By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
Following graduation day at St. Mary Secondary School next week, boom! Sophie Harold is outta here and headed to Providence, Rhode Island, on full a hockey scholarship.
And if not for her father, it would not have happened.
Sophie shared the story in a recent interview of how she started with Northumberland Wild at age seven in 2014.
Her parents are Bryan and Christine Harold of Cobourg, and they had her skating before she started school. When her dad mentioned hockey, she definitely did not want to – felt so strongly about it, in fact, that she recalls the odd tantrum – but finally let him take her to tryouts. She was won over.
“I met a bunch of my good friends that I am still friends with. I guess Dad was right,” Sophie admitted.
She played with the Wild for two years, then moved on to Cold Creek Comets for a year.
“Not to sound cocky, but I realized I should probably play at a higher level of hockey,” she recalled.
That’s when she went to the Peterborough Ice Kats AA team, where she met Chris Moher, “the best coach I will ever have. He taught me so many things, really developed me as a player an also as a human being.”
She would be with Peterborough for four years (during one of which they were ranked top place in North America).
“On our very last tournament, we won provincial championships, a great way to end,” she said.
The teammates seemed to go their own way at that point, and she signed with the Whitby Jr. Wolves U 22 Elite at the age of 14 – “another awesome opportunity,” she declared.
During that time, she tried out for Team Ontario 2024 and was made assistant captain of the Blue Team.
She was in New Brunswick last November to play in the Canadian National Women’s U18 tourney and, thanks to Dave Marshall, her signed jersey now hangs in the store at the Cobourg Community Centre.
She gives a lot of credit to her coach the first year, Paul Brooks, and even more to the one who came after.
It was under Gary Soper that she became co-captain of the team, and she will remember him as “my last coach to coach me before I went off into the world.”
The Providence Friars D1 Women’s Ice Hockey Team in Rhode Island had their eye on Sophie as far back as September 2023, when she verbally committed to them. She signed and made the full four-year scholarship official Nov. 14, 2024.
After her June 26 graduation from St. Mary Secondary School, she’ll leave almost immediately for Providence College (which is well known for its hockey and basketball) to begin some course work that will free up more hockey time in the fall.
“The campus is beautiful, the facilities are awesome,” Sophie said.
“My family went the summer I was offered the scholarship. I visited Providence and Brown, but the second I walked on the Providence campus, it felt like ‘this is where I want to be.’ It felt like Cobourg.”
One great feature of this college is that you do not have to declare a major the first year, which gives her the chance to take courses that will help her decide between her two top possibilities – physiotherapy and education.
The trip from Cobourg to Providence works out to about nine hours, which means she may have her own cheering section for some of those home games. Her brother Spencer may be too busy with hockey, baseball and studies at CCI, but her dad is planning to take off for a weekend visit one Friday a month.
And other relatives are making sure their passports are ready and arranging their plans.
