Megan Keller’s overtime goal clinched Olympic gold for the U.S. women’s team in Milan and became an instant, big-stage introduction to the defender from Farmington Hills, Mich.
Casual fans would soon learn that Keller captains the Boston Fleet of the PWHL and that she played four years at Boston College, where she twice won the Cammi Granato Award as the Hockey East Player of the Year.
Sports fans also learned that all 23 players on the women’s team played NCAA hockey or are still college players.
Four days later when Jack Hughes repeated Keller’s feat to give the U.S. men an OT gold medal victory, fans would hear that two of the four U.S. players on the ice for that goal – the Columbus Blue Jackets’ Zach Werenski and the Detroit Red Wings’ Dylan Larkin – played NCAA hockey together for a year at the University of Michigan.
Like Keller, Werenski and Larkin are both Michigan natives. All three grew up in suburbs of Detroit. Unlike her male counterparts, though, Keller didn’t have the opportunity to play college hockey in her home state. There are no Division I women’s hockey programs in Michigan.
Michigan has seven Division I men’s programs.
“There’s nothing here for women,” said Jenna Trubiano. “It’s a men’s hockey state for sure, but it’s not for women’s hockey.”
Trubiano, a native of southeast Michigan, played four years of women’s Division I club hockey at the University of Michigan before joining the coaching staff as an assistant in 2018 and serving as head coach from 2020 to 2025.
Trubiano now advises a group led by University of Michigan Regent Denise Ilitch that is trying to bring a Division I NCAA women’s team to Michigan. Ilitch is the daughter of Mike and Marian Ilitch, who purchased the Detroit Red Wings in 1982. Ilitich Companies still owns the Red Wings as well as the Detroit Tigers baseball team.
At a Michigan Board of Regents meeting in March 2024, Ilitch and other regents called for a feasibility study to explore bringing a women’s team to Ann Arbor. That study, published in October 2024, has been simmering on the back burner while the university has been occupied with its presidential search and an ongoing investigation into former football coach Sherrone Moore.
Trubiano said that there’s a “very committed group working behind the scenes” to move a plan forward and stressed that there’s no better time than now to plan for women’s Wolverines hockey.
“With the significance of the women’s hockey team at the Olympics and showing what the product is, and the PWHL, and the Takeover Tour game in Detroit this year and another one coming up in March,” said Trubiano, “we feel very strongly that this needs to happen.”
The feasibility study, authored by Collegiate Sports Associates, estimated that it would cost between $300 to $330 million to build a rink to house a new women’s program. While the study stated that Title IX considerations were not “in the scope” of that project, it said that “Title IX implications must be considered when potentially sponsoring a new varsity sport.”
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 says, in part, that education programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance cannot discriminate based on sex. There is no way to retrofit Michigan’s Yost Ice Arena to provide a women’s team with accommodations equal to what the men’s team enjoys.
The study floated scenarios in which a new women’s facility would be the only addition to the University of Michigan’s athletic complex as well as suggestions for new arenas for both men’s and women’s hockey. In every suggested iteration, the arenas were based on current University of Minnesota facilities, with a 3,500-capacity women’s rink similar to Ridder Arena and a 10,000-seat men’s arena similar to Mariucci.
“I think of Ann Arbor as more East Coast,” said Trubiano. “Not a ton of space. Yost is historic, just like a lot of rinks on the East Coast, like [Northeastern’s] Matthews Arena, old, historic, emotional. There’s challenges with that, but other programs have found creative ways to make it work.”
One existing facility that may not have that problem is Munn Ice Arena. The home of the Michigan State Spartans underwent extensive renovations that ended before the start of the 2021-22 season.
Deb Bolino, head coach of the Michigan State women’s Division I club team, sees some possibilities there. “I believe the visitor’s locker room could be turned into an equal facility for women,” said Bolino, who became the Spartans’ coach last year. “We could find space to do a visitor’s locker room.”
Michigan State has not done a feasibility study of its own nor has the school approached Bolino about a women’s NCAA program, but she said that she’s in contact with a range of potential investors interested in bringing an NCAA women’s team to East Lansing, including alumni of the men’s program.
“If you can make an NCAA program happen at Michigan State,” said Bolino, “you’re going to be a hero.”
Bolino grew up in Ann Arbor and played high school hockey there in the 1980s. “I was offered a spot at Northeastern,” she said, “but it seemed really crazy for an Ann Arbor kid to leave and go to Boston.”
After high school, Bolino stopped playing but said she found about “this whole women’s hockey world” when she graduated from law school in Chicago in the 1990s. After reconnecting with the sport, Bolino has played and coached ever since, including a stint playing for the Bracknell Queen Bees of England’s Women’s National Ice Hockey League in 2011-12 while living in London.
Bolino – who jokes that she “never owned a stitch of green clothing” before taking the coaching job at Michigan State – says that it would be “so easy” to recruit women’s players to Big Ten schools.
“Kids who grow up in Michigan are either Wolverines or Spartans when it comes to football season or basketball season. That’s one piece of it. Recruiting within Michigan would be a piece of cake. They’d be a part of that first big program. I don’t think it would matter whether it’s Michigan or Michigan State at all. They would do it.”
The last time women played Division I hockey for a school in Michigan was March 3, 2011. That was the final game for the Wayne State Warriors, a 4-2 loss to Robert Morris in the College Hockey America quarterfinals.
In that game against the Colonials, the Warriors didn’t know that they’d never play again. May 10, the team announced its captains for the following season. May 26, Wayne State shut the program down.
Wayne State remains the only Michigan school ever to have had a women’s Division I NCAA team. Jenna Trubiano thinks that’s about to change.
“I feel like we’re in a great position now,” said Trubiano. “Hopefully we can use the success of the women at the Olympic level, the PWHL level.
“I remain optimistic. Momentum seems to be in our favor, and we’ve got the right people on board.”