After NCAA championships and Olympic gold, Kirsten Simms poised to be a top-five pick in the PWHL Draft

When Kirsten Simms was just 6 years old, she prophetically began to map out her eventual hockey career. 

She proudly told her parents that she was going to be an Olympian and that she was going to try to win a gold medal. 

Fifteen years later, in 2026, she was part of the United States team that won gold in Italy. 

She also wanted to play for the Wisconsin Badgers, who became her dream school after watching an NCAA tournament game on TV that featured Hilary Knight, Brianna Decker, and Meghan Duggan. 

“From that young age, I wanted to be a Badger. I was pretty set on it as a 6-year-old," Simms said. “I wanted to go and follow in those footsteps of some of the legends of women’s hockey.”

Simms did just that. 15 years later, she’s a three-time NCAA champion from Wisconsin and a two-time first-team All-American. 

One thing that 6-year-old Simms struggled to dream about was playing professional hockey. In 2010, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League was in its infancy – more of a stipend-based league than a professional one – and for elite female players, the reality was that hockey could be a passion, but not a career after college. 

So for Simms, who grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, next week’s Professional Women’s Hockey League Draft, which will be held in Detroit on June 17, is a bit more than a dream come true. 

“It’s something that, as kids, the boys get the chance to look at the NHL, to look at that future and experience things like a draft and getting picked,” Simms said. “I didn’t get that. You can’t think about a future being drafted by a team or playing professionally like that when it doesn’t exist to even think about.” 

And now, Simms will go from not being able to think about it to being part of one of the landmark drafts in PWHL history. The league, which just wrapped up its third season, is expanding from eight to 12 teams, introducing franchises in Hamilton, Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Jose. 

There’s been a flurry of player movement this past week through the PWHL expansion process. When the draft is held at the Fox Theater, where Simms is projected as a top-five pick, she’ll be joined by a “pretty good squad” of friends and family, in addition to fellow Wisconsin teammates Caroline Harvey, Laila Edwards, and Lacey Eden, who are also likely going to hear their names called in the top five by PWHL general managers. 

“It’s pretty exciting. I’ve been through a lot with all of them over the past four years of our careers, and to kind of take this next step as a group, it’s gonna be exciting to see where we end up,” Simms said. “You get to be part of that moment where your friends and teammates achieve their goals and dreams.”

But before the draft and 2026, we have to go back to the 6-year-old girl who was obsessed with hockey and planned on winning a gold medal, taking a passion from following her older brother, Billy, onto the ice and making it her own. 

“I think there was something about getting better every day, wanting to push myself, that I just loved about it,” Simms said. “I had those big goals, but I also had smaller goals to get better every season, to take steps, and I think I was lucky that at that young age I started to kind of set myself up for that.”

Those small goals started to turn bigger as Simms grabbed more attention, first locally in Michigan and then on the international stage, winning gold with Team USA at the under-18 level in 2020 and earning her first senior national team spot in 2023. 

It’s a journey that’s fun to look back at, especially when you consider that in 2017, when the IIHF Women’s World Championships were held in Plymouth, Simms got to meet Kendall Coyne Schofield as a fan. In 2026, they were teammates, winning a gold medal for their country. 

Now, Simms is going to be a foundational piece for whichever team selects her at the PWHL Draft – we still don’t know the draft order beyond the fact that Vancouver will pick No. 1 – as a dynamic offensive player who creates space as both a passer and a shooter. She also has a healthy swagger and confidence; case in point, during the 2025 NCAA championship game, with Wisconsin trailing 3-2 against Ohio State, Badgers coach Mark Johnson asked his team, “Who wants it?” after a penalty shot was called, and Simms quickly raised her hand, then buried the game-tying goal with a slick double move. 

She also happened to score the game-winning goal in overtime. 

It was all fittingly part of Simms' 6-year-old dream. Now, she will get to add to that vision at the professional level, starting with the draft roughly 20 minutes from home.