WCHA 2025-26 previews: St. Cloud State Huskies
St. Cloud women's hockey faces the unique challenge of replacing its head coach while dealing with roster turnover and Olympic uncertainty
Ahead of WCHA conference play beginning this weekend, Badger Breakaway is previewing each of the eight teams in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association. Next in the series is the St. Cloud State Huskies, who lost almost exactly half of last season’s production, and precisely 100% of its head coach this offseason.
That change at head coach, a move coming late in the offseason, comes after three relatively successful years in St. Cloud. The next challenge is to crack the top half of the league standings.
St. Cloud’s last three seasons have culminated in three straight conference tournament quarterfinal dog-fights between the Huskies and Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs, each time ending in a 2-0 sweep by UMD. Turning back the clock further, SCSU is still looking to win a game in the conference tournament for the first time since 2010.
“We gotta stop thinking about who it is and just play,” captain Grace Wolfe said of her team’s struggle to take that next step. “I mean, we’ve tried to get past Duluth a few times in the playoffs and have not been successful in the way we wanted. So, I think, once we get over that, then everything’s a free-for-all.”
St. Cloud State Huskies preview, at a glance
WCHA returning production spreadsheet
2024-25 record: 15-15-6, 10-13-5 WCHA
2024-25 WCHA finish: 5th of 8
2024-25 postseason: Swept 2-0 in WCHA Tournament quarterfinal by Minnesota Duluth
2025-26 WCHA Preseason Coaches Poll prediction: 5th
2025-26 preseason national polls: 13th USCHO/13th USA Hockey
Preseason All-WCHA honorees: none
Returning production (conference rank)
Goals: 37 (8th)
Points: 92 (8th)
Goals percentage: 50% (6th)
Points percentage: 48.17% (6th)
Returning skaters games played percentage: 47.72% (8th)
Goalie starts returning percentage: 47.22% (7th)
Class breakdown
11 rookies
2 sophomores
9 juniors
5 seniors (T-4th)
St. Cloud State women’s hockey faces roster turnover, Olympic challenges
Any way you want to slice it, St. Cloud brings back roughly half its team from a season ago. It is a strikingly uniform share of returning players and production. The Huskies return between 44 and 50% of nearly every measurable facet of their team from the previous season.
Turning over half the roster is only the first part of SCSU’s challenge this season. With the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in February, the Huskies will also be navigating their schedule without a handful of their best players in the lead-up to and during the Olympics.
Five current St. Cloud players made their respective national teams’ roster at the 2025 IIHF World Championship this summer. Rosters at Worlds are capped at 25 players. Olympic rosters are limited to 23 players, so the comparison is not a perfect one-to-one; however, it provides a picture of which players could miss up to four weeks of collegiate action in February.
Between losses to graduation and players in and out of the lineup during the Olympics, St. Cloud could be without four of last season’s top five scorers during stretches this season. Plus, all 36 of the Huskies’ starts in net from the 2024-25 season are likely to be suiting up for Team Finland.
SCSU entered last season with what looked to be one of the best returning veteran goalie tandems in the league with seniors Sanni Ahola and Jojo Chobak. A lower-body injury forced Chobak to take a medical redshirt. Ahola, meanwhile, excelled in tandem with fellow Finnish netminder Emilia Kyrkkö. In her rookie season, Kyrkkö posted an impressive 1.98 goals against average with a 92.6% save percentage in 17 starts.
“It is what it is,” head coach Mira Jalosuo said of the challenge presented by the Olympic year. “Everybody’s gonna be happy for their international players. It’s always an honor to represent your country. And, for me, that’s more like an opportunity for the players who normally don’t get them.”
With Ahola exhausting her eligibility and Kyrkkö joining her on the Finnish national team, Chobak steps back into a significant role. In her first game in net in nearly 17 months, Chobak posted a 22-save shutout victory for the Huskies in non-conference play last weekend.
Huskies’ change behind the bench ‘not the Mira show’
St. Cloud is the only team in the WCHA that changed head coaches during the offseason. In June, the Professional Women’s Hockey League expansion franchise in Vancouver hired Brian Idalski as its first head coach in team history. The late-offseason announcement required SCSU to move nimbly, and the powers-that-be executed an impressive move in hiring Jalosuo.
Jalosuo takes over at St. Cloud after spending two seasons as an assistant under PWHL Minnesota Frost head coach Ken Klee. Jalosuo has experience both playing and coaching in the WCHA. The former Minnesota Golden Gophers defender served as one of Idalski’s assistants during his first year in St. Cloud. In that season, the Huskies won 11 conference games, the highest mark in 13 years, and led the NCAA with a program-record 576 blocked shots.
After three-straight 5th-place WCHA seasons under Idalski, each the Huskies’ best finish in the league since 2016, Jalosuo looks to pick up right where SCSU left off. Jalosuo retained all of Idalski’s assistants and plans to implement “hybrid systems,” incorporating aspects from both Idalski and Klee.
With such a short turnaround this offseason, Jalosuo is leaning on those assistants as she transitions back to the collegiate level from the professional ranks. The group is the first all-female coaching staff in Huskies program history and one of just six all-female staffs in NCAA Division I women’s ice hockey.
“I’m very lucky that I have a great coaching staff who has been coaching here for years,” Jalosuo said during the WCHA pre-season media conference call. Jalosuo’s associate head coach, Jinelle Siergiej, served in the same role for three seasons under Idalski and should smooth the transition. Goaltenders coach Noora Räty is only in her second season with St. Cloud. Still, she was Jalosuo’s college roommate at the University of Minnesota, completing a seamless full circle for the duo that won an Olympic bronze medal at the 2018 Games for Team Finland.
“I have a network of people around me. It’s not the Mira show. I think everybody has to understand that. I have a lot of people who are helping me, and I am very, very grateful for that.”