Angela Ruggiero

In her hockey career, Ruggiero was named as the best player in the NCAA and in the world by The Hockey News and named The US Olympic Committee’s Player of the Year. She was a member of the United States Women's National Ice Hockey Team, medaling in four successive Winter Olympic Games, including one gold medal in 1998, two silvers in 2002 and 2010, and one bronze in 2006. She competed in ten Women's World Championships, winning four gold medals and six silver medals. In that time she was named Best Defenseman twice at the Olympics and four times at the World Championships.

On June 29, 2015, Ruggiero was announced as a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame's Class of 2015. She was inducted on November 9, 2015. She was the fourth woman and the second American woman to be inducted. She is also the only person (man or woman) to be inducted that was born in California. Ruggiero is the all-time leader in games played for Team USA, male or female, with 256 games. Ruggiero is also a Member of the USA Hockey Hall of Fame (2015) and the IIHF’s Hall of Fame (2017).

As an IOC Member, Ruggiero presented the gold medals to the US Women's Soccer Team at the 2012 Summer Olympics, the gold medal for the US Women's Basketball Team and bronze medal for the USA Rugby Team at the 2016 Olympics, and did the same for the gold medal-winning US Women's Ice Hockey Team at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

On December 28, 2011, Ruggiero announced her retirement via Twitter.

On January 14, 2010, she was named as an alternate captain for the United States Olympic Hockey Team. In addition, at the Vancouver Olympics, she was elected as a Member of the IOC’s Athletes Commission, giving her an eight-year term as a Member of the IOC. Ruggiero played for the now-defunct CWHL’s Boston Blades. During the 2010–11 Boston Blades season, Ruggiero scored the game-winning goal on December 19, 2010, which snapped the Montreal Stars undefeated season.

Ruggiero is a graduate of the Harvard Business School (M.B.A.), Harvard College (B.A.) cum laude, and the University of Minnesota (M.Ed.) 4.0 GPA. She received her Master's Degree in Sports Management from the University of Minnesota in 2010 while training for her final Olympics. While at Harvard, she was a First-Team Academic All-American and captured the NCAA’s Top VIII Award, as one of the top eight student-athletes in the NCAA in 2004. She was later inducted into the 2015 COSIDA NCAA Academic All-American Hall of Fame.

In December 2009, Ruggiero was named to her fourth Olympic hockey team. To prepare for the 2010 Olympics, she joined a group of NHL players in the summer of 2009 for workouts at Athletes' Performance in Carson, California. Her preparation relied less on powering through workouts and more on paying attention to detail. The training group included Chris Drury, Richard Park, and George Parros.

In May 2006, Ruggiero was selected from a field of twelve Olympians to be a candidate on the sixth season of NBC's business-themed reality game show The Apprentice. The season debuted in January 2007. During Ruggiero's time on the show, many references were made to her Olympic and hockey experience. She was eliminated on the season's tenth episode, airing on March 25, 2007. At the conclusion of her stint on the television show, she was offered a job from Donald Trump.

Ruggiero made several U.S. professional hockey "firsts" on January 28, 2005, when she played for the Tulsa Oilers in a Central Hockey League game against the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees. She was the first woman to actively play in a regular season professional hockey game in North America at a position other than goalie. In addition, since her brother Bill Ruggiero, was a goaltender for the Oilers, they were the first brother-sister combination to play professionally at the same time. She recorded an assist on the final goal of the game making her the only woman to score a point in a North American professional hockey game.

Ruggiero was also credited with the game-winning goal in the shoot-out that won the 2005 Women's World Ice Hockey Championships for the United States against the Canadian national women's hockey team, winning the first gold medal ever for the United States at the world championship. At the 2005 Esso National Women's Championships, she was named the Best Defenseman for Group A.

Ruggiero is the author of a memoir, Breaking the Ice: My Journey to Olympic Hockey, the Ivy League & Beyond, published by Drummond Publishing Group in 2005. The book, aimed at young women, details her hockey career, including her experiences with misconceptions about women's hockey and the challenges of being a female player in a male-dominated sport.

She helped the Minnesota Whitecaps to the Western Women's Hockey League championship in 2008-09. She skated part-time for the Whitecaps in 2007-08 and ranked second on the team with 18 points (8-10) in 15 games. She made history on January 28, 2005, when she and her brother, Bill, competed for the Central Hockey League's Tulsa Oilers, becoming the first-ever brother-sister tandem to play in a professional hockey game. She was the first female skater to play in a North American professional hockey game, where she recorded an assist. Ruggiero joined the National Women's Hockey League's Montreal Axion part way through the 2004-05 season. On October 22, 2011, Ruggiero was inducted into the National Italian Sports Hall of Fame. EA Sports officially announced that Ruggiero would be among the first two female hockey players in NHL 13. Along with Hayley Wickenheiser, she has a playable character in the game which can be added to any team of the user's choice.

In her senior year at Harvard University, Ruggiero won the 2004 Patty Kazmaier Award as the top player in U.S. women's collegiate hockey. As of 2020, she is the only defenseman to win the award. She helped Harvard win a National Championship in 1999 and NCAA Runner-Up in 2003 and 2004. She graduated from Harvard cum laude in 2004 with a degree in government and was a four-time All-American selection and an Academic All-American. In her senior year, she was awarded the distinguished NCAA’s Top VIII Award, for success on the ice, in the classroom, and in the community. Ruggiero was a three-time MVP for the Crimson.

Ruggiero played prep school hockey at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. While a senior at Choate, Ruggiero was the youngest member of the gold medal-winning 1998 United States Olympic Hockey Team in Nagano, Japan. She was also a member of the silver medal-winning 2002 team in Salt Lake City, Utah, a member of the bronze-winning 2006 team in Torino, Italy, and a member of the silver-winning 2010 team in Vancouver, Canada.

Angela Marie Ruggiero (born January 3, 1980) is an American former ice hockey defenseman, gold medalist, and four-time Olympian. She was a member of the International Olympic Committee from 2010-2018 and served as a member of the Executive Board of the IOC after being elected the Chairperson of the IOC Athletes' Commission, the body that represents all Olympic athletes worldwide, a post which she held from 2016 to 2018.