Kara Santoro

I would say my dad specifically, and then my coaches growing up. I was fortunate that I had a lot of really good coaches. I had a couple not-so-good coaches, but learned just as much from them. The key has definitely been building those relationships with the kids and the families. One of the things that I kind of preach is that you can't have a good season without good families supporting the team. So I think that's one of my strong suits - building that culture, not just with the athletes, but with the families as well. My dad instilled in me and my brother very young the importance of having balance in life between academics, family, hockey, and time for yourself, and that really separated me from a lot of my peers.

I can give you two pieces of best advice. The first one was from my dad about finding balance in life and making sure you're giving attention to different aspects that are important to you - academics, family, hockey, and time for yourself - at the appropriate times. The other piece of advice was from my college coach when I was deciding whether or not to move across the country from Connecticut to take this job in Las Vegas. He put it very simply and said, you're only 24 once, and what's the worst that happens? It doesn't work, and you move back. Once my college coach said that, I was like, wow, you know what, you're right. That really helped me make the decision to take the leap.

I would say the biggest thing is being confident in yourself. Women's hockey is kind of looked at as secondary, as I'm sure a lot of women's sports are across the board, in comparison to their male counterpart. But I would just say being confident in yourself, because it's very easy to take what some of these older men have to say that have been doing this for a long time and still feel confident in your own abilities. The game has changed a lot, and I've kind of been a part of that change just in terms of my playing career. So just being really confident that you know the game, you know what you're doing, and just making it happen, I think, would be the biggest thing. Know that you belong and you deserve to have a seat at the table. The other piece is that everybody's path looks different. Just because one person did X, Y, or Z doesn't mean that it's gonna work for you as well. A girl I grew up with and I took very different paths - I went to a private high school where I lived on campus, she went to a public school - and we both excelled academically and athletically and wound up being captains of the same team in college. Our paths looked very different, but we wound up in the same place, finding the same success.

The biggest challenge is finding the opportunities. There's not a lot of coaching positions for women compared to male positions, so really just finding the opportunity is pretty challenging. In terms of proving yourself, I think the biggest thing is just proving that you know the game, honestly. There's a lot of people that look down at women's hockey or put it secondary to men's and boys hockey. But once you can get in and establish that you know what you're doing, the opportunities are truly endless. You build so many different life skills, relationship skills, and coaching skills that you can really take anywhere. My biggest goal is to have the most amount of female athletes competing at the highest levels possible, and we're working on getting girls into the sport much younger than they've typically been starting out here in Vegas and having them sustained all the way through 19U and potentially beyond that, talking college and professional leagues.

Balance in life is incredibly important to me - my dad instilled in me and my brother very young the importance of having balance between academics, family, hockey, any other sports, and time for yourself. We grew up with that kind of mindset of life balance, and that's something that really separated me from a lot of my peers, especially in college. Building genuine relationships is also core to who I am. I genuinely care about the girls I coach and have built really great relationships with them and their families. One of the things I preach is that you can't have a good season without good families supporting the team, so building that culture with both the athletes and families is essential. It's more than just coaching hockey to me - I care about developing these young women as whole people, which is why I focus on things like mindset, body image, nutrition, and life skills beyond just the sport.