On the evening of June 12, the North Dakota Flames and Team Saskatchewan battled through nearly four periods of hockey, with the Flames emerging victorious in overtime over the defending 2010 Division champions of the North American Female Elite Showcase. 

While the teams come from different countries, North Dakota and Saskatchewan face the same challenge in retaining hockey talent, surrounded by what appear to be greener pastures. 

For North Dakota, Minnesota is the stick-wielding hockey boogeyman. Minnesota youth and high school programs routinely field rosters with North Dakota talent, drawn to the State of Hockey by the level of competition and the added exposure to Division I colleges and universities, especially on the girls’ side. 

Saskatchewan finds itself surrounded by hockey academies in rival provinces, with Rink Hockey Academy setting up outposts in Manitoba and British Columbia and teams like the Northern Alberta Xtreme, Okanagan Hockey Academy (AB), Burnaby Winter Club (BC), and the Yale Hockey Academy promising players a world-class education in addition to advanced training. 

Amidst all these enticements, there are dedicated individuals in both North Dakota and Saskatchewan working diligently to retain their homegrown talent.

Those people include Team Saskatchewan 2010 coach Jason Baptist, whose thoughts on Sask hockey and what it takes to keep the top players home can be found in podcast form below. 

D.J. Rieger hails from Bismarck and also qualifies as an adult committed to providing North Dakota girls with opportunities to play high-end competition while maintaining a Bismarck address. 

“We wanted to get the kids exposed to summer hockey when they were young,” Rieger said during the NAFE Showcase. “Get them into full-ice hockey, get out from the local area, and kind of expand.” 

Getting out of that local area isn’t just a summer task - Rieger added that during the winter season, top-level girls’ teams in the Bismarck area are consistently spending weekends at tournaments and sleeping in hotels in order to play the best competition.  

“If you’re on the girls’ side doing youth hockey, when you get to that ‘A’ level, you’re a suitcase team,” Rieger said with a chuckle. “We might get four weekends at home all (season). Other than that, we’re traveling and traveling a lot.” 

Last season’s Bismarck Capitals 15A team thundered south on I-94 multiple times to play Minnesota squads in tournaments. The team performed well in those events, including taking 15A Minnesota state champion Chaska/Chanhassen to a shootout during the YHH Danglefest Invitational in December. That strength of schedule helped the Capitals go 33-9-1 for the 2024-2025 season, which culminated in an overtime loss to the Fargo Freeze in the North Dakota state championship.

This year's Flames, made up primarily of players from the Capitals and Freeze, won three of five games and finished fourth during the NAFE Showcase, defeating a trio of Canadian teams before falling in a semifinal shootout against the Western Selects. The Flames lost to Team Minnesota in the third-place game. Bismarck standouts Macie Vig and Elliana Mattson led the team in scoring with four points each.

Rieger has been through the youth hockey process twice - first with his eldest daughter, Grace, who graduated from Bismarck Century High School this year, and now with his 2010-born daughter, Morgan. Thanks to his time in the hockey trenches, Rieger says that his perspective has evolved with his daughters’ careers. 

“Father Time reminded me, with my daughter graduating, that this doesn’t last forever,” Rieger said. “So every one of those (little) moments means so much more.” 

His experience also means that Rieger has a more nuanced view of players who opt to leave the state, eschewing the hotheadedness that plagues some jilted parents in small-market hockey towns in favor of a more balanced perspective. 

“I get it, why some people do leave,” Rieger explained. “To me, it’s a timing thing. If you’ve proven everything you need to prove and you want - and I stress want - something else, it’s okay.” 

Fortunately for the Bismarck hockey community, not all standouts want “something else.” 

Macie Vig is one of the North Dakota Flames’ standouts and led her Tier I Team North Dakota 14U to the quarterfinals for the first time in program history this spring. Vig, the daughter of former University of North Dakota captain Mitch Vig, led Team North Dakota in scoring with two goals and four points in four games played. She currently plays for Bismarck Century, just as her older brothers Max and Charlie did before her.

Max is coming off a 32-point season with the USHL’s Cedar Rapids RoughRiders and will suit up for Bemidji State in the fall. Charlie departed the high school ranks a year early for a premium opportunity with the National Team Development Program’s Under-18 team last September. Charlie split the 2024-2025 season with the NAHL’s Bismarck Bobcats and the USHL’s Omaha Lancers.

To Rieger, the Vig clan embodies a “Bismarck hockey family.”

“They do things the right way,” Rieger said. “They keep their kids invested in the program. They put their stamp on it. They have proven over the years that you don’t need to leave what we have (in Bismarck) to enhance your career.” 

Bismarck girls have their own loyalist heroine in former high school supernova Britta Curl-Salemme, who played her entire prep career in Bismarck before becoming a five-year star at the University of Wisconsin. Curl-Salemme won three national titles in her five seasons in Madison and finished as the Badgers’ all-time leader in games played while ranking seventh in program history in goals, 14th in assists, and ninth in points with 179.

Curl-Salemme was drafted in the second round of the 2024 PWHL Draft by Minnesota, and helped the Frost win its second straight Walter Cup this spring. Curl-Salemme had 12 goals and 18 points in 36 games for the Frost. 

“She’s a girl who all our kids really, really look up to,” Riegel said, adding that Curl-Salemme made an appearance on Team North Dakota’s bench during last fall’s NIT tournament in Blaine. “She didn’t leave. She played all the way through, and that seemed to work out for her,” Riegel said. 

While the pipelines of talent from Saskatchewan and North Dakota to other places aren’t likely to dry up anytime soon, Riegel says that the hockey life on the prairie is pretty sweet. 

“I’m not judging people’s paths,” Riegel said. “I’m just saying…to stay where you’re at, and grow with your friends and enjoy it…it’s not a bad thing.” 

“At the end of the day, we’re all doing this for fun, right?”