Walking into Sertich Ice Arena in Colorado Springs brought back a swath of memories for Kelly Mahncke.

“Man. I haven’t been here in more than 20 years,” she said.

She definitely made the most of her time on that ice, along with other arenas in Colorado Springs, a while back.

Mahncke, 49, was one of the only girls in Colorado Springs – and possibly all of Colorado at one point – who played state-sanctioned high school hockey in the early 1990s. She wound up on a pretty good team: She played defense during her four years at Palmer High School and was part of a squad that won back-to-back state championships in 1992 and 1993.

Now, she’s taken her passion for hockey to one of the world’s highest levels. She has served as the assistant executive director of finance at Colorado Springs-based USA Hockey since January 2019 and is responsible for the nonprofit organization’s finances, insurance, treasury, payroll and risk management along with personnel and administration oversight.

She’s been a big part of Team USA’s planning headed into the Milan Cortina Winter Games in Italy – which officially start Friday, though some competition begins Wednesday – and her overall body of work drew praise from the organization’s top executive.

“She’s a phenomenal teammate and leader,” USA Hockey Executive Director Pat Kelleher said. “We can’t do what we do without finding the financial resources to put us in a position to be successful on the ice.”

Not bad for a girl who drew more than a few side eyes from the boys when she was on the ice in high school.

“It was really a mixed bag, honestly,” Mahncke said. “I think there was certainly the sentiment that there were folks who didn’t want a girl out there on the ice. But I had some incredible teammates who were really, really supportive, and the coach was also supportive. So overall, in hindsight, it was really positive, but it was also really challenging. I mean, there were times when there were players out there who would hit me as hard as they possibly could just because I’m a girl.”

Hockey in the early 1990s didn’t have nearly as many high school participants in Colorado as it does now. According to numbers on the Colorado High School Activities Association website, statewide participation in sanctioned ice hockey was 229 athletes in 1993 (the year the Terrors beat Kent Denver for the all-classifications state championship for the second consecutive year). This past season, the association reported 1,454 participants.

The data, however, does not provide any information on how many of those participants were girls, and an email sent to CHSAA requesting that information was not returned. Mahncke, however, said she didn’t hear of any other girls in Colorado Springs playing high school hockey until after her freshman year in 1992 –- a season that only happened because she said she begged her parents, Bruce and Wendy Mahncke, to let her play.

She joined the team as a freshman despite those reservations, which also initially came from some of Palmer’s coaching staff and players.

“I remember there was once when there was someone on another team who said, ‘I don’t know how it is you can have a girl on your team. She’s probably not very good’,” said Don Roth, one of Mahncke’s teammates at Palmer. “That’s when some of us said to them that she was probably 10 times better than a lot of people who come out here and in some cases, she would have been the best player on their team.

“She was a beast,” Roth continued. “She didn’t let people bully her in any way and would stand up for herself, even though she was always the smallest person on the ice by far. We were in a spot where we were watching out for her all the time, and we didn’t mind that.”

Mahncke’s time playing hockey at Palmer led her to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., where she played NCAA Division I women’s hockey for two years before transferring back home to get her undergraduate degree in economics from Colorado College. She then earned a master’s in business administration from the University of Colorado-Denver. Prior to her job with USA Hockey, she was the chief financial officer for Arapahoe House Inc., which was the largest provider of substance abuse treatments in Colorado, and helped make the organization profitable.

“That’s when (a co-worker) came to me and told me about this and said, ‘Hey, I think this job (at USA Hockey) would be really fun for you,’” Mahncke said.

Mahncke said USA Hockey is much more complex than people may realize. It has four companies under its umbrella, serves 1.2 million members, owns its own insurance company and is “much more complicated than just sending people to the Olympics,” Mahncke said.

A lot has changed from her time playing in high school. It wasn’t until 1994 that Minnesota became the first state to sanction girls’ high school hockey, and it wasn’t until 1998 that women’s hockey became an Olympic sport in Nagano, Japan. Since then, the U.S. women’s team has won seven medals, including golds in 1998, and in Pyeongchang in 2018. This year, the U.S. women are the favorites to win gold, according to DraftKings Sportsbook, with Canada close behind.

She’s also well aware of the history of the U.S. men’s team –- one that practiced at the original Broadmoor World Arena during the “Miracle On Ice” year in 1980 in Lake Placid, N.Y. Her family even has hockey history: Her dad, Bruce, attended Wasson High School and played hockey at Colorado College in 1965.

“She basically has hockey in her DNA,” Kelleher said.

Mahncke said she isn’t planning to attend this year’s games in Italy knowing she has plenty of other things to work on and attend to in the meantime –- ways, she said, to make herself and USA Hockey better.

“That’s what I strive to work on every day,” she said.