COLUMBUS, Ohio — More than an hour into a preseason practice, Nadine Muzerall sits on her “perch” to watch Ohio State’s drills.

The perch is a nickname players gave to a ledge above the bench. Muzerall, the architect of an unlikely budding dynasty in women’s college hockey, sits with her skates dangling over the side so she can have a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on the ice.

She doesn’t like what she’s seeing at this moment.

Ohio State is in the middle of a drill that starts with the puck in the corner, leading to a shot on goal and then a chance at the other end. Muzerall, the Buckeyes’ coach for the past eight years, wants them to get into the corner and stop cherry-picking.

“Cut that out,” she yells.

A few minutes later, she climbs down and hits the ice herself, never taking her skates off. She grabs a stick and begins passing pucks to the corner to speed the drill up.

Each rep gets faster until she is satisfied.

“Things need to be fast because you have to perform under chaos,” Muzerall said. “Things are going to be like this in the game and I don’t want practice to be like that.”

Muzerall cares about every detail in Ohio State’s women’s hockey program. It’s how she revived it from a dismal place and turned it into one of the most successful of Ohio State’s 36 varsity sports teams.

Before Muzerall arrived in 2016, Ohio State finished above .500 just six times since its inaugural season in 1999 and had never been to the Frozen Four.

In the time since, Muzerall has done nothing but win. She has a record of 208-78-21 and has been to the past three national championship games, winning two, including last year against Wisconsin. This season, the Buckeyes are 13-5-2 and ranked No. 2 entering Saturday’s game against the No. 1 Badgers, which will be played at Wrigley Field in Chicago (5:30 p.m. ET, Big Ten Network) after the Wisconsin beat Ohio State on Thursday night in Madison.

The success Muzerall has had is almost unheard of. In women’s hockey’s 23-year NCAA history, only four teams won national championships before Ohio State’s ascent: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Minnesota Duluth and Clarkson.

By focusing on every little detail for eight years, she’s turned Ohio State into a national power on the same tier as those select few other champions.

Nadine Muzerall building Ohio State’s women’s hockey team into a champion can be traced back to Annabelle Muzerall, her mother.

A single mother with two kids, Annabelle loved how tight-knit Streetsville, Ontario, was. She knew everybody and always knew where her kids were.

Annabelle, who was born in Scotland in 1940, a year before the infamous Glasgow bombings, worked hard so that her kids didn’t feel like they were without anything. And she’d do anything to get them to their extra curricular activities.

But she didn’t have a driver’s license.

At 5 a.m. every Sunday, the Muzerall family would get up for a trip to Vic Johnston Arena. With no car, they had to take their bicycles to the rink, even in the snow.

Darren, Muzerall’s older brother by three years, had a BMX bike of his own that he loaded up with hockey equipment. Muzerall rode with her mother. She got on the back of the bike, put her equipment over the handlebars and sat on the hard purple seat with her stick across her lap. The only thing holding her up was the bar across the back and the grip she had on her mom.

“I’d probably be in jail if somebody saw us riding the bikes now,” Annabelle said.

Nadine has been in love with hockey since she was a little girl sneaking into the penalty box to watch her brother’s games.

“I honestly think she was getting used to the penalty box because she knew she would spend a lot of time there in life,” Annabelle said.

She wasn’t always a hockey player. Nadine Muzerall was into ballet, figure skating and soccer early, but hockey was her love — even if it wasn’t always easy to play.

Although contact wasn’t allowed until kids were 12 or 13 years old, Annabelle had to go in front of a board of men every year and plead her daughter’s case to play hockey with the boys. Nadine was a talented player. She was better than some of the boys but opponents didn’t think she should be playing. There were challenges, like sometimes changing in a bathroom stall because there wasn’t a women’s locker room.

She refused to stop. Even if she didn’t know it then, she was picking up on her mother’s attitude and work ethic.

“I grew up my whole life with haters and it not being easy. Nowadays I just think of it as noise,” Muzerall said. “I don’t allow it to distract me, because the people closest to me know if you’re in a bar fight, I got your back.”

Soon after Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith fired former coach Jenny Potter for NCAA recruiting violations — the second women’s hockey coaching change in two years — Smith turned to Diana Sabau with a request.

“I need you to fix this,” he told his senior deputy athletic director:

Sabau wasn’t previously responsible for women’s hockey, but Smith trusted her.

For advice on where to start her search, Sabau turned to two legendary coaches who didn’t even know her: Wisconsin coach Mark Johnson and Minnesota coach Brad Frost.

They gave her advice on some up-and-coming names. Muzerall was on the list, even if she wasn’t a traditional candidate.

A legendary player at Minnesota, Muzerall was a member of the Gophers’ inaugural team and still holds career records for goals, power play goals, game-winning goals and goals per game. She also won four national titles in five years from 2012-16 as the second assistant coach.

Most athletic directors wouldn’t consider a second assistant for the leap to head coach, but Muzerall was different.

“People said she’s a diamond in the rough, but she’s rough,” Sabau said. “I’m OK with that because that’s passion and a moldable skill set.”

Sabau was relentless in her pursuit of Muzerall.

In the summer of 2016, Muzerall was coaching with the under-22 team in Canada and got a call from Sabau that she didn’t answer. The calls continued. Then came a text message and an email. Muzerall turned to her husband, Ryan Venturine, and told him, “Ohio State keeps calling me.”

She wasn’t interested at first. Their family had just bought a house and had two kids: an 8-month old, Brady, and 2-year-old, Bella. She was comfortable in her job at her alma mater.

Venturine, who played football at Minnesota, convinced Muzerall to take the interview.

“I told her, ‘You have to,’” he said. “It was a no-brainer. It was something she needed to experience and see for herself.”

It didn’t take Ohio State long to be sold.

“When you sit down and talk to her and you hear her mission and values, it speaks for itself,” Sabau said. “She’s after it as a head coach every single day, and I appreciate that.”

Muzerall doesn’t like to back down from a challenge but expressed her concerns about the program to her husband. The Buckeyes were struggling, coming off a 10-25-1 season. Their rink was an eyesore, and she would be the third coach in three years.

His response was simple: “Well, go fix it.”

Neither of them knew exactly what that meant.

Muzerall’s first year wasn’t easy. She had problems with her visa, so even after accepting the job in September 2016, she didn’t meet her team until just before the first game at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

She spent countless hours at the Ohio State ice rink trying to get things corrected, though the hockey side came easy to her. It was everything off the ice that took up her time. She had to get up to speed with the administrative side of being a head coach, while also trying to get to know her players off the ice.

To build a relationship with her players, Muzerall held 30-minute one-on-one meetings with them every two weeks, which meant she had a few every day to get through the team. She wanted to know everything about them off the ice so she knew the best ways to push them on it.

Those meetings, on top of learning everything about the program, took up most of her day. She didn’t get into her actual work until about 10 p.m. each night.

There were times she slept on the couch in her office, didn’t sleep at all or caught an hour or two before going to the 24-hour Walmart at 3 a.m. to grocery shop for her two children.

“I got used to having two hours of sleep every night, not consecutively either,” Muzerall said. “It would be two to four hours for a long time, but your body learns to adapt.”

Venturine didn’t make it to Columbus until about 15 months after the move because he was renovating their new house in Minnesota and trying to get it sold. He spent two weeks in Columbus at a time.

It took a team effort to keep everything going with both of them occupied. Annabelle stayed with her daughter full-time taking care of the kids when she was at work.

At Ohio State, Sabau also made a big impact. She became more than a boss to Muzerall; she was one of her closest friends and a mentor.

On the afternoon of Muzerall’s home opener, she was on campus with a recruit while preparing for the game. Sabau asked Muzerall where her family was. At home, she replied, because she didn’t have time to go get them.

Sabau took the keys to Muzerall’s car, moved the car seats to her own car and drove to pick her kids up. She wasn’t going to let Muzerall’s kids miss her first game.

“It’s her first game at Ohio State; her mom and her kids should be there,” Sabau said. “As a second assistant, it’s a whole new world. It takes a village, it really truly does.”

The support Muzerall got in her first year, despite finishing 14-18-5, reinforced the idea that she made the right decision choosing Ohio State.

On November 4, 2017, Ohio State lost to Wisconsin 7-0 in Madison. Three months later, Ohio State welcomed the top-ranked Badgers to Columbus and swept them, capping the weekend with a 3-1 win. After the game, Muzerall called the entire team and their family members into a room and thanked them for choosing to be Buckeyes.

It was an eye-opening moment for Emma Maltais, one of the best players in program history. Then a freshman, Maltais thought that was the pivot point for the program.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, if we can sweep No. 1 at home, we could do this,’” Maltais said.

Ohio State lost to Clarkson in the Frozen Four that year, but the season set the tone for what the program could be under Muzerall, who went to work recruiting.

Kelsey Cline, the current assistant coach, was recruited by Muzerall to Minnesota 15 years ago.

“Whether you meet her for the first time or have known her for 15 years, her personality remains consistent,” Klein said. “Her interest in people, wanting to get to know them. Right away you get that relationship feel with her.”

Muzerall learned that recruiting at Ohio State was different from Minnesota. The Gophers could be selective about who they want and swing for the most talented players in the country. Ohio State needed a specific type of player. They had to be able to skate and have talent, but she also wanted players like her: blue-collar and relentless, players who didn’t care if Ohio State’s rink wasn’t as nice as other schools’.

If she was interested in a player, Muzerall had to watch them play in person. She watched their demeanor on the rink, on the bench and after the game.

“You need your talented kids, but you need the kids with that relentless pursuit for perfection,” she said. “That ‘F you’ mentality — because you can’t coach that or teach that. … I knew I could coach the s— out of those kids, because that’s me.”

She got exactly what she was looking for in her first few recruiting classes.

The early groups included players like Maltais, the 2018 Western Collegiate Hockey Association rookie of the year and a 2022 Olympic gold medalist, plus 2022 WCHA defensive player of the year Sophie Jaques and 2023 All-American Jennifer Gardiner, among other stars. These were players that Minnesota didn’t recruit and overlooked.

Muzerall didn’t hesitate to remind them of that.

Before a game against Minnesota, Muzerall spoke to the team in their lounge in St. John Arena, next door to the ice rink. She asked them to stand up if they had been recruited by Minnesota. Nobody did.

“That’s what they think of you,” she said. “They didn’t recruit one of you.”

Muzerall stood up on the table and said, “I can’t be the biggest bitch in the room today.”

They won the game, but that was only the beginning. As Ohio State’s success grew, Muzerall’s personality began to rub off on the team.

In 2023, Ohio State was in a position to win its first regular-season WCHA conference championship. The Buckeyes had to win at Wisconsin first.

Ohio State got one point after losing in overtime to Wisconsin, but because Minnesota won in overtime, the Buckeyes went into the season finale against Wisconsin controlling their own destiny. A tie would’ve meant sharing the title with the Gophers and a win would give them the outright championship.

Ohio State trailed the Badgers 1-0 with five minutes to play before Maltais tied the score on a power play. With one minute left, Muzerall did something she never does. She decided to settle. She told her team not to make any bad mistakes and just take the tie. She was OK sharing the conference title with Minnesota.

On the ice, the players had a different mindset. When they heard Muzerall say that, they were shocked. So they didn’t listen.

Madison Bizal scored, giving Ohio State the lead with one minute left. Twenty seconds later, Bizal scored again and Ohio State won 3-1. It was a resounding reminder to Muzerall to never settle.

“You learn from them all the time,” Muzerall said of her players. “I wanted it so badly that I was almost OK to share it. That’s not who I am.”

On March 20, 2022, Muzerall’s dream was realized.

As the puck was cleared out by the Ohio State defense and the buzzer sounded, Muzerall fell to the ground in tears. Ohio State won the national championship.

She was excited, exhausted and dumbfounded at the same time.

“I couldn’t believe we had done it,” she said. “All the late nights, the missed anniversaries, missed birthdays, missed dinners — it was all worth it.”

Her family was the first people out of the stands and onto the ice. Annabelle still gets emotional talking about it.

“Next to having my kids, it was the most emotional time I’ve had,” she said. “Everything she had given up, it wasn’t for nothing.”

Venturine made it to the ice with Bella and Brady, and he was just glad the kids got to be there for the moment. But to know Muzerall is to understand the excitement and shock of winning it all doesn’t last long.

After the celebration on the ice, she went into the locker room, celebrated a little bit more and then was on the phone with a recruit setting up her travel plan for a visit a few days later.

“I just didn’t want to be the coach who was a one- hit wonder. Like, ‘You had one good year and were never heard from again,’” she said. “I didn’t want that and that drove me to work even harder.”

There was no break after the first championship. It was the same way after they lost in 2023 and won again in 2024.

“We turned the page fast which we probably shouldn’t have, but that’s what’s difficult about being so competitive, it’s hard to turn off chasing the next,” Cline said. “It’s hard because only one team wins and the other teams are trying to figure out how to win next season.”

Muzerall turned a dying program into a national contender. It’s such a well-respected program now that it was chosen to play Wisconsin on Saturday’s big stage at Wrigley Field.

All the success and the attention is great, but inside Muzerall is the same person every day. She’ll go back to practice in her “eyesore” of an ice rink, sit on her perch and yell instructions to her team.

No matter how much pressure there is, she can always fall back on the gift her mother gave her when she was inducted into the Minnesota Sports Hall of Fame.

It was a bicycle with a note on it.

She’s come too far to let up now.

“Before you’d have a good year and people are like, ‘Oh nice year, you were close,’ but it wasn’t a good year to me. It teased me,” she said. “Now it’s, ‘OK there is the weight of the expectation.’ But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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