How Torrent forward Julia Gosling made herself into more than an elite sniper

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orrent head coach Steve O’Rourke was hired in June of 2024, after Seattle had already accumulated a roster full of stars who’d been drafted away from other teams, including Team USA veterans Hilary Knight and Alex Carpenter. Gosling, meanwhile, had been left unprotected by Toronto and scooped up by Seattle GM Meghan Turner.

When O’Rourke attended the entry draft in Ottawa in late June, where the Torrent rounded out their roster, he also had separate conversations with Ryan and Kingsbury, and the highlight of each was nearly identical.

“They both made it a point to tell me that Meghan did a really good job stealing that player from them — they were very disappointed to lose Julia,” O’Rourke says. “That’s very high praise from those two, because they’re around the best national team players all the time.”

O’Rourke came into the season’s training camp with a purposeful blank slate, not having poured over video, not wanting any preconceived notions of players he wasn’t personally familiar with. Still, he couldn’t help having some expectations for Gosling after hearing that praise. Then he saw her on the ice.

“She wowed me right from the start — her size, her ability to skate, her shot. All those things just, ‘Wow, this is a really good hockey player,’” says O’Rourke, a former pro who was drafted by the New York Islanders in 1992.