Warrior Spotlight: Katerina Bukolska
Katerina Bukolska is 20 years old. She is from the Czech Republic and is at Merrimack to continue playing hockey. Katerina also has had many accomplishments throughout her hockey career. She plays on the Czech national hockey team and she has came in 3rd at the world championship with the U18 team. She has also been at 3 world championships with the U18 team and has # world championships with the senior national team.
So what makes you a real warrior? Everyone has a story. Do you have anything you want to talk about first off that makes you, you? What obstacles have you had to overcome?
So, I play ice hockey and I was recruited to play hockey here at Merrimack. I am from the Czech Republic and the recruiting process over here starts really early so girls usually get recruited for hockey when they are 15 years old. I am an incoming freshman and I am already 20 years old so it might be really late for other people here. So, I guess since I came over here only two years ago, I didn’t have as much time to be seen by coaches in order to get recruited for D1 hockey. That was really hard for me and I decided to do a gap year last year because I didn’t get an offer that I wanted yet. Taking a gap year was a big risk because I didn’t know if it was going to work out or not and it was one more year away from my family and I also didn’t go to school for that year. It was a huge risk and I was like I’m either going to get an offer or I might just quit hockey and go back home.
Do you think you will end up going home or do you want to stay here in the US?
Honestly, I don’t think it would make sense for me to go home. Obviously I miss my family and everything and I wanna go back as much as I can but in the future I’m studying psychology and my degree wouldn’t apply back home so it wouldn’t make sense for me to go back home if I studied here for six years.
Has being so far away from your family been really difficult?
Yeah, at first I was really homesick but now I’ve already been away for two years so I’ve been really getting used to it. Hockey has really made it so much easier because your whole team is like your family here.
Is there anything significant in your life that you want people to know about you that impacts your everyday life?
Something that impacts me a lot is my family, I have a really big family, I have five siblings. I would say my family situation was really hard because my parents weren’t together and I only lived with my dad and my siblings. But my parents are now back together, it’s definitely a confusing situation. It for sure made a big impact on me and having a lot of siblings you kind of had to fight for everything because even though parents were always there for me they also give attention to all my other siblings. You are kind of more on your own when it’s like that, and being the second oldest I’ve had to take care of my younger siblings.
