What would you do if the sport you loved was at odds with your life’s work?
This is not a hypothetical question for Jacquie Pierri. The Montclair native is a climate activist with a master’s degree in sustainable engineering. She is well aware that hydrofluorocarbon coolants are among the biggest causes of global warming — she did her thesis on it, in fact — and that hockey arenas are basically giant, leaky refrigerators.
Think of the energy needed to keep the ice frozen while also making sure fans are comfortable in their seats. Then think of doing that in places like Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and Dallas where the temperatures crack triple digits.
Pierri thinks about it all the time. She isn’t just searching for solutions to the world’s climate problems as an engineer. She is a professional hockey player who has carved out a long career in Canada, Sweden and Italy — and who, this month, will live out her dream and compete on the world’s biggest stage.
And that’s the answer to the question above. Pierri is leveraging her platform at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics as a defenseman for the Italian women’s hockey team — more on that long journey in a minute — to raise as much awareness as she can about the impact of global warming.
“I’m not planning on stopping hockey anytime soon to save the planet,” Pierri said in a phone interview as she traveled on a team bus to a training session in the Italian Alps. “But I do a lot of things in my day to day to be environmentally conscious, and I can draw attention to the fact that, for all of us, there are a lot of different ways to approach the problem.”
So Pierri isn’t just leading Italy’s underdog women’s team into a tournament with heavy favorites Team USA and Canada looming. She is leading a team of like-minded peers called EcoAthletes dedicated to championing a cause that, in the sports world, hasn’t had the same star-power support of other important issues.
That’s one reason Lew Blaustein, a 1982 Rutgers grad, founded EcoAthletes in 2020. His group of more than 250 athletes helped create 160 million media impressions last year about climate change — but lacks, he said, the star power that helps put other issues at the forefront of the worldwide discourse.
“Athletes are the most influential humans on the planet,” Blaustein said. “They’ve led on all manner of social issues going back many decades, but on this issue of climate and the environment, mostly they’ve stayed on the sidelines. We don’t have a Billie Jean King or Muhammad Ali or Megan Rapinoe.”
That doesn’t mean the EcoAthletes can’t lead by example, which is something Pierri has done her entire life. She is a vegan who doesn’t own a car, riding a bicycle 45 minutes to and from practices in Bolzano, Italy, to limit her own carbon footprint. Her teammates “think I’m a little weird at first,” she said with a laugh, but then they get curious.
When she started playing hockey, she had no idea that the refrigeration systems needed for rinks — and food storage or mass computer systems — were hurting the environment. She was just six, after all, when a grammar school field trip to Clary Anderson Arena in Montclair sparked an interest in the sport. Her father, an Italian immigrant named Al, started playing alongside her as it became her family’s passion.
Montclair High did not have a girls’ team, and after three years fighting for ice time under a boys’ coach who didn’t think she belonged, she proved him wrong as an assistant captain in 2008 as the Mounties won a division championship her senior season. She didn’t shy away from the violence playing against the boys. She loved it.
“Most of the time, if we were sticking up for Jacquie on the ice, she would be pushing us boys out of the way to get to the perpetrator herself,” said Bill Freeswick, one of her teammates with the Montclair Blues club program.
She continued her hockey career at Brown, which is where she turned her lifelong interest in environmental issues into an academic pursuit. She majored in mechanical engineering with a concentration on energy conversion, studies she later continued in Barcelona and Stockholm.
Her thesis, “Practical Aspects of Ammonia Water as Secondary Refrigerants in Ice Rinks,” helped land her interviews with hockey publications and podcasts as she played professionally in Calgary, Sweden and Italy. When Milano Cortina was selected in 2019 to host the Winter Olympics seven years later, she saw an opportunity to take her activism to another level.
This journey, however, is about more than just the environment. It is also about honoring her father. Al Pierri died of heart attack while playing hockey in 2012, and a difficult four-year process to gain Italian citizenship so she could could skate for Le Azzurre in these Games had a much more personal mission.
“Our heritage is still closely tied to Italy,” Pierri said. “I wanted to see his name — our name — on the back of an Italian jersey.”
When Italy opens the Olympic tournament against France on Thursday, it will be one of the first opportunities for the Italian fans to voice their support for their national team. One night later, Pierri will join her teammates across all of Italy’s teams as they march into the iconic San Siro Stadium as part of the Opening Ceremony.
Pierri, 35, isn’t ready to reflect on what might come after her time in the Olympic spotlight ends. She’ll be back in her home state this spring when she is inducted into the New Jersey High School Hockey Hall of Fame, an honor that ensures she’ll forever be mentioned alongside some of the greatest athletes to lace up the skates here.
But she’s never been content to let hockey be her entire legacy. The sport that she loves is at odds with the world that she wants to leave behind. Someone has to do something about it, and there’s no one more qualified to lead the way than her.
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