from Joe Pack of Sportsnet,

Pia Sterner is not much of a drinker. She never has been. She has a glass of wine now and then. That’s it.

So, when former Soviet national team coach Anatoli Tarasov said to her in 1974, “If you want to be a really good coach, you have to drink vodka,” Sterner’s first thought was, “Shit.”

Sterner was out with Tarasov and a full room of Russian hockey players celebrating the end of a coaching symposium, the punctuation on her eight months under Tarasov’s tutelage in Moscow. She looked down at the glass of vodka in front of her and then turned to her translator and switched it for his water. Nobody else took notice. The day after, confident in Sterner’s ability to put back a drink, Tarasov told her she would “become one of the best coaches in the world.”

In the years that followed the prediction, hockey would take Sterner across Europe and North America. She would coach elite men’s and women’s teams, bringing them to new heights, and catch the eye of some of the brightest minds in the game. And just two years after her tall glass of water with the Russians, she would get the chance to prove Tarasov right when the Philadelphia Flyers offered her the chance to become the first female coach in National Hockey League history.

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