Ten Questions Columnist Reena Gilani sat down with women’s ice hockey junior forward Brianne Jenner to discuss her charity work, being gluten free and silly times with her teammates.
1. How did you get involved with hockey?I started playing hockey when I was three. My dad and uncle ran hockey rinks back home and I grew up skating on an outdoor rink like a lot of Canadian kids, so I started to get into it that way. Did you ever participate in any other sports?Yeah, I played basketball, soccer, cross country and all that stuff growing up, but I liked hockey the most. How did you end up at Cornell?Just through the recruitment process. I looked at a lot of schools and Cornell just fit. I came and visited the school and I loved the team here, loved all the girls.Can you tell me about your try at the Olympics?I was the last cut.How does it feel to have accomplished so much and to have been that close to a huge opportunity?It was pretty cool to be able to play with so many talented heroes and have that chance. No one likes to get that close and get cut, but overall it was a great experience. Are you trying to go back in the future?Yeah, definitely.
2. What is the ‘Markers for Madison’ charity?It’s an initiative that I started for one of my good friends from back home. Her little cousin was just diagnosed with brain cancer and she’s going into her second treatment of chemotherapy. I thought that with my position at Cornell I could maybe get the Lynah Faithful and the hockey fans to help me support her since her family is going through a really rough time and they need some financial help so that her dad can be with her. ‘Markers for Madison’ is just a charity so if people sponsor me, they’ll pay a dollar for every goal I score throughout the season… which probably won’t be too many goals. But hopefully with the amount of donors we can make a difference. How has the support been so far?I just started advertising it [Monday] and the support has been great. A lot of the communities have gotten behind me and I’m pretty excited about the future of it.
3. Have you ever peed your pants during a hockey game?Our first game this year I took a really big hit. I was not expecting that hit and I guess my bladder wasn’t expecting it either, so I had a rough go. What did you do? Did you get off the ice?I actually stayed on the ice. We had a power play and I ended up scoring like 30 seconds later. Hopefully I got my teammates to forget about the incident for a couple of minutes, but they remembered after the game and they were pretty hard on me.
4. What is your signature dance move?It doesn’t really have a name, but it pretty much goes along with every song you could ever think of. It goes along with any beat and I think all my teammates would agree. A lot of them try to imitate it but they don’t even come close.What’s it like?It’s a lot of shoulder movements. The look is really important, too. Do you bring it out a lot in Collegetown?Oh, you could probably see it around.
5. Let’s talk about your singing abilities.Oh, god. I can’t sing. I wish I could, more than anything. If I couldn’t play hockey and could be a singer, that would be really cool. But I suck at it. What did you do as a child?As a kid I used to think it would be okay to whisper sing so my teammates always try to ask me to do it.Have you ever gone public with the whisper singing? Oh no, I kept it all to myself. I actually hadn’t even told anyone about it until last year.
6. What was your experience with learning you were gluten free?That was the worst time of my life. That was last year. I found out I had Celiac Disease and I love food, so that was really tough. Trillium is my favorite place to eat on campus so my selection there went from like everything to nothing. How did you find out you had it?I got diagnosed at Gannett; that saved the day.What’s the incident with Chipotle?Last year we went to Chipotle for a pre-game meal on a road trip and a few of us got sick. I was up all night and I thought it was because of Chipotle and I was cursing Chipotle, but really it was because I’m a glutard and I just didn’t know it at the time.
7. If you could be any animal, which would it be?Oh, that’s easy. I would definitely be a loon. How come?There are three main reasons why. Loons can fly. They can dive really far underwater. And, they have a really cool call. Do you have a call of your own when you’re on the ice?Nothing that’s appropriate.
8. Do you have any pre-game rituals to get you ready for the ice?Our team as a whole is really superstitious about that kind of stuff. We have two soccer keep-up groups on our team; one is the talented group while the other group is more of the misfits. I’m a misfit so we just try to get as many shoulders as possible — hitting the ball off of our shoulders — but really we only keep up the ball once or twice in a row, because we’re that bad. But we have fun.And you do this before the game?Yeah, in the locker room … We kind of own our less-talented players. We have fun.
9. What’s the craziest thing you’ve done since you’ve joined the team here?It would probably be the prank that we played on some of our teammates over intersession. What’s the story there?So a bunch of our teammates live in a house called Sheer Ice. Sheer Ice was chilling at home and myself and one of my teammates — Katelyn Pippy ’15 — faked a car crash a block from their house so that they would leave. We had an inside man in Sheer Ice that let us know when the coast was clear so that myself and a few other teammates could go in. We hid their TV, computer and pictures of boyfriends and then hid ourselves. Because of the great success of this prank we decided to continue on to another teammate dwelling and get them too.Did that work out just as well? Unfortunately for us the prank backfired because Sheer Ice had warned our next victims of what was coming. Long story short our teammates scared us by telling us they had told our coach, and that he was on his way and we were all in big trouble. We all freaked out.
10. Which other sports team do you like to hang out with most on campus?Definitely wrestling.How come?There’s something weird where female hockey players are like the equivalent of male wrestlers. Whenever we hang out it’s just an awesome time. We hang out with the wrestlers more than with any other team.
Original Author: Reena Gilani