Jill Hertl knows people can overlook NEWHA players, but a .953 save percentage and 49 saves against Quinnipiac in the NCAA championship is hard to miss. She decided to enter the PWHL draft days before the declaration pool opened, after a feeling she just wasn’t done.
“I’m getting more and more recognition,” Hertl said of the response since entering the draft. “It’s definitely becoming more real than I ever thought it was going to be.”
Becoming a record-breaking Raven
Hertl was on skates at two years old. At seven, when her all-boys house league coach asked if anyone could play goaltender, Hertl’s hand shot up the moment her mom whispered “don’t raise your hand.”
“I thought she said ‘Raise your hand,’” Hertl said.
Hertl grew up in Highland Park, Ill. where she started on all-boys teams before playing with girls’ travel teams, including the Chicago Young Americans.
She signed with Franklin Pierce just after she was told one of their goaltenders wasn’t taking a fifth-year, as previously planned. She canceled her gap-year plans and, in 2022, headed to Ringe, New Hampshire to serve as a backup goaltender.
When the starting netminder got an injury in October of Hertl’s rookie year, her plans of just opening doors came game time were put on hold.
“It was like a shock, I thought I really wasn’t going to see much ice that season,” Hertl remembered.
In high school, she mostly split goaltending time. So Hertl wasn’t used to playing a full season, much less in Division 1. Nevertheless, she was in net for 30 games her rookie season, tallying a save percentage of .934% and making herself indispensable for the Ravens.
After four years in Ringe, Hertl has worked on mental recovery after taking a bad goal and controlling the rebound. It’s paid off— in four years, she made 3,382 saves, the first Franklin Pierce goaltender to do so.
“I’ve gotten so good at staying out of my head and just going on to the next shot,” she said. “It helps so much with just my physical game.”
The final game
With Hertl’s sixth shutout of the season against St. Anselm in the NEWHA championship, the Ravens made it to the NCAA championship for the first time in program history. The team flew to Madison, Wisconsin to take on No. 7 Quinnipiac, where they played in a rink that holds nearly 1,000 more people than the entirety of a Franklin Pierce.
“We’re like ‘Oh my god, we play at a high school rink. This is like insane,’” Hertl remembered.
The odds of a NEWHA team beating the ECAC champion felt incredibly unlikely.
But in the first period, Hertl made 19 saves, effectively shutting the Bobcats down. In the locker room, the team was thinking one thing— “We could really do this.”
The game didn’t go their way. Fifteen minutes into the second period, Quinnipiac finally slipped one past Hertl, and three followed.
It’s a game Hertl still looks on fondly, noting, pleased, that Kahlen Lamarche, the nation’s leading goal scorer, “couldn’t even get one.”
Road to the PWHL draft
Playing in the PWHL didn’t feel realistic for Hertl, although she always wanted to continue after college. It took some convincing, but on the first day of the declaration period, Hertl decided to give it a shot. Her teammates were the most relieved, Hertl said. Their attitude was always “you’d just be stupid not to.”
“I’ve never met a group of girls that believed in me more than they did,” she said. “And it was honestly a great feeling to feel like people have so much faith in me, especially when maybe my confidence gets down, or things get rough.”
It’s still surreal for Hertl that the PWHL is her new goal. She distinctly remembers when her mom explained during a parent-teacher conference that Hertl would miss a few Fridays for hockey tournaments. Hertl’s teacher asserted that she shouldn’t be missing school for her brother’s events. She doesn’t have a brother.
“Seeing [women’s hockey] expand, I’m hoping to see less moments like that,” said Hertl, light-heartedly.
“I think [the PWHL] is going to be great for the future generations of girls,” Hertl said. “I wish I could be back growing up and seeing this huge development of women’s hockey, because it would give me so much more motivation.”
It’s also about representing NEWHA, the conference that developed her. She’s one of four players from the conference who entered the draft, and the only one from Franklin Pierce.
“I really hope a team will take their chance on me,” Hertl said. “I hope that we can go in there and show and prove like no, [NEWHA] is legit. We’re D1 for a reason, we deserve to be here.”