MILAN — It was the day to determine the best player in U.S. women’s hockey, and Rory Gilday was cautiously confident despite being cut from the team a year ago.
Still, Ms. Gilday did not tell anyone, including her parents, that national team director Katie Million was planning to call her (and all remaining potential athletes individually) to reveal the Olympic roster.
“I felt like I played well and I felt like I showed what I needed to show,” Gilday said. “From then on, what happened is what happened.”
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On that day, about a month ago, Guild Day answered the phone. Million’s message was spot on. “You’ve earned a spot,” or words to that effect.
“I was shocked,” Gilday said Sunday after the team’s second practice in Milan. “I really can’t process that moment.”
Gilday is a 23-year-old defenseman from Chanhassen, Minnesota, best known as the location of Prince’s Paisley Park. She is the only athlete on the 23-member Olympic roster to be a healthy selection from the 2025 world championship winning team.
“She just took the advice (in 2025) of, ‘Hey, you need to understand your game a little bit more, especially defensively,'” U.S. head coach John Roblewski said. “It was just her defensive instincts maturing a little bit.”
Gilday started playing hockey when he was around 5 years old. In Minnesota, she jokes, they make you put on skates as soon as you start walking.
In a recent interview, Gilday shared his life-changing story. During a routine vision test in seventh grade, an MRI scan revealed that he had an optic glioma, a benign tumor that was growing and starting to affect the vision in his right eye.
She underwent nine months of chemotherapy and spent up to eight hours a day in the hospital to prevent the cancer from spreading to her left eye. Still, she lost most of the vision in her right eye.
“I don’t really think of this as a sob story these days,” she said on the “Jocks in Jills” podcast. “That’s just part of who I am these days. Yeah, chemo isn’t fun. It’s really taxing on my body and mind and on the people around me. I lost a ton of strength in my body. When I was younger, skating was my identity as a hockey player. So when I started chemo and stepped onto the ice, I felt like I couldn’t support myself with my ankles, and it was so devastating.” ”
Gilday did not play in a hockey game for nearly a year. Upon returning to action in high school, she adapted and regained her confidence and fearlessness.
Her brain adapted too. When she skates, drives a car or just walks, she no longer needs to think about visions.
“For the most part, my left eye has just fully recovered,” she said in October. “My body uses my left eye. I’m not really using my right eye. Right now, my vision in my left eye is about 20/15, so I call it eagle eye.”
She played on world championship teams in 2022, 2023 and 2024 (all while a student-athlete at Cornell University) and was drafted fifth overall by the Ottawa Charge of the Women’s Professional Hockey League last June.
As a child, Gilday watched the Olympics with his three brothers, holding torches made from tin foil and paper made by their mother.
On Thursday, she will suit up for her first Olympic hockey game. The United States will play the Czech Republic at 10:40 a.m. ET (USA Network and Peacock). When I found out she was joining the team, I booked a trip to Italy and my whole family is planning to come.
Gilday said he is grateful for the experience that took him away from sports briefly in middle school.
“I really appreciate being able to actually play,” she said.
