Scoggins: Doesn’t matter the competition, Taylor Heise plans to ‘rip it up’

One of the top women’s hockey players in the world celebrated Hockey Day Minnesota in a place that brings her joy.

Taylor Heise went to a basketball game.

She loves hoops and was quite a baller as a kid.

“I wasn’t Caitlin Clark,” she said, “but I definitely was on a path that I would have made something out of myself.”

Her boyfriend vouches for her basketball skills.

“She’s got really good shooting form, and she’s got range too,” said Parker Fox, spark plug of the Gophers men’s basketball team. “She’s got deeper range than I do, that’s for sure.”

Said Heise: “I can rip it up from the three.”

She leaves the ripping to the ice as star of the Minnesota Frost, but her connection to hoops remains strong.

Heise comes from a basketball family. Her parents Amy and Tony played college basketball at Wisconsin River Falls. Her two younger brothers currently play college basketball. Nate is a key reserve for No. 3 Iowa State after playing four seasons at Northern Iowa. Ryan is the sixth man as a 6-9 freshman at Division II Upper Iowa.

On Saturday, Heise cheered on Fox as the Gophers upset No. 15 Oregon 77-69 at Williams Arena. Heise and her mom also kept an eye out for updates on Ryan’s game in Iowa.

So how did Heise break the mold and become a superstar in hockey? She brought home a flyer from school one day in first grade inviting kids to an introductory hockey lesson.

“I never skated,” she said. “Never knew what hockey was.”

She was an exceptional athlete as a kid in every sport she tried. Raised in Lake City, the Heise kids spent free time outdoors. The family never had a video game console in the home.

Taylor and her brothers would run hills for morning workouts and bike around the block, which measured 6.5 miles. Two would go one way and the other the opposite direction to see who could make it back first.

Their home had three basketball hoops in the driveway, one for each kid. Taylor wrote down daily goals for her workouts. She’d shoot free throws or do dribbling drills before dinner.

She had natural athleticism and feisty competitiveness. She still remembers the girl in southern Minnesota who was her nemesis.

“This same girl beat me every single place we went,” she said. “Punt, Pass and Kick. Tractor pull. She would beat me every time. But she was already six feet and way bigger than me.”

Hold on, tractor pull?

“I got second in the nation for tractor pulling,” she said.

She pulled out her phone to show a video of it. Technically, it’s called pedal pull, a competition in which kids sit on a miniature tractor and pull a weighted sled by pedaling. Heise took second at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D., bringing home a huge trophy.

“She was a beast,” her mom said.

Hockey provided another opportunity to display her beast mode, though the family literally had no history with the sport.

“We joke that every time they talk about somebody either in the PWHL or Minnesota Gophers or U.S. national team, every person has some sort of lineage,” her mom said. “The dad is the skating coach for the New York Rangers. Mom was a speed skater. [With us] there’s nothing. You can’t backtrack to great-grandparents, no uncle, nothing.”

The school flyer offering a lesson was all the encouragement Heise needed. Her parents bought her a used pair of skates for $19. Some kids taped oven mitts to their knees.

Heise’s mom is a scrapbooker and has a page devoted to her first year in hockey.

“Wow, she skates really confidently,” she wrote. “But it took her until the last 35 seconds of the season to score a goal.”

Her parents weren’t convinced she would stick with it. They wanted to make sure before jumping all-in financially. Heise played for a Twin Cities team in U12 that wore black uniforms and black helmets. She only had a white helmet. Her parents didn’t cave.

Heise improvised by covering her white helmet in black tape.

“I was made fun of by everyone,” she said. “I skated for two years with that thing.”

She honed her skills by shooting pucks into a net in her driveway and rollerblading down a big hill in her front yard.

“Me and my brothers would tape things to our bodies and just absolutely slam into the ground,” she said. “That’s how I first got into hockey.”

She played both basketball and hockey in the winter from third grade through sixth. Her dad coached her basketball team so he would set their practice schedule after receiving her hockey schedule.

The family’s property has a pond that became an occasional training area. Her brothers would join her on the ice. The sibling competition spread to a new sport.

“Nathan was a sledgehammer,” she said. “He wanted to bulldoze over everything. I would see him tailing me and I was like, Oh my gosh, he’s going to take me out. Boom!”

Lake City didn’t have a hockey team so Heise played in Red Wing 20 miles away. As a fourth-grader, she informed her parents that she would open enroll in Red Wing in middle school to play hockey. Her basketball career ended after sixth grade.

The Heises became a hockey family, too.

“I am very type A,” she said. “I was nervous every day that I wasn’t going to make it worth it and that it wasn’t going to work out for me.”

She squashed those fears with a hockey résumé few can match: Ms. Hockey award winner at Red Wing; All-America and Patty Kazmaier Award winner for the Gophers; No. 1 overall pick by the Frost in the inaugural PWHL draft; member of the U.S. national team.

Her brothers and her relationship with Fox keep her emotionally attached to basketball. In December, she jumped in the back seat to join her parents on a road trip through icy conditions to watch both brothers play.

She met Fox as a student when the basketball team stopped by a party after a Gophers football game. She was sitting on the ground, talking on her phone.

“I remember him being like, ‘What are you doing over there, you look lame,’” she said.

Um, Parker?

“I was probably joking,” he said, “but sounds like something I would say.”

They are partners in comedy, a couple of characters who should have their own TV reality show. Date nights on campus sometimes consisted of them shooting hockey pucks or playing P-I-G at Williams Arena.

“When we play cards at night,” Fox said, “it gets a little fierce.”

Heise has proof.

“I took this video the other day,” she said. “It was a riveting Sunday night at the Heise-Fox household of us playing Kings Corners. I was so mad. I threw my cards on the table. He’s like, ‘Are you going to be a sore loser?’ You know me better than that. Of course I am.”

They are also each other’s biggest fan. Fox climbed into the stands after recording a double-double in the win over Oregon to give Heise a hug and kiss.

“She’s been the biggest blessing to me,” he said.

A day later, Heise was the headliner. She scored two goals in the Frost’s 5-2 win over Boston, proving once again that whether it’s hockey, cards, P-I-G or tractor pulls, she can rip it up.