BEIJING, CHINA – FEBRUARY 06: Ni Lin (91) of Crew China controls the puck in opposition to Crew Japan throughout the Girls’s Preliminary Spherical Group B match at Wukesong Sports activities Middle on February 06, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Photograph by Elsa/Getty Photos)
Nicely earlier than she went on to play hockey on the Division I degree for 4 years and as an expert for near a decade, San Jose native Rachel Llanes spoke overtly about her aim of sometime competing within the Olympic Video games.
“On the time, you thought it might be with Crew USA, not with China,” stated Rod Romanchuk, Llanes’ former coach with the San Jose Jr. Sharks. “She was all the time the most effective gamers on the staff and it’s no shock to seek out the place she is immediately as a result of she was simply so passionate and clearly very proficient.
“You mix these two issues collectively and it’s a profitable recipe.”
From beginning the game when she was round 10 years outdated — enjoying road hockey in her neighborhood and skating on the since-closed Eastridge Ice Enviornment — Llanes, now 30, realized her dream of competing within the Olympic Winter Video games in Beijing this month as a member of the Chinese language nationwide staff.
“We're so proud. That was her dream since she was younger to go to the Olympics, and it occurred,” Tess Llanes, Rachel’s mom, instructed NBC Bay Space. “I'm so glad she fulfilled her dream.”
Llanes’ largest spotlight on the Video games got here final Friday in opposition to Denmark as she scored the go-ahead aim with 50.9 seconds left within the third interval to assist carry China to a 3-1 win.
China missed a possibility, although, to clinch a spot within the quarterfinals with a 2-1 loss to Sweden early Monday. China completed 2-2 within the preliminary spherical and in fourth place in Group B, the place solely the highest three groups advance, assembly all 5 groups in Group A within the quarterfinals, which start Friday.
Llanes’ causes for eager to play hockey as a child rising up in San Jose weren't unusual for gamers of that age.
“I favored it higher than different sports activities,” Llanes stated in an interview posted on the Olympics’ web site. “There’s contact and it’s quick.”
Romanchuk estimated that near 40 women who got here by means of the Jr. Sharks program throughout the 2000s went on to play faculty hockey, however Llanes’ ardour for the game was unequalled.
“She was by far essentially the most intense and centered Jr. Shark woman that I coached in my profession,” Romanchuk stated. “She was all the time in search of methods to get higher, beloved the game. I feel the older she obtained, she fell in love with the game extra.”
Llanes performed from 2009 to 2013 at Northeastern College in Boston earlier than she started an expert profession that has taken her throughout the globe.
She performed with the Boston Blades of the Canadian Girls’s Hockey League from 2013 to 2015 and the Boston Pleasure of the Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League from 2015 to 2017. For the previous four-plus years, she has competed for Chinese language-based skilled groups. 
“Numerous women had been fairly passionate in regards to the sport once they had been 12, 13, 14, 15, however then they begin getting different pursuits,” Romanchuk added. “Faculty, boys, simply possibly not hockey. However she by no means misplaced that zeal, that burning need to be the easiest, and I feel that’s what set her except for the opposite women.
“That depth simply grew and grew.”
Llanes, a graduate of Gunderson Excessive Faculty in San Jose, performed in Beijing by the title Ni Lin, as all foreign-born gamers on the lads’s and ladies’s hockey groups have been given Chinese language names.
In accordance to a Reuters report, the lads’s staff has 10 China-born gamers on its 25-player roster and solely 11 of the 23 gamers on the ladies’s staff had been born within the nation. Each the lads’s and ladies’s groups added a number of gamers from North America to attempt to scale back the aggressive imbalance between themselves the standard hockey powers.
Llanes is of Filipino-American descent.
“She arrange her targets as soon as a month after which quarterly after which long-term to go to the Olympics,” Tess Llanes stated. “We're very pleased with her.”
Llanes is the primary participant in girls’s ice hockey to win championships within the CWHL (2015), NWHL (2016), and Zhenskaya Hockey League (2020). The league has 9 groups in Russia and one in China, the Shenzhen KRS Vanke Rays, which Llanes has performed for since 2018.
“I instructed her wherever you go,” Tess Llanes stated, “I do know you'll be the perfect you could be.”
“She may play on the subsequent Olympics, too,” Romanchuk stated of the 2026 video games in Italy. “I wouldn’t put it by her (to play) eight years from now as a result of she’s nonetheless loving it.”