Kimberly Newell

Kimberly Newell grew up in Burnaby, British Columbia, attending Vancouver Giants games at Pacific Coliseum as a kid — sitting in the nosebleeds, by her own recollection — with no reason to imagine she would one day skate out of that same building as a professional hockey player. When the PWHL announced Vancouver would receive an expansion franchise, that changed.

Newell was born October 4, 1995, and came up through Canadian hockey with enough distinction to be part of the 2013 U18 Team Canada squad that won gold — a team that also included goaltenders and future PWHL teammates Emerance Maschmeyer, along with Hannah Miller and Sarah Nurse. She went on to Princeton University, where she became, as host Kevin Woodley noted in a 2025 conversation, the winningest goalie in the history of Princeton women's hockey. After graduating, she worked in finance in New York City, took two years away from competitive play, and then made a return to professional hockey with KRS Vanke Rays of the Zhenskaya Hockey League (ZhHL). That return carried a specific purpose: representing her Chinese heritage by playing for the first-ever Chinese professional team. She also carries the Chinese name Zhou Jiaying.

That chapter culminated on the biggest international stage. Newell represented China in the women's ice hockey tournament at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, doing so while managing an ankle injury — one she described in detail in a 2025 InGoal Radio appearance, noting that it never fully disappears but that targeted rehab and neuromuscular work can bridge the gap between technical healing and full athletic performance ^[1].

After the ZhHL stint, Newell returned to the Vancouver area, took up goaltending instruction, and became a co-founder of InPower Hockey. She coached a U18 AAA team locally, and it was at a PWHL Takeover Tour game — attended with that team's staff — that she first allowed herself the thought of playing professionally in her hometown. When Vancouver's expansion franchise was confirmed, she decided to pursue a spot. "If I don't try, I think I might regret it," she said ^[1].

The path back to competitive play required disciplined management of her training load. She described the summer leading up to Vancouver's 2025 training camp as one of carefully phased preparation: building conditioning and strength off the ice first, keeping ice sessions to as little as once a week through much of that period, and trusting that the technical foundation — accumulated through years of playing and coaching — would resurface when the physical capacity caught up. In September she flew to San Jose to work with her strength coach and neuromuscular therapist in person, developing a program specifically designed to address the lingering effects of the ankle injury ahead of a November training camp ^[1].

The coaching work she had done in the intervening years also fed back into her own preparation. Through InPower Hockey and her U18 AAA work, she had spent considerable time breaking down goaltender movement — analyzing the distinctions between versatility, adaptability, and resiliency as movement qualities, and examining the granular details of posture, hand positioning, and the transition between active and block hand positions at different shot distances and angles. She described all of this at length in episode 330 of the InGoal Radio podcast, where she and Woodley went deep on goaltending movement science, the relationship between learning mode and performance mode, and how she structures her preparation in the days leading up to games ^[1].

She wears number 35 for Vancouver and catches left. The opening night at Pacific Coliseum — sold out, the building thick with energy — brought her full circle to the arena where she had watched junior hockey as a child. "I, like, got, like, the little chills, you know, like, running down your back," she said of the walk from the dressing room to the ice ^[1]. Her parents were in the building. So were people she had coached and people from the local hockey community. The moment, she said, was one she had never anticipated being part of when she was growing up in Burnaby.

Newell first appeared on InGoal Radio in episode 178 following the 2022 Olympics ^[2], a conversation Woodley described in 2025 as "loaded with mindset advice." InGoal Magazine has covered Kimberly Newell in two podcast appearances.