Moscow High School senior Amanda Pouchnik comes from a family with winter sports in their blood. That passion has paid dividends, with Pouchnik recently accepting a partial scholarship to play hockey collegiately at NCAA Division III University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Pouchnik’s mother, Brenda Bokyo, is a board member for the Moscow Ice Rink and originally is from Canada. Amanda’s father, Derek Pouchnik, hails from Minnesota. Mom and Dad are competitive lumberjacks and met at a competition.
The couple’s affinity for winter sports resulted in Amanda and younger brother, Chase Pouchnik, signing up to play hockey.
“We waited to start Amanda (in hockey) until she was 6 because Chase was obsessed with hockey and he couldn’t start until he was 4,” Boyko said. “And he wouldn’t understand if she was playing and he didn’t get to play.
“She just took off. She already had taken some dance classes, and I think that helped her ankle strength. So, she put skates on her feet and she was just a natural skater.”
But because Moscow does not offer hockey in either gender as a varsity sport, Amanda Pouchnik has honed her craft by playing on various different national youth league and travel teams, one of which recently won the Idaho state title. Amanda’s coach for that and many other of her teams has been Derek Pouchnik.
“It’s awesome. It’s super fulfilling as a coach and a dad,” Derek Pouchnik said. “She’s had other coaches who have sent her to camps and things like that, so she’s experienced different coaching. But it’s pretty fulfilling to know I played a big role in it.”
Idaho is not a traditional hockey hotbed, particularly on the women’s side. In 2019, five native Idahoans played hockey at the Division I level. All were men, and four were from southern Idaho.
Amanda Pouchnik played on the Idaho state hockey travel team, and it was at that point, meeting with college coaches, that she realized playing collegiately was a possibility.
“We set up a lot of different tours of schools in Colorado, we did camps in Minnesota where we toured schools,” Amanda Pouchnik said. “So that really got me interested and it made me realize that I had a future in hockey and that I could actually get something out of it.”
In sports offered to men and women across all NCAA divisions, hockey is one of the most gender-disproportionate with 138 men’s college teams compared to just 108 for women. Men’s hockey can be found at all three levels of the NCAA, but women’s hockey is in just two divisions. In Division III, there are 84 men’s teams and 67 women’s teams.
“Being from Canada, we have a rink in every town,” Bokyo said. “Every small community has an ice rink. When I grew up, I loved hockey — but I couldn’t play hockey growing up because girls couldn’t play hockey. So, it was phenomenal to me to see that there’s an opportunity for (Amanda Pouchnik) to play hockey.”
Amanda Pouchnik, who also just began the spring season for the Moscow softball team, still has some hockey left to play before she begins her collegiate studies in Stevens Point.
Her U18 hockey team, the Idaho Jr. Steelheads, will compete in the USA Hockey high school girls national championships from March 23-27 in Plymouth, Minn. The 12-team event has two six-team divisions, with the top four in each advancing to the knockout stage. The final takes place at 9:15 a.m. Pacific on March 27.
The Jr. Steelheads will face Team Texas on March 23, Shattuck-St. Mary’s (Maine) on March 24 and the Omaha (Neb.) Lady Lancers on March 25 in pool play. Shattuck-St. Mary’s is the No. 1-ranked U18 team in the country.
And Amanda Pouchnik hopes this is not the end, but the beginning of her journey.
“I was born into (hockey),” Amanda Pouchnik said. “I just love that my whole family can connect over it. We all just love the sport. It’s a lot more intense than softball or anything. It revolves around our family. We’re very ‘go, go, go,’ which is just like hockey.”
