Kimberly Newell

Kimberly Newell grew up in Burnaby, British Columbia attending Vancouver Giants games at the Pacific Coliseum, never imagining she would one day skate out of that same building as a professional hockey player in front of a sold-out crowd. That moment arrived in the fall of 2025, when Newell made the roster of the PWHL's newest franchise, the Vancouver Goldeneyes, wearing number 35.

The path to that opening night was neither direct nor simple. Newell, born October 4, 1995, played collegiate hockey at Princeton University, where she became the program's all-time winningest goaltender in the history of the women's program. After graduating, she spent two years working in finance in New York City before returning to competitive hockey — a gap she would later navigate a second time on her way back to the PWHL.

That first return brought her to the KRS Vanke Rays of the Zhenskaya Hockey League in Russia, and ultimately to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where she represented China under the Chinese name Zhou Jiaying. She had taken on Chinese nationality to play for KRS, a team she described in her first InGoal Radio appearance as a chance to represent her Chinese heritage with the first-ever Chinese professional team ^[1]. Before that, in 2013, Newell had been part of the Canadian side, winning gold at the U18 World Championship alongside teammates who would later become her professional peers — including Kristen Campbell and Sarah Nurse, as well as Hannah Miller.

The road back to professional hockey for the PWHL season required Newell to rebuild her physical foundation from the ground up. She had sustained an ankle injury before the 2022 Olympics and managed it through the Games. During her preparation for the PWHL draft, she worked with a strength coach and neuromuscular therapist in San Jose to develop a program she described as bridging the gap between rehabilitation and performance — addressing not just whether the ankle had healed technically, but whether it could support her movement without restriction. Through the summer, she was on the ice as little as once a week, deliberately limiting her load to protect her body while building conditioning off the ice. It was only in September and October that she began skating three to four times per week in earnest, timing her physical peak to coincide with training camp. She also maintained some base fitness during the off years by playing beer league hockey — as a skater, not a goaltender.

During that same period away from pro hockey, Newell co-founded InPower Hockey, a goaltending coaching operation, and worked with a local U18 AAA team in the Vancouver area. The coaching work deepened her technical understanding of the position in ways she has articulated in detail. She describes a framework built around three movement qualities: versatility, or the ability to execute multiple options in a given situation; adaptability, or the capacity to respond to different plays as they develop; and resiliency, the physical ability to handle unexpected contact or situations without injury. Her thinking on how goalies move shifted away from prescriptive, single-answer approaches toward an understanding that different movement patterns carry different trade-offs, and that practicing multiple options — in shuffles, hand positioning, butterfly posture — builds the athleticism to let the right choice emerge in game situations.

She also draws a clear distinction between learning mode and performance mode, describing training as the process of making conscious technical work unconscious, so that by game day the mind can clear and the body executes without deliberate processing.

The decision to enter the PWHL expansion draft was anchored specifically in Vancouver. Newell has said she attended a PWHL Takeover Tour game at Rogers Arena with the U18 team she was coaching and first allowed herself to imagine what it would mean if a franchise came to her hometown. When the Vancouver expansion was announced, she committed to pursuing it. She said that had the new team been in Seattle rather than Vancouver, she would not have been nearly as motivated. The sold-out Takeover Tour crowd — over 19,000 at Rogers Arena — reinforced what she believed was possible. Opening night at the Pacific Coliseum sold out as well, and Newell, whose memories of the building were from childhood Giants games in the nosebleed seats, described getting chills walking toward the ice as she heard the crowd through the tunnel, knowing her parents, friends, and many players she had coached were in the stands.

On episode 330 of InGoal Radio, Newell discussed her return to professional hockey in detail — from her physical preparation process and the role of coaching in sharpening her technical understanding, to the meaning of playing in her hometown and her philosophy on goaltender movement ^[2]. Her first InGoal appearance, episode 178, came after the 2022 Olympics and explored her mindset and the experience of competing in Beijing ^[1].

InGoal Magazine has covered Kimberly Newell in two podcast appearances.