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MICHELLE NOLAN
FOR THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
Nine-year-old Meghan Kraus especially loves the centerpiece of her bedroom decorations. It’s a hockey puck.
The fourth-grader at Geneva Elementary School used that precious puck to score the first goal of her life.
That was a long time ago in Meghan years. She was only 7.
Now she’s a 4-foot-2, 58- pound athlete who contributed five goals and seven assists in her first six games this fall for the Whatcom Warriors Atom Rep team, a select squad of local 9- and 10-year-olds.
Meghan is the only girl on the squad, which is off to a 4-1-1 start.
She also has been chosen to play on the Northwest Selects. The new all-girl under-12 team, made up of the best young female players from Washington and Oregon, will play in three tournaments.
Two teams aren’t enough for Meghan, however. On Saturday night, after playing in two games that day, she will skate with the Vancouver Canucks before they face off against the Minnesota Wild in Vancouver.
That’s right. Meghan has hit the big time.
She was chosen for the McDonald’s “In the Lineup” program, which allows one 8- to 13-year-old hockey player to skate out with the players for the pre-game anthem in front of more than 16,000 fans at GM Place. The honor goes only to youngsters with exceptional skating ability. Allison Kraus, Meghan’s mother, said her Whatcom Warriors coach, Craig Roth, vouched for her skill level on the ice.
Meghan also is proud that the Whatcom Warriors novice team (6- to 8-year-olds) will play a game at halftime of the Dec. 16 contest between the Canucks and the Wild.
Meghan’s 11-year-old sister, Emily, isn’t into hockey, but she doesn’t mind serving as Meghan’s unofficial publicist.
Emily offered a plausible explanation for what makes Meghan such an accomplished hockey player at a young age.
“Meghan has some muscle,” Emily said. With that, Meghan flexed.
Meghan added a more telling detail.
“I can also skate backward and I’m fast,” she said.
Another older-sister moment ensued when Emily was asked why Meghan wanted to play hockey in the first place.
“She wanted to hit people with sticks,” Emily said.
Allison Kraus smiled and said she rapidly disavowed her daughter of that notion.
“We quickly explained to Meghan that she couldn’t do that, and it wasn’t a good reason to want to play hockey, but she still wanted to play,” her mother said.
Meghan, of course, doesn’t back down from a hard check. She can give as good as she gets. And with her skating skills, she is one of the quicker players on the ice in every match.
Meghan spent two long years learning the fundamentals of the game before she scored her first goal.
“I was a bad player, and then I scored a goal. It was cool and I was happy,” she said.
Allison said Roth, sensing it would mean something for Meghan, retrieved the puck and presented it to her. A poster of Brett Hull seems to look proudly down on the souvenir in her bedroom.
“I was so happy I cried when she got that goal,” Allison said. “I remember she had a breakaway. I was so excited for her.”
Meghan’s athleticism comes in part through genetics. Allison played softball in Oklahoma in her youth but didn’t know a thing about hockey when she moved to Washington.
Allison recalled how happy Meghan was when the family moved from Ocean Springs, Miss., in March of 2002. Meghan, it seems, turned out to be in an ice princess in waiting.
“I was just happy to see snow,” Meghan said. “I had never seen it. And it was just too hot down there.”
The move proved beneficial in another way, more important than hockey. Her old home no longer exists, thanks to Hurricane Katrina.
Meghan attended Bellingham’s Lowell Elementary, then spent a year in Sedro-Woolley before moving to Sudden Valley. This is her first year at Geneva, where many of her classmates also are her teammates.
“What’s really neat is that a lot of the boys on my hockey team are in school with me,” she said.
Her mother said those boys have been supportive of Meghan’s hockey success.
“The boys on her team are fantastic and they really stick up for her,” she said.
Her first hockey lessons more than four years ago came from Garth Butcher, the former NHL player who is director of hockey at the Sportsplex, and his son, Matt. Meghan’s mother noted Matt is now on a hockey scholarship at Northern Michigan University.
As for how long she plans to play hockey, Meghan gives the standard response of a youngster in love with her sport. “Forever,” she said.
When you’re 9 years old, that’s a lot of hockey to play — and a lot of pucks to collect. |
