The top Minnesota girls hockey players born in 2000 have been selected to participate in USA Hockey’s Girls’ 15 National Player Development Camp. The national camp serves as the final component of the CCM Minnesota Hockey High Performance Programs and will be held at St. Cloud State University on July 17-23 in St. Cloud, MN.

This past week 102 of the top girls’ hockey players in Minnesota participated in the Girls’ HP 15 Summer Camp in St. Cloud, MN.  The summer camp provides the girls with an intense week of on- and off-ice training designed to help them take their game to the next level.

“You learn so much from the coaches,” said Amy Menke, who participated in the camp in 2010 and returned as a counselor this year. “They want you to take away something every time you’re on the ice or doing a different activity. I remember one of the coaches for example told me, ‘When I shoot, I need to shoot to score. Don’t just shoot to shoot.’”

With the players hitting the ice for one practice and one game each day, they had numerous opportunities to learn from high quality coaches including Erik Fabian from the University of North Dakota and Ohio State’s recent hire, Jenny Potter.  The girls also had daily off-ice training sessions to build strength and athleticism, as well as a variety of speakers and classroom sessions.

“During dinner every night, we would have a different speaker come and talk to the girls,” said second year counselor Sara Bustad, who currently plays for Minnesota State University, Mankato. “We had Brad Frost from the Gophers talk about what it was like to be a Division I college hockey player. We also had the head coach from Augsburg come and talk about D-III hockey. Realistically, not every girl there is going to and play Division I hockey so it’s pretty cool to give them looks at both sides of collegiate hockey.”

While having the opportunity to listen and learn from the coaches certainly created a fantastic environment for development, the best part for the girls may have been connecting with their counselors, all of whom currently play at the Division I or Division III level.

“Being their counselor, we made a close bond where they could ask me questions that maybe they didn’t want to ask a college coach,” said Menke, who finished with a career high 15 goals and 28 points at North Dakota this past season.  “They asked questions pretty much all throughout the day every day on the college process.”

Regardless of what the highlight was for each girl, the camp provided a platform for each of them to take the next step in their development as hockey players. For the 39 girls selected to participate in the national camp, that step will come this July, but now, all of the girls know what it takes to compete at the level they aspire to.

“They can do anything they set their mind to,” said Bustad. “If they want to go play Division I collegiate hockey, it’s completely within their reach. If they want to go beyond that and play for the U.S. National team or even the Olympic team, it’s definitely there. They just have to be willing to work hard enough and set away that time to make sure they get to that level.”

For a list of selectees and alternates for the 2015 USA Hockey Girls’ 15 National Player Development camp and details on the registration process for both the national camp and Minnesota’s Pre-National Camp, click here.

To view the 2015 Girls’ HP 15 Summer Camp rosters and results, click here.

The CCM Minnesota Hockey High Performance Programs are conducted in conjunction with USA Hockey and are referred to as “Select” programs in other parts of the country. The national festivals/camps are used by USA Hockey to identify the top performers in each age group for possible opportunities to represent the U.S.A. at advanced levels of national and international hockey competition.