Lake Forest Academy Girls Hockey Team, Driven By Diversity

By Ross Forman
Lake Forest Academy skated into the 2025-26 Metro Girls season with a lot of unknowns in head coach Erin Stoney’s second season leading the Caxys.

They had lost 10 seniors from the previous season, including several AAA-level players. “We weren’t sure what our roster,” would include, Stoney said. “I (knew) we would have two to four incoming freshman who had solid hockey experience, but attempting to replace 10 seniors was a tough hill to climb. We run pre-season skates to give the students at LFA a chance to get in front of the coaches and to quickly develop their basic skills where applicable, and this past fall we had about 20 girls attend.

“We ended up rostering five girls with no hockey experience, which left the total roster number at 13. Lake Forest Academy has an agreement with the Metro Girls Hockey League where we join the season later than the other teams, which makes us ineligible for the state tournament. This is because of school rules about strict season timing boundaries. This (past season), we were unable to play any seeding games, so we only had six games scheduled for our regular season. The bonus of this situation was, we had a little more time to focus on practice and development with our skill disparity.”

LFA went 2-2-2 after a 6-8-2 record during the 2024-25 season.

“We fought hard for each win and tie, and the losses were hard, but we used them as learning experiences,” Stoney said. “The girls embraced their unique situation and supported one another through the ups and downs of this season. I couldn’t be more impressed with our veteran acceptance and support of the newer players, which could make or break a team. The captains led by example and set the tone for the younger girls, as should be expected of leaders on a team. We were terribly upset at the news that we were not going to be in the playoffs for the Founders Cup due to technicality on tiebreakers in the league. But it again taught the girls a lesson about life, that we are only in control of certain things, but mostly, our own reactions. So, we used our last practice to have fun and played non-hockey sports on the ice like lacrosse, baseball and pickleball, which was the most fun practice of the year.”

This past season included a memorable senior night – and LFA won the game and their seniors excelled in ways they had not previously, she said. 

LFA came-from-behind for the senior night win over Lake Forest High School.

“We had so many little ‘W’ moments in the season and I have always preached that it takes many little ‘W’ moments to create Big W moments,” Stoney said. “Having faith in ourselves throughout the weeks of practice and growth takes fortitude and dedication, especially when we have so many inexperienced players on the team. What held us through these weeks was the patience and positivity of the experienced players, the support of the coaching and administrative staff, and the grit of the girls themselves. I couldn’t be prouder of each one of these ladies.”

Stoney is joined on the LFA bench by assistants Shannon Gibbons and Alexandra Fernandez, forming an all-female coaching staff.

Stoney has spent three seasons as a coach for the Northshore Warhawks AA girls’ program. She also coached at the ACHA D1 level, and in Minnesota for both U14 and high school girls’ teams. Plus, she has experience with two seasons of boys’ lacrosse. In total, Stoney has 12 years of coaching experience.

Gibbons is senior captain of the Lake Forest College D3 team and a native of Madison, Wisc., where she played AAA hockey with the Madison Capitals organization.

Fernandez, an LFA alum, was a goalie for the Caxys during the 2024-25 season. She now attends Loyola University in Chicago.

“I firmly believe that girls in sports need strong female representation leading them,” Stoney said. “When it is possible to have female coaches, this is the most direct way to make an impact, but seeing female program directors, athletic directors and support staff is also impactful. We are finally in a place with women’s hockey chronologically where we have experienced females in the sport who can step in to these roles and lead by example, and indeed lead in a way that girls respond to positively. 

“My generation came through the sport with mostly male coaches, and we are amazingly grateful that those pioneering men helped us build and grow the female side of ice hockey. My father had to create a girls’ league in my hometown of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota for me and my friends to even have a place to play. Now, we have more women with years of experience in ice hockey who can become coaches and leaders for the younger generations. One of my main goals as a leader in this space is to mentor other young females so that they can grow into these positions confidently and competently.”

Stoney added: “Girls need to be coached differently than boys. They internalize mistakes differently, respond to discipline differently and play the game differently, so it only makes sense that they need different types of coaching and support. Their bodies are also not the same, and having a female coaching staff that personally understands all these differences creates a transformation in how the girls respond throughout the season.”

Stoney is optimistic for the 2026-27 season but admitted it is “a great and wild unknown.”

“Although we have some very strong players returning, we will be losing five seniors, so again we have a season coming up where we will need to take on players with less experience,” she said. “Coaches refer to these types of years as ‘rebuilding years.’ I don’t anticipate having more than a couple of experienced players join us in a natural way, meaning that they play AA or AAA hockey outside of high school. This is a result, partially, of the school not offering athletic scholarships. However, I agree with the school’s take on scholarships as they do this in a need-based way across the board. Does it benefit my hockey program? No. But it is a fair and necessary way of distributing the scholarships so that we can provide the best to the most number of kids, regardless of athletic ability.”

Stoney said the strengths of the team is camaraderie, dedication, resiliency, laughter, learning mentality, embracing mistakes and common goals.”

Key losses that LFA will need to fill include Maddie Stastney, Jenna Gilani and Serena Gilani.

Key newcomers include forward Mia Pellegrini, who played defense last season. “She rose to the occasion last season, using her hockey IQ to adjust and adapt while still taking the right moments to apply her forward skills to a rush; she sets up her teammates with smart passes and never lets off the gas in a shift,” Stoney said. Plus, forward Clara Danz, who Stoney coached during the 2024-25 season at the Northshore Warhawks. “I know that I can always trust her to do exactly what I ask her to do. She has killer timing in her board battles and in front of the net and scored a few times because of this determined attitude near the crease. Her energy drives the team to good places.”

The LFA roster is diverse with a capital-D. This past season, the Caxys’ roster featured two Pakistani-Americans, two African-Americans, three Asian-Americans and a Latina girl. Consider:

Serena Gilani, defense, captain, Pakistani-American;
Jenna Gilani, forward, captain, Pakistani-American;
Christina Quiroz, forward in her first year playing, Latina;
Emmie Greer, forward in her first season playing, African-American;
Zoe Watkins, forward in her first year playing, African-American;
Maiko Yamaoka, forward in her first year playing, Asian-American;
Jessica Xu, forward, Asian-American;
Clara Choi, defense, Asian-American; and
Mia Pellegrini, Asian-American

Plus, the team managers were Harmony Gray, African-America; and Cecilia Hao, Asian-American.

There were only three girls on the roster who identify as Caucasian.

The team’s diversity seems natural, Stoney said “I grew up in an area of suburban Minneapolis where my high school was only about 50 percent white. Diversity is a strength in so many ways.

“At LFA, we tend to be an underdog team year after year. We only have about 450 students total in the school from which to pull athletes. We don’t offer athletic scholarships, so recruiting efforts are minimal, and we usually lose any high-level recruits to prep schools that have an even higher focus on ice hockey. We also don’t have a co-op team like a vast majority of the other Illinois high school teams, who can pull from up to seven schools to gather a roster. LFA having diversity is a natural consequence of how the school operates in general and it gives the girls something deeper in that they will always have teammates who are different from them in their upbringing and cultural normatives. This creates an environment that serves them well later in their lives when they enter college and the workplace, when they need to know how to not just understand cultural diversity, but to embrace it as a massive strength in projects and collaborative efforts.”

Stoney said there is no formal recognition for the team’s diversity, but a calm and accepted level of normalcy. “At LFA, diversity is a part of the DNA of the school, and therefore our own team’s profound mixture of ethnicities is a natural consequence.”

Stoney added: “As a youth coach, learning the different contexts of our athletes’ backgrounds should be the norm. It gives us understanding of how to best motivate them to excellence, how to have compassion while pushing through shortcomings, and how to communicate with them in both their high and low periods. It gives us a roadmap for how to be the best coach we can be for each unique personality we have under our care. It also builds the core of a team and their intimate and individual culture. As coaches, we can do our utmost to influence team culture, but in the end, it is up to the athletes to truly create this as a group. Diversity means they learn to respect and understand one another in multiple ways, and they must adapt their communication to account for all these individual backgrounds. This transfers into bigger life lessons for them. How do we get along with people of other ethnicities? How do we adapt our own communications to account for these beautiful differences? Can we deeply appreciate diversity in experiences as we move through life instead of judging them and being frightened by them? To embrace the perspectives of others should be a core belief that our children grow up understanding.

“In ice hockey, the cost of the sport and the availability of rinks has traditionally been prohibitive to more diverse cultures. This is, of course, a demographic and economic issue on a larger scale. We simply see more Caucasian upper-class kids playing and in recent years USA Hockey has had initiatives to mitigate this discrepancy, but it is still difficult to find a variety of ethnicities playing hockey. There are two unique aspects of life at Lake Forest Academy that cut through these specific issues. The first is having a naturally diverse student body at LFA, which helps introduce these kids to a sport that they may not have played otherwise. The second is that LFA has the only high school dedicated rink in the state. We have unparallelled access to a resource that many kids simply aren’t able to get to for one reason or another.”