MANKATO, Minn. — Minnesota State has announced the four skaters that will be captaining the Mavericks for the 2024-25 season.

Forward Sydney Langseth will serve as captain while Jamie Nelson, Shelbi Guttormson and Madison Mashuga will each be alternate captains. All four athletes are from Minnesota.

“We are excited about our leadership group for the upcoming season,” said Minnesota State head coach Shari Dickerman in

a press release from the University.

“All four bring effort, energy and enthusiasm in everything they do. They have been leading by example since long before they stepped foot on our campus. We cannot wait to see how far this group will take us as we aim for new heights in the WCHA.”

Langseth, a native of Eden Prairie, is entering her fifth-year of eligibility with the Mavericks in 2024-25. She just finished up her senior season where she led the entire team in overall point scoring by earning 15 goals and 17 assists through 38 games played. The 22-year-old is also no stranger to being a leader both on and off the ice as she wore an ‘A’ in 2023-24. She puts in quite a bit of work in the classroom too as she was a 2023 Krampade Division I All-American Scholar and she is a three-time WCHA Academic Team member.

Shelbi Guttormson will be the lone defender of the leadership group in 2024-25. The native of Moorhead came to the Mavericks after competing with Shattuck-St. Mary’s in high school. She has now just finished up her junior season of collegiate hockey where she scored two goals and three assists through 38 contests in 2023-24. The 21-year-old has appeared in 109 total games for Minnesota State and she is a two-time WCHA All-Academic Team member.

Madison Mashuga will also be wearing an ‘A’ for the Mavericks in 2024-25. The forward from Anoka scored 11 points through 26 games played this past year as a senior. She served as an alternate captain in 2023-24 and will do so again in 2024-25. The 22-year-old has appeared in 117 career collegiate games as she enters her fifth-year of eligibility with Minnesota State and she is a three-time WCHA All-Academic Team honoree.

Forward Jamie Nelson rounds out the three skaters that will be alternate captains in 2024-25. Nelson, from Andover, had an outstanding senior season in 2023-24 as she led the entire Mavericks roster in goal-scoring with 20. She tallied a total of 30 points through 38 contests over the past year. The 21-year-old is entering her fifth-year of eligibility at Minnesota State this fall after a successful four-year collegiate career so far. She was named the 2021 WCHA Rookie of the Year and has since been honored as a 2023 Krampade Division I All-American Scholar and was put on the WCHA All-Academic Team three different times.

Sydney Wolf is a reporter for The Rink Live, primarily covering youth and high school hockey. She joined the team in November of 2021 and graduated from St. Cloud State University with a degree in Mass Communications and a minor in Writing and Rhetoric Studies.

Birds blow by on a screen of snow: larks, robins, blackbirds, all moving north against us as Minnesota falls behind. A dark hawk slides behind trees in northern Iowa. A turkey tiptoes out of a woods. It is mid-March, and my friend Mike and I are going to Texas to look at birds. We first detour into southeastern Iowa to find Eurasian tree sparrows.

My guidebooks show the Eurasians next to house sparrows. There is an apparent cousinly relationship that doesn’t look true in Burlington. The house sparrows look unwashed, tree sparrows bright and clean, crisply colored, obviously different at a distance.

Seriously on our way to Texas now, we follow the western shore of the Mississippi River, passing 20,000 canvasbacks on the water south of Fort Madison, Iowa, ducks as far as you can see up stream or down. We drive into the depths of Missouri, cross a state line, ricochet off suburban Memphis, cut diagonally into Arkansas.

We have driven, I am certain, for days through Missouri and now weeks across Arkansas. It seems endless. All the mobile homes begin to look alike. There are no birds.

At 6 a.m. the next day we are on the road again, in rain. We need three hours of driving to get to Jones State Forest across the Texas line, where we hope to find red-cockaded woodpeckers.

The road is lined with barbecue joints, most of them small, some no larger than a comfortable ice-fishing house. Many are in mobile homes. One is in the middle of a huge junkyard. Fronting an auto-repair business is a stained sign: “Mechanic on Duty. Spot Welding. Hot Lunches.” We drive on.

The woodpeckers are just where they are supposed to be in the state forest, working quietly in the midst of a colony area, the nesting trees all marked with vivid green paint, thank you very much. There are pileated, red-bellied and downy woodpeckers, too, with pine and prairie warblers, titmice and cardinals. The pines are tall, the brush beneath them thick, perfect for the white-eyed vireos that call and call in the morning rain.

The next day we are in Galveston, on Boddeker Avenue, along the outer beach in a serious downpour. We are looking for the kelp gull that has been seen here for two winters. There are thousands of black skimmers, laughing gulls, shorebirds, white and brown pelicans, rails, herons, egrets, terns, but no kelp gull. Offshore, ships glide in the rain, far away, each towing a cloud of gulls. Now we know where the target gull is.

We check into the Marine Motel. Our room smells of seawater and body fluids. It has sheltered too many spring breaks. The sink is plugged, coated with something black. A man comes to fix it, forcing a long wire into the drain, then violently pushing and pulling.

Mike leans into the room to see what is happening. I watch bits of black goo fly over his head. Some sticks to the bathroom wall. Mike says he will get us another room. The new room has a flowing drain but doesn’t smell any better.

We leave Galveston the next morning, taking the ferry to Bolivar Flats, where we find a huge flock of American avocets. They loaf and feed on tidal debris along the beach.

Many birds are sleeping, thousands of heads beneath thousands of wings. If we come too close, hidden eyes see us and the nerves of the flock flicker.

At midafternoon, the tide shifts. The water begins to move toward our shoes. Suddenly, the avocets are a marching army of feeders, wide awake, rank and file sweeping parallel to the beach line, heads swinging, bills splashing. You can hear them cut the water. Occasionally a bird captures a large morsel and stops to manipulate a gulp, then skips back into step.

High Island is next, up the shore, a plain little town famous for its Audubon refuge, heaven for birders at the height of spring migration. We are early. There are no birds. We tour the town, see an alligator in a small pond, then drive away.

At Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, several hundred white Ibis idle in a wetland. While we watch them, hundreds of white-faced Ibis fly over. Seaside sparrows sing.

There were blue buntings the next day at the photo blind near the campground where we spent the night. We peek at them through the narrow camera ports, Mike and me and a third birder, three of us in the blind trying not to elbow each other.

Mike and I drive on to Salineño to see friends who winter there, 100 yards from a landing on the Rio Grande. They tell us of frequent gunfire at night along the shore as drug runners beach their boats. How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys in the dark? The federals, they say, shoot tracer bullets.

At Falcon Dam the river is filled with shorebirds. Caspian and royal terns squat on sandbars. Across the river, in Mexico, seven kettles of black and turkey vultures float in the late afternoon sky, details bleached from the picture by the sun. We split our last bottle of beer.

In Surfside on the west end of Galveston Island we find a motel, the Sand Castle. We rent a room. Mike tosses his bag on one of the beds. A large bug runs from beneath the pillow. This insect is one mutation away from nursing its young, but after much searching we decide it is a loner, and go to sleep.

Next morning, water from the bathroom faucet is brackish. The coffee at the convenience store we find several blocks away is brackish, too, salty coffee for 59 cents.

Ten minutes east, we stop for coffee refills. A pleasant woman who sells fishing bait and gas pours for us. Mike tells her we spent the night at a strange motel in Surfside. “Oh,” she says, “the Sand Castle.”

We drive on. At the K-2 Steakhouse we have a wonderful prime-rib dinner. Earlier that day we had read aloud a review of a book about prions, proteins that collect in your brain and give it the airy structure of a sponge, something like mad cow disease. There is a suspected beef relationship. It is not what you should be reading in Texas.

On our way out of the state we visit Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, filled with migrating sparrows, eight species in an hour on a cold, windy day when the birds hold tight to cover.

It also is home to dozens of oil-well workers and their debris. There is some kind of deal with the devil here, wells dotting refuge landscape, rusty pipes and fast-food wrappers the most commonly seen species.

And then we drive home.

The first three games of Minnesota’s best-of-five Professional Women’s Hockey League semifinal playoff series against Toronto featured a shutout, with Toronto winning the first two games and Minnesota the third.

The pattern continued Wednesday night at Xcel Energy Center, but this time it took two overtimes to declare a winner.

Minnesota’s Claire Botorac scored at 4:27 of the second overtime as Minnesota beat Toronto, 1-0.

Butorac banged in the rebound of a shot from the point that caromed into the slot off the back boards.

Minnesota’s win sets up a deciding Game 5 on Friday night at Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto. The eventual series winner will play Boston in a best-of-five series for the inaugural PWHL championship.

“Honestly, my linemates did most of the work,” Butorac said of the winning goal. “I got in on the good change from the line before us, and I picked up that rebound in the front of the net.

“We knew it was going to be a dirty goal. Just happy to finish.”

Minnesota coach Ken Klee commended his team for finding a way to tie the series after losing the first two games and facing elimination.

“When you’re season’s on the line and you’re back at home, that’s a good feeling,” Klee said. “You can take it as pressure or, hey, we’ve played well at home all year. I think breaking through in Game 3 was good for our confidence and being excited to play hockey, knowing we can win games.

“Tonight, I loved our first period, I loved our third period. They took it to us a little in the second, which you’re going to expect. They’re a good team. But I’m super proud of our team. Even when we gave up chances we kept going, we stayed positive.”

Toronto played without Natalie Spooner, the league’s leading scorer, who sustained a knee injury in Game 3. Spooner will miss the remainder of the postseason.

Toronto’s offense definitely was limited. It managed only 11 shots on goal through three periods, while Minnesota had 23.

Neither team was able to produce much offense in a scoreless first period, with Minnesota holding a 5-3 edge in shots on goal. Minnesota had the two best scoring chances of the period, and they came from its top line.

Grace Zumwinkle fired a slap shot from the top of the right-wing circle at 11:39 that got through Toronto goaltender Kristen Campbell, but the puck slid just wide of the far post. With just over four minutes to play in the period, Campbell made a good stop on a shot from in tight by Taylor Heise.

Toronto put on some offensive pressure early in the second period and came close to taking the lead when Hannah Miller’s shot from the slot hit the outside of the left post.

Minnesota went on the first power play of the game at 3:22 of the period, but it lasted only 55 seconds, when Denisa Krizova was sent off for tripping.

It proved to be another period dominated by tight checking. Toronto had six shots on goal in the period, Minnesota four.

Minnesota got another power-play opportunity at 6:57 of the third period, but it was Toronto that got the best scoring opportunity. Minnesota goaltender Maddie Rooney made a clutch left pad save to deny Kaitlin Willoughby from in tight.

Minnesota defender Sophie Jaques got a good scoring chance 13 minutes into the period, but Campbell stopped her with a glove save on a rising shot.

Minnesota outshot Toronto 14-2 in the third period.