The Newcomers: KRS Vanke Rays Shenzhen in 2019-20

KRS Vanke Rays Shenzhen celebrate a pre-season tournament championship in Beijing in late August. Their opponents at that event included ZhHL rivals Agidel Ufa. (Image Source)

Time for the fifth of our 2019-20 Women’s Hockey League (ZhHL) previews, and this time we will be talking about the league’s newly-added eighth team, and its first from outside of Russia. KRS Vanke Rays Shenzhen, based in southeastern China, join the Russian circuit following the untimely demise of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. Read on, as we take a look at their 2019-20 roster!

(Image Source)

Who are KRS Vanke Rays Shenzhen?

They are the women’s team of the KHL’s Kunlun Red Star Beijing club, founded to give the sport a boost in advance of China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics. KRS Vanke Rays arrive in the Russian Women’s Hockey League after two seasons in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, but the history is actually a bit more complicated than that. Kunlun Red Star originally founded two women’s professional teams in 2017: Kunlun Red Star WIH and Vanke Rays. Their first season in the CWHL, 2017-18, was a success; although Vanke Rays narrowly missed the playoffs, Kunlun Red Star WIH went to the final, and lost only in overtime to the Markham Thunder. The summer, the two teams essentially merged, and the new squad took the name KRS Vanke Rays. They finished fifth out of six in 2018-19, but missed the final playoff spot only due to the tiebreaker. But this past spring, the CWHL suddenly folded, leaning the Chinese team adrift. Given the geography, and the Kunlun Red Star club’s already-considerable ties to Russian hockey, the move to the ZhHL made a lot of sense for everybody, and here we are.

As they did in the CWHL, KRS Vanke Rays play out of the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province. Their home rink is the 14000-seat Shenzhen Dayun Arena, built for the 2011 Winter Universiade.

Noora Räty playing for Kunlun Red Star WIH a couple of seasons ago. (Image Source)

Any familiar names on the roster?

Well, how about Noora Räty? The much-decorated Finnish goalie, one of the sport’s all-time greats, has not played for Vanke Rays yet this season, but indicated a couple of days ago that she will join the team this week. Räty, incidentally, is the only player on the Rays’ roster who has previous ZhHL experience; she played briefly for SKIF Nizhny Novgorod in 2013-14. And the other very familiar name on the roster is American forward Alex Carpenter, who has represented the U.S. at eight World Championships at the U18 and Senior levels, and at the 2014 Olympic Games. Carpenter was better than a point-per-game player over three seasons in the NWHL and CWHL, and put up prodigious numbers during her NCAA career with Boston College (278 points in 150 games, for example). Both Räty and Carpenter have spent the last two seasons in the CWHL as part the Kunlun Red Star teams there.

Some other names on the roster, too, may well ring some bells for fans of North American and European women’s hockey. Rachel Llanes has two seasons of NWHL experience and four in the CWHL (two of those with Kunlun Red Star teams), while her fellow forward Amy Menke has also played in the NWHL and in Sweden’s SDHL. Canadian-Chinese goalie Kimberly Newell, who’s been holding the fort very well in advance of Räty’s return, and American forward Rebekah Kolstad are both coming out of college hockey in North America, while Claudia Kepler, who also played in the NCAA, is joining the team after a successful season with HV71 in Sweden.

What about homegrown talent? Who are the Chinese players on this team?

The best-known Chinese player on the Rays’ roster, at least outside of China, is likely defender Liu Zhixin, who has a decade’s worth of national team experience and who spent the past couple of seasons in the CWHL with one or the other of the KRS teams (there is an interesting profile of Liu here, in Chinese). Liu is joined on the roster by four experienced Chinese players who are newcomers to the club but whose time in the national program goes back to the early 2000s. Defenders Qi Xueting and Zhang Shuang fall into that category (Qi will captain the team in 2019-20), as do forwards Huo Cui and Tang Liang. All four have both top-division Worlds and Olympic experience with the Chinese national team, while the slightly-younger Liu also has the 2010 Olympic Games on her resume.

Liu Zhixin. (Image Source)

And while the older generation of Chinese players is well-represented on KRS Vanke Rays this season, so is the younger via four players who recently graduated from the U18 program. Forwards Liu Yufei, Pi Yunlin, and Yang Liying are three of those, with Pi of particular interest. At 19, she’s the youngest player on the Vanke Rays’ roster, and she has scored well in youth hockey, including for one of the KRS youth teams in the American-based U19 EWHC; in 2017-18, she led her team in that league in points, scoring 7-3-10 in 13 games. The fourth youngster is 20-year-old goalie He Siye, who has already made her ZhHL debut, stopping 26 of 28 shots against Biryusa Krasnoyarsk on September 15th.

Finally, and much as on the men’s side at the Kunlun Red Star program, Vanke Rays have looked for North American players of Chinese extraction, who can become naturalized citizens of China and play for the national team. At least five players on the roster fall into that category, namely above-mentioned netminder Newell, defender Kaitlin Tse, and forwards Emily Costales, Melanie Jue, and Leah Lum, all of whom were born in Canada (and all but Tse in British Columbia). There may well be others for whom naturalization is an option, but those are the five of whom I am sure.

Who’s the coach?

48-year-old Brian Idalski is the Vanke Rays’ bench boss this season. He’s been away from coaching for a couple of seasons, but prior to that break spent sixteen seasons in working as a women’s hockey coach in the NCAA, the last ten of those campaigns as head coach at the University of North Dakota.

How has it gone for them so far?

Well, they’re currently seventh out of eight teams in the league, but don’t be fooled. Vanke Rays are 2-2, with one of those wins coming in a shootout. They dropped their opening two games, at home vs. Biryusa Krasnoyarsk, largely due to some very fine play by Biryusa goalie Nadezhda Morozova; the scores were 2-1 and 2-0. But Vanke Rays recovered to take a pair of victories against SKIF Nizhny Novgorod, winning the first 3-0 and second 4-3 in the afore-mentioned shootout. The Chinese team now heads on the road to Dmitrov to play two games against Tornado Moscow Oblast.

No surprise that Carpenter is leading the team in scoring (4 gp, 3-3-6), and Llanes also has found the net three times so far (Leah Lum has the Rays’ other goal this season). In goal, Newell has played very well too, stopping 84 of 89 shots over three games (94.4%). So, while the record isn’t great (and a few more goals would come in handy for this team), there’s no reason to think that Vanke Rays, given the talent on their roster, won’t be among the contenders for the title this season — especially with Noora Räty apparently on the way.

Anything else?

Vanke Rays are a well-supported team in Shenzhen; they’ve already set a new attendance mark for a regular-season or playoff game in the ZhHL, with 3432 spectators for their second match against Biryusa.

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Thank you for reading!