Women’s Hockey Update: July 30th, 2018 (Updated)

SKIF Nizhny Novgorod U18 goalie Varvara Bunkova with Georgy Kuznetsov of Dynamo Moscow (l.) and Andrei Tikhomirov of Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod after Saturday’s KHL pre-season game between Dynamo and Torpedo.  All of the proceeds from the game went to help with Bunkova’s physiotherapy following very complicated knee surgery.  (Image Source)

More player moves in the Women’s Hockey League since the last update, including a couple more big signings by SKIF Nizhny Novgorod!  Those are discussed below, as well as some new players in camp with defending champions Agidel Ufa, a benefit game for an injured young player, and some other matters as well.  Read on…

Update: We start with big news from the Women’s Hockey League, as the list of the participants for the 2018-19 season was released today.  Unfortunately, and as rumoured, Kazakh team Tomiris Astana will not be joining the league for the coming campaign, and we will have to wait to see what happens next with that project.  Tomiris’ parent club, Barys Astana, had a fraught 2017-18 season in terms of front-office administration, resulting in a lot of changes there; those may very well have derailed or postponed their bid to the join the Russian women’s league.  The Women’s Hockey League has stated a desire to expand back to ten teams by 2021, so there will be expansion news at some point!

In the meantime, the league will enter 2018-19 as a seven-team circuit once again.  The only change, as we discussed in the last update, is Arktik-Universitet Ukhta’s name-change to SK Gorny, ahead of their planned November move to St. Petersburg.  So the list of teams then is as follows:

• Agidel Ufa
• Biryusa Krasnoyarsk
• Dynamo St. Petersburg
• Gorny Ukhta/St. Petersburg
• SK Sverdlovsk Oblast
• SKIF Nizhny Novgorod
• Tornado Moscow Oblast

The next big news to come from the league will of course be the announcement of the season format and schedule.  There will be a post here as soon as that info is available!

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Moving on to a nice story from Nizhny Novgorod.  Goalie Varvara Bunkova of SKIF Nizhny Novgorod’s national-champion youth program, who recently underwent serious knee surgery and faces a long period of rehabilitation, was the recipient of some support from the local KHL team this weekend.  Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod turned Saturday’s pre-season game against Dynamo Moscow into a benefit event for Bunkova, with the young player receiving all the proceeds from the game to help pay for her physiotherapy.

Bunkova performed the ceremonial opening faceoff for the match (which was won 4-3 by Dynamo, just for the record), and also chose each team’s Player of the Game afterwards.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, she selected her fellow netminders Andrei Tikhomirov of Torpedo and Dynamo’s Georgy Kuznetsov.  You can see more pictures from the event here, and watch a short video on it here.  And here’s wishing Varvara Bunkova a swift recovery and a successful return to the ice!

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The senior team at Bunkova’s club, SKIF Nizhny Novgorod, had already made one big splash in the Women’s Hockey League’s summer transfer market, signing Agidel Ufa forward Alexandra Vafina to a contract.  And they went right back to Ufa this past week for another pair of major acquisitions on the defensive side, inking veteran blueliners Anna Shchukina and Alexandra Kapustina.

Alexandra Kapustina. (Image Source)

It is a return to Nizhny Novgorod for both players; Shchukina played for SKIF from 2002 to 2011, while Kapustina patrolled the blueline there from 2005 to 2015, and was team captain for the last four of those seasons.  Both were part of the Russian national team for many years as well (Kapustina has nine World Championships and three Olympics on her resume, Shchukina a respective eight and one).d  Both were serious contributors to Agidel’s title run last season, as well, with Kapustina scoring 15 points in 24 games, and Shchukina 10 in 22.  The two have more spectacular seasons in their pasts, but they are still fully capable of playing the game.

SKIF have a prodigious youth system; their Under-18 team has been national champion for several seasons in a row now, and adding Kapustina and Shchukina (not to mention Vafina) to the roster will give those graduating youngsters some further veteran support as they head into their Women’s Hockey League Careers.  They will be joined in that role by another returning former national-teamer in forward Yelena Silina, who is back at SKIF after taking a year’s maternity leave.

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Speaking of which, congratulations are in order to Arktik-Universitet Ukhta goalie Alyona Kropachyova on the birth of her daughter!

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As for Agidel, despite the departures to SKIF (and the unfortunately acrimonious parting of ways with defender Yekaterina Ananyina, to which team GM Alexander Semak responded recently), the defending champions will still boast a very solid defence, having signed Mariya Batalova from Tornado Moscow Oblast earlier this summer to join the likes of national-teamers Mariya Pechnikova and Anna Shibanova.

Agidel have also brought in a quartet of young players for a look-see, and two of them are on defence.  Milana Leushkina comes out of the youth program at KHL club Vityaz Moscow Oblast, and played the last couple of seasons on boys’ team Armada 2004 Odintsovo, while Varvara Leonova, from Tver, was with the all-girls Moscow Oblast Selects in the regional championship for boys born in 2005 (it is standard practice for girls competing in hockey against boys in Russia to be a couple of years older than their opponents; Leonova and most of her team-mates were born in 2003).

Ulyana Balashova playing for Severyanka Cherepovets’ U18 team last season.  (Image Source)

Joining those two newcomers are forwards Alina Narutdinova, from the Sergei Makarov Hockey School in Chelyabinsk, and Ulyana Balishova. Balashova is from Yaroslavl, and played a number of years for the Yaroslavl 2003 boys’ team (she herself was born in 2001).  In 2017-18, she turned out for Severyanka Cherepovets in the Under-18 division of the amateur League of Women’s Hockey, and did very well; Balashova led all scorers in the division with a line of 10-5-15 in eight games as Severyanka took home the national silver medal.

Definitely all names to keep in mind, although given their youth there is no guarantee that we will see them much in the Women’s Hockey League this season.

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Dynamo St. Petersburg have continued their off-season roster-stocking, signing a couple of players from defending silver medalists Tornado Moscow Oblast.  On their way are 18-year-old goalie Milena Tretyak (no relation to the famous Vladislav) and 21-year-old forward Kristina Korotkikh.  Korotkhik spent the last three seasons at Tornado in a depth forward role (Tornado is a tough team to break into as a forward), scoring one goal and one assist in 21 games last season.  Tretyak, though she was on Tornado’s books last season, still awaits her Women’s Hockey League debut; she was the backup netminder for the Russian U18 team at the 2018 World Championship in Dmitrov, and played in one game.  She will be in the mix with Irina Kostina for the backup job with Dynamo behind the prodigious Valeriya Merkusheva.

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We will talk more about some of the other teams’ pre-season changes in the next update, but a quick note here on Tornado Moscow Oblast.  Tretyak and Korotkikh are not the only players departing the Dmitrov team this summer — also heading elsewhere are: defenders Svetlana Tkachyova, Darya Seredina, Alyona Novikova and Alyona Khaustova along with forwards Lyudmila Belyakova (now Lyudmila Mishina) and Yelizaveta Zenchenko.  The two biggest names on that list are the veteran rearguard and former Olympian Tkachyova and the prolific scoring forward and current national-teamer Mishina.  As I said, more on these moves in the next update, and in the meantime many thanks to Alexander Agapov for passing along this information.

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Thank you for reading!