Three Natties and a Patty

Casey O’Brien is the sixth Badger to win the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award, the top honor in collegiate women’s ice hockey. Althea Dotzour

Casey O’Brien ’24, MSx’26 was watching warm-ups during her official visit with the Wisconsin women’s hockey program in 2019 when she set the goal that would define her collegiate career.

The Badgers had just won their fifth national championship, and forward Emily Clark ’19 was back in Madison for the banner-raising ceremony. Seated on the bench with O’Brien and bonding over their shared number 26, Clark predicted that O’Brien would win two national championships as a Badger.

“At the time I was like, ‘That’d be unreal,’ ” O’Brien recalls. “A few weeks later, I was still thinking about it, and I was like, ‘Wait, why only two?’ ”

Five years later, O’Brien has a hat trick of championships on her Badger résumé, not to mention a new school record in career points (274) and the most prestigious individual honor in women’s collegiate hockey: the 2025 Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award. But if you ask O’Brien, those achievements reflect on a legendary team.

“I’ve always felt like that recognition has come in the form of the team’s success rather than anything individual,” she says. “I’ve measured my success based on how well our team has done.”

The results speak for themselves. Before the team secured its eighth national championship in March, the Badgers went nearly undefeated, falling only once, in October, to their 2023, 2024, and 2025 title-game rival, Ohio State.

“We did not play our best game, so it felt like we beat ourselves,” O’Brien says of that loss. “But that was also a turning point for us, where we realized that the only team that’s going to beat us is ourselves.”

Fast-forward to March, and the Wisconsin wins piled up on and off the ice. The Western Collegiate Hockey Association named O’Brien, Caroline “K. K.” Harvey x’27, and Mark Johnson ’94 as player and forward, defender, and coach of the year, respectively. Ava McNaughton x’27 was named National Goaltender of the Year by the Hockey Commissioners Association. O’Brien, Harvey, and forwards Laila Edwards x’26 and Kirsten Simms x’27 were top-10 contenders for the Kazmaier award, and O’Brien, Harvey, and Edwards marked the award’s second-ever single-school sweep as the three finalists.

“It didn’t really matter who [the eventual winner] was going to be,” O’Brien says. “We were just happy that the Patty was coming back to Wisconsin.”

As the 2025 honoree, O’Brien, a team captain, sees the award as validation of her dedication to leading her team to one more victory.

“This was my last year wearing the Badgers’ jersey, and I had to make the most of it,” she says. “I couldn’t take a single game for granted.”

Anyone who watched the heart-stopping championship knows how this story ends: trailing the Buckeyes for nearly the entire game, the Badgers earned an unlikely penalty shot with 18.9 seconds left and a chance to tie. In a characteristic show of trust, Johnson turned to his players and asked, “Who wants it?”

According to O’Brien, it was all part of the plan.

“We have this joke, whenever we’re down, that ‘We have them right where we want them. Checkmate. Their backs are against the wall,’ ” she says.

Jokes aside, it was never a question of if they’d win this game. It was a question of when.

“Coach kept coming in and saying, ‘All right, someone’s going to score. I just don’t know who it is going to be yet,’ ” O’Brien says. “That’s been our philosophy all year, since we are such a deep team. When one line isn’t playing well, the next line’s going to step up.”

As soon as Simms raised her hand for the penalty shot, O’Brien knew the Badgers were back.

“I had a conversation with her before she went out: ‘Hey, you do this every single day. You score on [McNaughton], who’s the best goalie in the country, every day with these moves. Relax,’ ” O’Brien says.

Seconds later, Simms deked Ohio State’s goalie to tie the game and then scored again in overtime to win it.

“For her to have her big moment was the best part of the year for me,” O’Brien says of her linemate. “She did what she does best: she scores big goals.”

O’Brien declared for the professional draft in March, and with her own goals realized, she’s leaving the Badgers on a high note. Her sights are set on a career with the Professional Women’s Hockey League and the potential to add “Olympian” to her accolades.

Also, she owes Clark a call.

Published in the Summer 2025 issue