Teenage phenom Chloe Primerano made her senior worldwide debut for Staff Canada on Thursday afternoon on the 2025 girls’s world hockey championship in České Budějovice, Czechia.
Having simply turned 18 in January, Primerano is the youngest participant on Staff Canada and the youngest defender to make a Canadian world championship roster since Cheryl Pounder in 1994.
Primerano began the sport towards Finland on the third pair with Jocelyne Larocque, certainly one of Canada’s longest-tenured gamers, who has a shutdown defensive mindset to go together with Primerano’s offensive abilities.
It’s yet one more benchmark for Primerano, who’s charting a singular path in girls’s hockey.
In September, she made her extremely anticipated NCAA debut with the College of Minnesota a 12 months sooner than anticipated after graduating highschool early and beginning faculty at 17. Not lengthy after that, Primerano debuted for Canada’s senior crew on the Canada-USA Rivalry Sequence and scored the game-winner in a shootout over the U.S.
CHLOE PRIMERANO CALLS GAME 🚨
The 17-year-old seals the win with a spectacular shootout objective! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/EgpEL65uwZ
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) November 9, 2024
Earlier this 12 months, Primerano captained Canada’s U18 crew to a world championship title and was named the event’s prime defender. Now, she’s set to play for one more gold medal, this time on the largest stage.
“I really feel like I’m prepared,” Primerano told the Canadian Press this week. “I’m surrounded by fairly superb gamers and an ideal crew, so I do know they’re going to set me up fairly effectively, and it’s going to be superior.”
She has already established herself as some of the promising prospects in girls’s hockey. She is dynamic on the blue line with elite skating and edgework and sees the sport at a really excessive degree: a uncommon breed of defender who could make one thing out of nothing.
“There’s gamers which can be elite skaters, there’s gamers which can be elite puck handlers, there’s gamers which have a extremely excessive hockey IQ or they’re objective scorers or they set folks up — Chloe is a end result of all of it,” mentioned Minnesota coach Brad Frost.
Primerano first made headlines in Might 2022 when she was drafted by the WHL’s Vancouver Giants (268th total), changing into the primary feminine skater ever chosen in a Canadian Hockey League draft. She solely made the transition to girls’s hockey in 2022-23, becoming a member of the RINK Academy elite women program and successful back-to-back CSSHL championships and league MVPs. In two seasons at RINK, Primerano completed third all-time in scoring (137 factors in 59 video games) and first amongst defenders.
In her U18 worlds debut final season, Primerano scored 16 factors in six video games — a report for a defender in a single event — and was named MVP. Her 26 profession factors at U18s matches Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin’s manufacturing on the event earlier than she made the leap to the senior nationwide crew in 2009.
That Primerano even cracked the Canadian roster is critical, given this system — led by common supervisor Gina Kingsbury — has sometimes been conservative on the subject of speeding youngsters into main worldwide competitors. However, in accordance with Kingsbury, Primerano is prepared.
“She’s an ideal skater, she sees the sport extraordinarily effectively, she brings all of the attributes which can be worthwhile at that degree already,” she instructed CP. “It’s not a matter of growing or trying on the future. We expect she will be able to are available and affect our success and affect our crew.”
On the event, Primerano can have a primary alternative to showcase her sport to Canada’s braintrust at a important time within the girls’s hockey calendar, with the 2026 Olympics solely 10 months away. Making an Olympic crew as an adolescent is a tricky process, given the energy of Canada’s blueline and the truth that Olympic rosters are solely 23 gamers (Canada sometimes brings seven defenders) versus 25 at worlds.
However with a robust event in Czechia, Primerano may give herself an inside observe to Milan.
(Photograph: Vedran Galijas / Simply Photos / Sipa USA / Sipa through AP Photos)
