The scholarships added to the attendance, with 10-year-old Kelly Seguin able to visit from Florida. As a fan of the Sirens, she was excited to meet Hartje but has done more than that.<\/p>\n
“I think my mom told me about a week ago that I was going to be able to go,” she said. “We’re making new friends and learning a lot of stuff.”<\/p>\n
For Hartje, the camp is the next step in a lifelong love affair with hockey.<\/p>\n
She was born in Detroit on April 13, 2001, when her father, Tod, was near the end of his pro career, finishing with Toledo of the ECHL in 2002-03.<\/p>\n
“With my dad playing professionally, it was kind of natural that he put us in skates right away,” she said. “Breathing, walking and skating were basically our first three things.”<\/p>\n
Hartje played against boys until she was 14, then played for two of the powerhouse programs in Detroit hockey.<\/p>\n
“I played for a year with Little Caesars, then two years at Belle Tire,” she said. “It’s really amazing how girls youth numbers have grown. Now they have the option to grow up playing with girls and develop and get better.<\/p>\n
“That really wasn’t an option when I was growing up. You had to play against boys if you wanted to progress.”<\/p>\n
With both parents and her older brother all having attended Harvard University,\u00a0Elle was expected to follow in their footsteps.<\/p>\n
Instead, she ended up going against the grain, to Harvard’s biggest rival.<\/p>\n
“I kind of felt I should go to Harvard, but my parents knew I loved Yale, and they told me to pick my own course,”\u00a0Hartje said. “I really fell in love with that campus — it was obvious that’s where I wanted to go.”<\/p>\n
She was expecting her hockey career to end after her time with Yale.<\/p>\n
“There were professional leagues — plural — but it wasn’t a sustainable living,” she said. “You had to have other jobs, and that didn’t seem like a path I was going to take.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The scholarships added to the attendance, with 10-year-old Kelly Seguin able to visit from Florida. As a fan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-820050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}