Walking before six months, Potter was on the ice when he was only a year old. Since skates that small weren’t available, his grandpa Dwayne made some for Potter to wear by riveting blades into boots.
“It was hard to pull him back in because he loved it so much,” Schmidgall-Potter said.
After growing up in Edina, Schmidgall-Potter went on to play for the Gophers before going to Minnesota Duluth, where she led the nation in scoring as a sophomore and won a national championship in 2003.
Earlier, she captured gold with the U.S. in the inaugural Olympics for women’s ice hockey in 1998, and her son was 3 years old when she appeared in her fourth and final Olympics in 2010; the Americans earned silver after she scored a team-high six goals.
Schmidgall-Potter and her husband Rob trained Cullen, playing pickup games outside. That was how Cullen kept up with the sport as a kid, not sticking with a team until he was 12.
“He played with us,” Schmidgall-Potter said, “learned from how we played and with older guys, and we thought that was the best way for him to just be creative and learn the game how we grew up but also love the sport. It wasn’t too structured. It was just something, hey, if this is what you decide, we want it to be fun, too.”