Senden played a big role on the Hill-Murray team that went 25-6 last season prior to winning a state championship. The 5-foot-9 right-shot skater was one of just four seniors on the entire full-time varsity roster and one of just two upperclassmen who skated the blue line (there was one other senior defender in Josie Skoogman, but no junior defenders), so she played a key role on the squad as one of the oldest athletes on the entire team.

Senden wound up netting the most points out of any other defender on the roster as a senior, just shy of a point-per game pace, and she was one of just a handful of athletes who were out on the ice when Pioneer forward Ella Hornung scored the double-overtime game-winning goal in the state championship match against Edina in 2025.

“All I remember was that I was on the blue line, I think the left side, I remember my D-partner Addy McLay was also out there,” Senden said about what she remembers from that moment. “I remember the puck coming out and I was ready to step and take the puck and I saw Addy sliding over and we kind of switched places and she took a shot. I could see from my angle Ella Hornung tipping it in and I was just like ‘no way’.”

Obviously, chaos ensued after the game-winner was scored and it was a moment that the Minnesota native will never forget.

“I ran over to Addy and we hugged for a second and we saw Ella go down in the corner with Anna Pohl (another one of their teammates) and we went down there and I just remember being on the ice at the bottom of the pile and it’s something I will never forget because I could see it (the goal) go in and it was so cool.” 

It was a great moment for Senden and the team as a whole who had gone through a few ups and downs that season, which is to be expected with a roster that is so young. It also felt like revenge, in a good way, considering that the Pioneers had lost the state championship game to Edina, 2-0, just the year before in 2024.

“Losing my junior year made it so much more worth it my senior year because you know how it feels to be so close,” Senden said about losing the state title game as a junior before eventually winning it a year later as a senior. She added that the loss to the Hornets her junior season was ‘heartbreaking’, but that it made all of the returners to the team even hungrier to get back to the Xcel Energy Center and to show the state of Minnesota what they could do as a team.

“Summer STP, the first day (in the offseason after losing the state title match to Edina), our coach Chris Pryor, he was like ‘yep - it starts now, you know the goal, we are winning state this year and it starts now, no days off, we’re practicing with a purpose, let’s go,’ and I think that just kind of carried on and it just made it so much more worth it my senior year,” said the Vadnais Heights native about the mood of the entire team and coaching staff after suffering the loss to the Hornets in 2024. They were more driven to win than ever before.

Despite having a roster full of underclassmen, the squad never really had any issues with bonding or becoming friends and trustworthy teammates out on the ice. Hill-Murray did have its ups and downs throughout the year but Senden said that the addition of film sessions really helped the team as a whole along with a few select activities that helped everyone focus on the same things every day in practice.

“Us seniors, we started a jar where everyone wrote three things on three different slips of paper and each day we had a different goal or something to focus on - like cheering on your teammates or having a good backcheck, picking up sticks, stuff like that, and I feel like that helped everyone to get on the same page with everything.”

The Pioneers were a top-ranked team for pretty much the entirety of the season but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have any nerves heading back to the state tournament in 2025, hungry to win their first title in Class AA since 2015. Despite some nerves, the team played well and defeated Andover in its quarterfinal match, then Rosemount in the semifinals, only to rematch against Edina in the state championship game.

“We hadn’t beaten Edina in the regular season so we knew there would be a big hill to climb,” said Senden. To try and get everyone rid of their pre-game nerves, the defender said that the team would regularly have dance parties in the locker room to try and get rid of any anxieties that they may have had. You could find many of the Pioneers players shaking each other and yelling and trying to get as hyped up as possible before a lot of the big games. It was tricky to stay excited prior to the start of the championship match though since the game before the Class AA final went to overtime so many of the skaters had to wait extra long to get ready due to the delay.

During the title game, Hill-Murray played well and kept up with Edina throughout all of regulation for the most part. Senden said that no matter what was happening on the ice that the bench tried to be ultra-supportive to each other and brought as much energy as possible which created a positive, exciting environment. “We were cheering for every little thing like blocking shots or skating and rushing the puck, we never had a moment where we got too down on ourselves … we just had a 0-0 mindset that I think really helped us, especially in overtime.” 

Eventually the game-winner was scored in overtime and the rest is history. It was a fulfilling moment for Senden, who had been playing with the Pioneers since middle school.

“My eighth grade year we lost, I think to Stillwater (in sections), it might’ve been in regulation, then we lost in double-overtime to Gentry the following year, then lost to Gentry again the next year, and then my junior year when we finally won sections it was like ‘woo, finally we did it’ and then we were at state,” she said about her journey on varsity, which culminated in a state title in her senior season. “You get to the ‘X’ and it doesn’t feel real.”

Senden played on JV as a seventh grader and then joined the varsity squad full-time in eighth grade. She says that she learned a lot from various upperclassmen throughout the years, such as Ellah Hause - who is now at St. Thomas, and that working with a skating coach also really helped improve her abilities throughout her high school career. All in all, she wound up tallying just over 70 points throughout her time at Hill-Murray.

In between her sophomore and junior seasons, when she was officially able to be contacted by college hockey coaches, Senden made early contact with the staff at Bemidji State. It seemed like it would be a good fit right off the bat since she knew that she would prefer a university that wasn’t too big, she had a great relationship early on with the coaching staff, noting how much they cared about their athletes as people both on and off the ice, and she wanted to compete in the WCHA. The team eventually offered her a spot and she made a verbal commitment to the Beavers in late 2023.

Now in the fall of 2025, Senden is getting ready to hit the ice with Bemidji State as a freshman.

“(Fans) can expect a lot of energy and no-quit mentality,” said the Minnesota native about what people can expect from the Beavers squad in 2025-26. “We are such a close-knit team, even from the first day, the whole team was helping move the freshmen in … we’re with each other all the time and no one is ever alone, everyone is super nice and super welcoming. It’s also a very competitive nature on the ice too. Expect a lot of compete and grit from us.”

The Beavers are welcoming 11 new athletes to the roster this fall with two goaltenders, five defenders and four forwards, including Senden. Read more about what you can expect from the squad in the APX Hockey WCHA Season Preview here.

For any Bemidji fans who are unfamiliar with Senden’s game, she claims that she is a steady defender who likes to jump in the play and take a shot every once in a while but that one of her main strengths out on the ice is seeing the play develop and making consistent, smart breakout passes and stretch passes.

Currently, Senden is studying exercise science at Bemidji State, which makes sense considering that she is a college athlete who also enjoys other activities such as pickleball, walking outdoors and wakesurfing/being on the lake in her free time.

Senden, who was originally inspired to try hockey after watching her older brother Jack play the sport, competed in the White Bear Lake Youth Hockey Association prior to her time at Hill-Murray. She is related to many other hockey players and has a lot of family ties to the sport. Her cousin is Mark Senden, the former state champion at Wayzata High School and captain at the University of North Dakota, who is now competing in the AHL, and her dad’s cousin is Stu Senden, who competed at the University of Minnesota from 1997-2001.

You can catch Senden out on the ice for the Beavers this fall, who start their season with an exhibition game on September 20 in Brainerd against Minnesota before their home opener against the reigning national champions in the University of Wisconsin on September 26 and 27.