In the final week of October, most girls high school hockey teams in the state of Minnesota are starting their first official week of the season. Tryouts are happening, rosters are being assembled, practices are being scheduled, and plenty of crazed hockey fans are trying to predict who will come out on top in 2026.

While it may still be too early to tell which teams as a whole will be the best in the state, it can easily be said that if all things go according to plan for The Blake School this winter that Janie McGawn will be a top contender to win the Jori Jones Senior Goaltender of the Year award after posting a whopping .950 save percentage and a 1.60 goals-against average for the Bears last year as a junior.

McGawn has a unique story of her own of how she got into hockey. The netminder who now currently lives in the Edina area was actually born and raised in Denver until spending a handful of years in California and then eventually wound up in Minnesota for high school at Blake in Minneapolis.

“My grandparents belonged to the Denver Country Club and there was actually a Blake alum who my grandparents were friends with and he started a hockey program there, so they had this little like outdoor rink, and we weren’t very good but we just had like a couple of little teams and on weekends you could just come and skate whenever you wanted, so we just started going there as a family,” said McGawn about how she started her journey into the sport of hockey while growing up in Colorado, which is where her mother is from. She remembers watching her older brother start to get into the sport and going to his practices and having to then wait until she was age five to actually start playing a version of organized hockey.

McGawn remembers always wanting to try out the free goalie gear that you could wear at the community center rink, which eventually morphed into playing goalie while her brother was shooting in the driveway or while playing knee hockey. Despite her parents protests at first, that became McGawn’s primary position and she has loved it ever since.

The current Blake netminder lived in Denver until around age 10 and mainly played boys hockey. The McGawn family then relocated to California for a little while due to Janie’s fathers job and she started to play more girls hockey there for teams like the Anaheim Lady Ducks triple-A program.

McGawn’s school in California only went up to the eighth grade so she was going to have to find a new school to enroll in for high school and instead of staying out west the family decided to take a visit out to Minnesota to see if there could be a fit there. Janie took a visit to The Blake School and got to meet the head coach, Kristi King, and stayed in the area for a few days and ended up loving the atmosphere and thought that it would be the perfect spot for both her athletic and academic future.

The move to Minnesota also made a bit of sense considering some of the family ties in the area. One of McGawn’s grandmothers is from St. Paul and went to St. Paul Academy and she has other relatives who attended and worked at Blake so it wasn’t necessarily a totally random move. Although a large portion of her extended family is in the Denver area now there are still various aunts and uncles that live in the Minnesota/Wisconsin area.

As a freshman, McGawn officially enrolled at The Blake School and started posting eye-popping results almost immediately, which is rare for someone who hadn’t grown up playing the sport in Minnesota to be making waves so quickly at the varsity level. There is plenty of talent in California hockey but the goaltender says that there was a noticeable difference in the depth of teams from out west compared to teams in Minnesota.

“My freshman year, we had like 12 seniors, so everyone was pretty old and I think we had three girls that were committed to Division I,” she said about stepping into the Bears team as just a ninth grader. “Sam Broz (who is now competing at Brown University), she took a slap shot on me and I was like ‘oh my gosh, she can rip it’ so a lot of the girls I guess were just like bigger and faster and obviously it was a step up but I thought it was a fun challenge.”

Even though it might have taken a little while to get used to how things worked in Minnesota hockey, McGawn had a very strong freshman season and posted a .939 save percentage and a 1.66 goals-against average, along with four shutouts. Blake went 15-12 that year in 2022-23.

“I thought it was a good situation for me because we also had a senior goalie and at the start of the season we switched off like every other game and it wasn’t like I had to go and play Edina in my first game or anything,” joked McGawn about having senior Abigail Ziehl to learn from in Year 1. “It was good for me to just like watch those games at first and see what it was like and get a feel for it and then by the end of the year I got to play Edina and that was just like a super fun game and I think I kind of just got slowly accustomed to it and I think that was good for me.”

Things then looked a bit different in her second year on varsity as McGawn took over the entirety of the starting job since Ziehl graduated and the Bears squad itself was also quite different with many key seniors who departed that offseason as well. The team struggled overall as a whole but the Denver native stayed strong in the crease and still earned a .930 save percentage despite a 5-20-2 record for Blake in what was a bit of a rebuilding year.

“We didn’t even have a JV team that year so it was definitely a different feel, we had a lot of new players and not too many returners but I think we learned a lot that year and obviously we were really young so it was good to just get everyone some more experience,” she said about the season in 2023-24.

With two years of excellent statistics under her belt, McGawn started the college recruitment process in the summer between her sophomore and junior years. She had to work through some ups and downs with a handful of collegiate teams who would talk to her and then conversations would eventually fizzle out but she decided that the only thing she could control was to continue to play her best hockey during her junior season and to just trust the process that the right fit would eventually come.

With absolutely eye-popping statistics during 2024-25, including a whopping .950 save percentage, eight shutouts, and a 1.60 goals-against average, McGawn’s time finally came and she officially committed to Dartmouth in January of 2025.

“I am super excited and honored to be committing to the admissions process at Dartmouth College to continue my education and fulfill my dream of playing Division I hockey! Thank you so much to my family, coaches, teammates, and friends for helping me along the way,” she posted to her social media pages.

Even though Dartmouth is located all the way in Hanover, New Hampshire, it wasn’t a completely random or out of the blue choice for McGawn, as her older brother actually attends the Ivy League school too, so she was secretly hoping that Big Green would eventually reach out and show interest in her hockey skills. The school didn’t really start recruiting conversations with McGawn until around December but the Denver native then went on a visit to the campus shortly after talks started and immediately fell in love with it and how it sort of reminded her of Colorado.

After committing to the Division I program out east, McGawn finished up her junior season with the Bears and wound up posting a 15-11-1 overall record, which was a big improvement from the year prior.

Now, McGawn is gearing up to have her best season yet as a senior in 2025-26 with a Blake team that is hoping to make some noise. The Denver native is going to be an athlete to watch for the annual Jori Jones Senior Goaltender of the Year award considering that she is the top returning goaltender this winter in the entire state of Minnesota by save percentage.

“We’re super excited, I think we have a really good group and we have a lot of experience and a lot of returners,” she said about what hockey fans can expect from the Bears this season. “We got some new people last year after combining with SPA (St. Paul Academy) and then a few people transferred as well so I think that we’ll have a really good group this year. Captains practice and STP has all been a lot of fun so I’m just ready to go and I’m super excited. I think it’ll be a really good year.”

After the high school hockey season is over, McGawn plays on the Blake lacrosse team in the spring but after that ends she’ll be getting ready to head out to Dartmouth to play Division I hockey next fall. She’s one of many Minnesotans who have been recruited by Big Green over the last two years, including others she is already familiar with such as Addy Cowan of Holy Family and Cate McCoy of Edina, who are both also in the graduating class of 2026, and there are multiple 2027s who are now committed to Dartmouh as well (Jaylie French - Warroad, Alex Christian - Orono, Laney Miller - Minnetonka, Lilly Horton - Edina).

McGawn isn’t quite sure yet on what she’ll study once she gets to college but is thinking about something in the maths and sciences realm, possibly engineering, but is currently undecided.

For now, be on the lookout for McGawn and the Bears to make some noise in the Minnesota High School hockey scene in 2025-26.