This may be Lauren Zary’s first term as captain of the Huskies women’s hockey team, but she’s already well ahead of the pack when it comes to fulfilling her role. As team leader, she brings both dedication and enthusiasm to the job.

So far this year, Zary has already led the Huskies to victory over the University of British Columbia Thunderbirds — the only team to do so this season. She has been named a Canada West third star athlete and Huskie Athlete of the Week.

Despite these honours, Zary still cites being named captain by her fellow players as her best achievement in 2016.

“To be pointed out by a bunch of girls and that they put faith in you as a leader — that was — it definitely tugged some heartstrings there. I hope I’m doing a good job. I try and lead

Lauren Zary is captain of the women’s hockey team this year.

Currently in her third year of a mechanical engineering degree, Zary has been playing hockey since she was four years old. She credits her family for inspiring her initial love of the game.

“My whole life it’s pretty much been hockey,” Zary said, “I just fell in love with the game. My dad would always make a rink in our backyard, you know, kind of flood everything and paint professional blue lines and stuff. My brother was a goalie, so I’d go and shoot on him. I grew up playing hockey with the boys.”

After graduating high school in Saskatoon, Zary spent two years playing hockey at Brown University in Providence, RI. Although her time there was valuable, she says that it also caused her to lose some of her initial passion for the sport.

“The environment with my old team at Brown — it wasn’t the same as here and I definitely think I lost a lot of that passion for the game, and then I kind of took a year off and didn’t really think I was ever going to play hockey again,” Zary said.

However, it wasn’t long before she noticed that without the thrill of competition, something significant was absent from her life.

“I think that was just a big thing that was missing from my life — just the competition of the sport, and just getting fired up for every game and even every practice, and just getting to challenge yourself and challenge everyone else around you and make people better,” Zary said.

Although the 2016-17 season is already half over, there’s still plenty ahead for the women’s hockey team. Currently, the team has its sights set on the Canadian Interuniversity Sport women’s hockey championship being held this spring at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

“That’s definitely our number one goal. I know we had our team meeting at the start of the year [and] they had a picture of the rink [in Kingston] up there just to keep it in the back of our minds that that’s our end goal. That’s where we want to be, and that’s where we hope to be,” Zary said.

There are many reasons why Zary loves hockey besides the competition — she is also proud of her ability to be a positive role model for other young women. She recounts a story about two young girls that recently came to see a Huskies’ game.

“I guess the whole background of the story was their aunt had to bring them because they didn’t believe that girls actually played hockey. They didn’t believe it was real. They’d see [female players] on TV and think that it’s fake. So [she] brought them to the game to show them that girls’ hockey was real indeed,” Zary said. “I guess [one of the girls] had said … ‘I want to be a boy because boys can do more than girls.’”

However, if Zary’s success is any indication, the next generation of female hockey players won’t have much to worry about. Until then, Zary is happy to continue smashing expectations with the same determination she uses to play her sport.

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Emily Klatt / Sports & Health Editor

Photo: Josh Schaefer / GetMyPhoto.ca / Supplied