T.J. Oshie and Gig Marvin for the Stanley Cup Day in Warroad
In a normal season, the Warroad PeeWee team’s state title in February or former Warroad Warrior Kobe Roth winning a NCAA men’s hockey title with Minnesota Duluth in April would’ve been the highlight of the sports year.
And while both of those accomplishments were justly celebrated by the fans of Hockeytown USA, they both took a bit of a backseat to the work of Warroad High School’s Class of 2005 last winter and spring.
More than a dozen years ago, high school seniors Gigi Marvin and T.J. Oshie were crowned king and queen of Frosty Festival week. In 2018, that pair returned home with, respectively, an Olympic gold medal and the Stanley Cup.
In late July, when Oshie spent part of his day with the Cup -- won when the Washington Capitals beat the Vegas Golden Knights in the NHL finals -- in Warroad, he took a few precious minutes to meet Marvin in the shadow of Warroad’s famed water tower, with the crossed hockey sticks permanently emblazoned on it, to reenact their side by side photos from 2005. Except this time they each held one of the most coveted trophies in all of sports.
T.J. Oshie and Gigi Marvin - Warroad High School 2005 Frosty King and Queen
That quieter celebration came an hour or so after seemingly all of Warroad packed into the Gardens to see Oshie arrive with the Cup. He took the time to have a picture taken with every Warroad youth and high school hockey team, and told stories of his first trips to his family’s ancestral home in Warroad, before he moved there to finish high school in 2002. Tim and T.J. would stay with Henry Boucha, Tim’s cousin, who had a rink flooded in his yard.
“There was one time I couldn’t sleep and I remember going out and putting on my skates and skating on his rink from about 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. before everyone woke up,” T.J. said. “And that’s still, to this day, maybe my best childhood memory.”
Washington's T.J. Oshie hoists the Stanley Cup
A few months earlier, Marvin had become the latest Warroad kid, and the first woman, to come home from the Olympics with a gold medal, following the lead of Bill Christian (1960), Roger Christian (1960) and Dave Christian (1980). When interviewed by the Grand Forks Herald about the parallel accomplishments of her and T.J. in 2018, Marvin recall that she had won Minnesota’s Miss Hockey at roughly the same time as T.J. led the Warriors to the 2005 state title, so this wasn’t their first shared hockey celebration.
“There was one time I couldn’t sleep and I remember going out and putting on my skates and skating on his rink from about 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. before everyone woke up,” T.J. said. “And that’s still, to this day, maybe my best childhood memory.”
In a town where the hockey rink’s lights are rarely shut off, and ice time is free for all who want to play, it makes some kind of sense that the WHS Class of 2005 has an ongoing hockey celebration that seemingly never ends.
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Jess Myers (@JessRMyers) covers college and professional hockey for Forum News Service and The Rink Live. He is a 1987 graduate of Warroad High School and a two-time hockey letterwinner for the Warriors (as team statistician).
To get a printed copy of this article, pick up a brochure for the
25th Annual Warroad HockeytownUSA Holiday Classic
at the Gardens December 26-30, 2018
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