‘My lifelong dream is coming true,’ says Olympic-bound Team Canada rookie goalie Kayle Osborne

By Keiran Gorsky

It has been a genuine landmark season for Kayle Osborne in the PWHL and the stage is only getting bigger. The 23-year-old goaltender from Ottawa has seized the reins as the out-and-out starter in the New York Sirens’ goal crease in her second year in the league.

With last year’s starter Corinne Schroeder off to Seattle in free agency, the franchise placed a great deal of faith in Osborne, who had just 10 games of professional experience to her name. It was a faith that was so rapidly rewarded.

On Jan. 6, Osborne became the first netminder in PWHL history to start 11 consecutive games, marked with a 31-save 2-0 shutout win over the Toronto Sceptres. She did it while boasting a .930 save percentage, good for third in the league among active starters when the team was announced.

Given that, you might be startled to learn she was only assured of her place on Canada’s Olympic roster the night before it was publicly announced on Jan. 9.

“I think you never go into these things expecting anything,” Osborne explained. “Obviously, you want it to be you and you want it to work out. I think that just going in with an open mindset and knowing that regardless if you make the team or not, that it wasn’t going to be the end of my journey there.”

The race for that final goaltending spot on Team Canada, behind veteran locks in Ann-Renée Desbiens and Emerance Maschmeyer, provided plenty of intrigue. It came down to Osborne, the now battle-tested professional and Ève Gascon, the college phenom widely regarded as Canada’s starter of the future.

Both young netminders were given trial runs at Canada’s Rivalry Series games against USA in November. It was Osborne, with her professional pedigree and elite puck-playing ability, who was ultimately given the nod.

After receiving the news, Osborne’s first phone call was to her mother, who burst into tears. It doubled as something of a virtual reunion for her scattered immediate family – Osborne quickly rang her brother in New Brunswick and her sister in Gatineau to spread the joy.

“It was such a special moment, especially because my family doesn’t get together in the same room a whole lot,” Osborne underlined.

Osborne had already become well acquainted with her soon-to-be Olympic teammates during the Rivalry Series, flying from Airbnb to Airbnb. It didn’t exactly go according to plan, Canada dropping all four games to the United States by rather lopsided 4-1, 6-1, 10-4 and 4-1 scorelines. Even so, Osborne took great pleasure in simply being a part of it all.

“I got to see how special this group was, and not just see it, but be a part of it,” Osborne described. “It’s something you can’t really explain.”

She has every bit of faith that the world will come to know Canada’s true potential come February. Osborne knows better than anyone how the path to success is not always so linear.

Now living in constantly-buzzing New York City, Osborne grew up in tiny Munster Hamlet, which only comes alive for Halloween, and for outdoor hockey games in the case of the three Osborne siblings.

She played ‘AAA’ hockey with the Upper Canada Cyclones before joining the Ottawa Lady Senators. Osborne led that PWHL (called the Provincial Women’s Hockey League at the time) in save percentage (.950) in her second junior season. That led to a call from Ontario Red to play in the 2019 Canadian women’s U18 hockey championship, where she won a gold medal, and then another from Team Canada for the 2020 world women’s U18 championship, where she earned silver.

Osborne, who also played soccer and volleyball in high school and led the 2016 Female Box Lacrosse Nationals in scoring en route to her first of two gold medals with Ontario, had relied heavily on her innate athleticism and lightning-fast reflexes up to that point.

But it was when the John McCrae Secondary School grad joined the NCAA’s Colgate University Raiders that her goaltending skills sharpened. Her saves were, and still are, reactionary, but Osborne needed to find a way to marry real technique to her intuitive acrobatics to bring her game to the top level.

Chris Cobb, a volunteer assistant coach with the Raiders, was the one to spot her potential. Coach Cobb wasn’t even with the team when he first saw her play against his local University of Vermont Catamounts. After the game, he approached Osborne and offered up his services.

From then on, he made the four-hour trek to Hamilton, NY to train with Osborne and her tandem partner every week. It was here that she realized just how much strain she was putting on her hips in positioning herself so far back in goal.

“You’re making yourself small,” she recalled Coach Cobb saying.

Much of her work in practice was devoted to narrowing her stance and learning to respect her own size. Her new practiced, though still unmistakably nimble style, immediately bore fruit for the program. As Rookie of the Year in her conference, Osborne led the Raiders to their first-ever ECAC Championship in 2021 and then three more from 2022-2024.

The improvement was all too evident. Her save percentage topped out at a nigh impenetrable .941 in her final season. But Osborne never perceived her development path as very strange. As a girl, it was perfectly normal for her to trust her instincts first and foremost; to flop and flail however she needed to stop a puck.

“Growing up, I had quite a few goalie partners that were never really trained,” she recalled. “It just was never super harped on.”

As women’s hockey continues to mature, there surely won’t be so many agile oddities who make it to university without arduous technical instruction. For Osborne, though, it all worked out pretty well.

To this day, first and foremost, hockey is still just a lot of fun. Osborne has never lost that childlike spirit. She has rubbed elbows with a great many goalies now, but she never gleaned that silent, solitary shell so many other netminders retreat into on game day. Before games, no matter how big, Osborne is talkative as ever.

“If I get in my head, and I’m worried and I’m anxious about the game, that’s when I play my worst,” she noted. “I just go into every game like, this is fun, we get to play hockey today, you know?”

Osborne takes the same attitude heading into Milano Cortina. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if she had to sit this one out – she has a lot of years ahead of her. That doesn’t make it any less magical.

“It still doesn’t seem real,” she smiled. “My lifelong dream is coming true.”