North American professional sports leagues.
Three months after that world championship, the IOC approved women's hockey's Olympic inclusion starting with the 1998 Nagano Games. Weinberg-Hughes, and her generation born in the 1960s, had hoped the debut would be four years earlier at the Lillehammer Games. Hanging on for another four years would be difficult given the rising college talent.
After Ben Smith was named the U.S. head coach in 1996, he asked some post-collegians, including Weinberg-Hughes, to train together for a smaller international tournament. She did, but then blew out her knee — requiring ACL, MCL and meniscus surgery — less than two years before the 1998 Olympics. That was the end of her playing career.
"It's all good," she said. "I was one of the lucky ones that got to be a part of it and to witness and watch what these amazing women did."
She ended up on site at both the 1998 Nagano Games and the 1999 World Cup — each won by the U.S. in landmark women's sports moments — as a broadcaster.
"Those were celebrations of what female sports could do at the time and where we wanted to take it," she said. "I really believe that was an incredible turning point for both of those sports in our country."
Weinberg-Hughes then left TV to spend more time raising her three sons along with husband Jim, the former Toronto Maple Leafs director of player development.
"She put us before herself," said Quinn, who remembers regular Tim Hortons pit stops for blueberry muffins before childhood games.
Weinberg-Hughes believes there's a box at home with a tape of her career highlights, and that the boys have seen grainy footage of her back when women played with men's sticks that were cut down. Granato has said Quinn plays just like his mom.
"She's not, like, basking in her glory," son Jack said. "But we definitely know the kind of athlete she was."
Andy Dougherty and Marisa Marcellino contributed to this report.