Top shelf pair

Stephanie Tartaglino wasn’t even sure she’d scored until she saw the look on teammate Janessa Courtney’s face.

As Courtney threw her arms up and embraced her longtime teammate, Tartaglino realized the Big Sky Wildcats girls hockey team was headed to nationals after a 4-3 double-overtime victory over Team Wyoming in the Northern Plains District championship game on March 9.

“I seriously do not remember very much because of the adrenaline rush,” Tartaglino said. “All I remember is Janessa’s face lit up and she was just screaming.”

Tartaglino’s goal capped an intense three-game series in Gillette, Wyo., that gave the U-19 Wildcats, a team made up of the best girls hockey players from Montana and two from Idaho, their second-ever berth in USA Hockey’s Tier II National Championship tournament.

Courtney won a battle for the puck in the corner, threw a pass across the crease and Tartaglino tipped it past the Wyoming goaltender. The goal was Tartaglino’s fifth of the series and the latest example of her chemistry with Courtney, which began many years earlier when the two high school seniors were 5 years old.

The only players from the Flathead Valley who play for the Wildcats, Tartaglino of Kalispell and Courtney of Whitefish have anchored the Wildcats’ offense all season. Tartaglino leads the team with 31 goals and 15 assists in 29 games and Courtney is second in both categories with 15 goals and 14 assists in 22 games.

Courtney’s mother, Jill, said the two have such good chemistry it seems like they have walkie-talkies in their helmets. Steve Tartaglino, Stephanie’s father and head coach of the Wildcats, shared similar thoughts.

“It’s almost like one thinks the thought and the other one hears it,” he said.

That’s been a big advantage for a team that rarely practices together. With a roster of players from Kalispell to Bozeman to as far away as Miles City, the Wildcats only get together for weekend tournaments and practice with their local hockey associations.

On the ice, Tartaglino and Courtney have been joined at the hip since they learned to skate. Courtney got on the ice for the first time in figure skates when she was 3 years old. She had ditched the figure skates by the time she was 5 to play hockey like her older brother.

Stephanie had no interest in figure skating. She grabbed a pair of hockey skates when she was 3 and started playing a year later.

“She wasn’t interested in pretty dresses and figure skating,” Steve said. “She was much more interested in the hockey her older sister and her older brother were playing.”

Courtney and Stephanie teamed up at age 5 and have, for the most part, played together ever since. The result is a familiarity that makes them a potent offensive combination.

“She’s always there for you,” Courtney said of Stephanie. “Taking the puck in, she’s always behind me for a drop (pass) or going in towards the net for a pass. She’s really good at being in the right spot and letting me know if she’s there or not.”

Stephanie said she has a similar sense for where Courtney is on the ice.

“Whether she talks to me or not, I always know where she is,” she said.

It helps that they’re similar players. Steve describes both as aggressive forecheckers, a crucial element of the Wildcats’ scheme, which uses an active forecheck to disrupt its opponents’ systems.

“They’ve got a lot of the same attributes,” Steve said. “Both of those girls, if they go into a corner one-on-one with a player on the other team, 98 percent of the time they will come out with the puck.

“They’ve learned to trust that the other will win the battles, so when one player is battling, the other gets in a position to take advantage when the other player wins.”

That’s exactly what happened on the double-overtime goal that sent the Wildcats to nationals. As Stephanie describes it, Courtney went to the left corner of the offensive zone to battle for the puck while she crashed the net.

“Without even calling for it, Janessa knew where I was and just kind of flung it to me,” Stephanie said. “I wasn’t even ready, but I threw my stick on the ice. It tipped off my blade and beat the goalie.”

For all their similarities on the ice, their personalities are quite different. A shy girl who enjoys longboarding and has a taste in music ranging from, as she puts it, “rap to Disney,” Courtney prefers to lead by example.

“I’ve always been shy, but I’ve definitely come out of my shell a lot the last couple years,” Courtney said. “It’s hard because when I was younger I’d have the older girls that I was kind of afraid of and now that I’m older there’s younger girls looking up to me.”

Stephanie’s challenge has been channeling her strong personality. She’s engaging, outgoing and admits she has “a really loud voice.” She’s also a fierce competitor, which her dad says is her greatest strength.

“She lives life on offense, even when she’s not playing hockey,” Steve said. “She carries that on the ice with her and plays with that kind of attitude.

“She’s matured immensely as a player. One of the things she’s struggled with because she’s so competitive is when things don’t go her way, as competitive players tend to do, she tends to get frustrated. Not being a good loser is a good way to put it, but she’s grown immensely in that and I think that comes with maturity as an athlete.”

Stephanie joined the Wildcats as a seventh-grader when her dad took over as coach. He said she wouldn’t make the team but invited her to tryout. Her ability caught the eye of the assistant coach, who convinced Steve leaving the youngster off the roster would be a mistake.

She was reunited with Courtney a year later and the two played together until Courtney went to live with her uncle in Connecticut her sophomore year of high school.

“I wanted to see what hockey was like across the country,” Courtney said.

With Courtney in Connecticut, Stephanie and the Wildcats topped Wyoming 1-0 in their district championship game to reach the national tournament for the first time. They went 2-1 in pool play at nationals to reach the quarterfinals, where a 7-1 loss to Vermont sent them home. Stephanie had four goals and one assist in the four games.

“It was definitely a crazy experience,” she said. “Being a team out of Montana, you didn’t ever think you were going to make it to a national tournament, so it was definitely eye-opening to see that there is a bigger hockey world than in Montana.”

That run raised expectations the following season. Courtney returned and added a new dimension to the offense, but Steve said his team might have been too confident heading into the district tournament. The Wildcats advanced to the championship game before losing 5-1 to Wyoming.

“Because we had beat them the year before and most of our players were coming back, I think there was an attitude that we would just do it again,” Steve said. “And I don’t think they conditioned themselves and prepared themselves mentally as well as they could’ve. They just ran out of gas in the district playoff.”

Part of that fatigue was the result of a five-overtime marathon against Wyoming in pool play, but that didn’t stop Wyoming from firing on all cylinders in the championship.

“They just wanted it a little more I guess,” Courtney said. “It was tough because I knew we could play with them.”

This season Steve assembled a murderous schedule to ensure the Wildcats would be battle-tested prior to the district tournament. They finished the regular season with a record of 7-15-4, which Steve said was a success given the competition they faced.

“The big dance for us is this district playoff tournament because they want to advance onto nationals,” he said. “So all of the tournaments leading up to that we look at as practice and getting ready.”

One of those tough opponents was the Colorado Tigers, who finished second at last year’s Tier II national tournament. The Wildcats lost 4-1, but Steve said the game was more competitive than the final score and the Wildcats were missing a couple key players.

The Wildcats finished the regular season in Missoula with a three-game series against a team from Cranbrook, British Columbia. They won the first game before losing the next two.

“The team that we played in Missoula before we went down to our districts was one of the best teams in British Columbia at the midget Tier I level,” Steve said. “We matched ourselves against them because we knew it would be a challenge.”

The district tournament pitted the Wildcats in a best-of-three series with Wyoming, continuing what had become an intense rivalry.

“Janessa and I are good friends with some of the girls on the Wyoming team,” Stephanie said. “So it’s always been kind of a friendly competition, but I definitely think the district championship is one exception. It’s kind of like a bloody coup. It’s do or die for both teams, but I think we really wanted it more this year.”

The Wildcats rolled to a 6-0 win in game one and led 3-1 after two periods of game two, but Wyoming stormed back with four goals in the final period, forcing a deciding game three.

“We kind of lost focus a little bit,” Courtney said.

Momentum swung back and forth in game three before Stephanie found the back of the net in double overtime.

“The majority of the time I was biting my tongue because I thought they were going to score on us,” Stephanie said of the first overtime. “Definitely an emotional game. Even thinking about it now I get the same adrenaline rush. There was definitely enough chances for both teams to advance.”

“Since I didn’t go to nationals two years ago and it’s my senior year, I left everything out on the ice,” Courtney added. “I worked as hard as I could and it paid off.”

The Wildcats are currently raising money to help pay for the cost of traveling to San Jose, Calif., where Tier II U-19 national tournament will take place April 3-7.

Courtney and Stephanie would both like to play hockey in college, but they haven’t finalized their plans for next year. Courtney is leaning toward studying civil engineering, and Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., is among her top choices. Stephanie is leaning toward studying nursing at Stevenson University in Maryland.