LYNN — Lynn’s Katie Burt, a goalie the Boston College women’s hockey team, may be the top draft pick for the Boston Pride of the National Women’s Hockey League — and the No. 1 selection overall — but she’s not going anywhere this season except back to The Heights.
“First of all,” said Burt, daughter of Jim and Kristen Burt of Lynn, “I want to say that this is an honor to selected, especially first overall. My draft class is extremely talented. I’ve wanted to play professionally, and it’s coming true.”
But not quite yet. Burt fully intends to play her senior year at BC, especially since there is one very elusive goal she hasn’t quite managed yet: a national championship.
“We’ll go from there once the season is over, hopefully with us winning our last game,” said Burt, who has backstopped the Eagles to the Women’s Frozen Four the last three seasons (including a national championship runner-up in 2016).
Winning a national title would definitely put the frosting on the cake of what has been, since she was a child, a stellar athletic career for Burt. But she doesn’t want to get too far ahead of herself.
“(A national championship) is a great end goal,” she said Friday, “But we have other goals along the way. We want to start off well, and we’ll take it game by game.
“Obviously, we want to win the Beanpot and win Hockey East, so we can’t get ahead of ourselves in August. We haven’t even set foot on campus yet.”
In the meantime, Burt trains four days a week, both on the ice and in the weight room, and also works as a ballgirl at Fenway Park. She’s seen the Yankees twice this season, “but one of those games was 16 innings, so it probably counts as two,” she said. “So maybe that’s three.”
Aside from lifting and skating, Burt does a lot of stretching at Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning gym in Middleton.
“He has his program for hockey players,” she said. “It’s pretty standard stuff for ice hockey.
“We do about 15-20 minutes of stretching, and it’s a big part of what we do in the summertime. You can lift all you want, but if you can’t move and be functional, it’s not going to help.”
Burt says every team in Hockey East has been getting better since she was a freshman.
“There’s a lot more parity,” said the economics major. “Northeastern and BU are always good. We lost to Maine last year, and Merrimack played us tough. There are no easy games in Hockey East.”
And that suits her fine.
“Anyone who knows me knows that everything I do involves competition,” she said. “I’m a competitor. And anytime I have to compete, I’m in my element.”
That goes all the way back to Little League, when she played with the boys at Wyoma, and actually won the Home Run Derby.
She continued playing baseball for Lynn Babe Ruth until she turned 16.
“In the regular season I didn’t feel as if I had anything to prove, because they were all my friends,” she said. “But it was totally different in All-Stars. You’d get to the field and the coach would say, ‘oh, look, there’s a girl pitching, blah, blah blah.’
“Well, one game I was catching, against Plymouth, when we were 14, and I got hit by a pitch, and then got run over by this kid. Next time I got up, first pitch, I roped one down the line. The coach was stunned.
“That’s probably my best Babe Ruth memory,” she said.
