It came from her natural abilities, her innate hockey IQ, and from her devotion to the sport. Wendell-Pohl was always playing hockey or watching it, coming home from the rink to turn on college or professional games, training herself to see how plays developed in an ever-changing game. There were the games of pickup, the unstructured nature of them full of trial and error, learning with each success or mistake.
It was during one such game of shinny, at the John Rose Minnesota Oval, where Winny Brodt-Brown, a future teammate at Minnesota and on the national team, first came across Wendell-Pohl. She looked across, seeing a girl who was four or five years her junior, and thought to herself, “Gosh, this girl is good.”
She went up to her after. The girl had a black eye.
The black eye had come from a basketball game with her brother, a fitting monument to the kind of childhood that Wendell-Pohl had, one of cutthroat competition in the family’s cul-de-sac, an outdoor-kid experience that saw her playing — and generally excelling — at everything from baseball, where in 1994 she became only the fifth girl to start in the Little League World Series, to pingpong to hockey.
“Oh yeah,” thought Brodt-Brown. “She’s tough too. Good and tough.”
Not that Wendell-Pohl was a bruising hockey player. She was, instead, all about finesse and IQ and hands, someone who played with utter joy, her smile serving as both a lasting image to her teammates and a potential dagger to her opponents.
“To me, what really stood out from Krissy were her hands,” Halldorson said. “Her ability to handle the puck, protect the puck, to make moves around people. She’s famous for her toe-drags, her hands, her dekes.”
Darwitz was the shooter. Wendell-Pohl would get closer, would make a move on the goalie.
It was hard to stop.
“When you combine that hockey sense with her ability to control the puck and the strength — she was always so strong on her skates,” Halldorson said. “She was big and strong and she could shield the puck, she could play it along the boards and come out with the puck. And then she had the ability to understand when to pass and when to shoot.”
