Kendall Hanley pursing her hockey passion as an on-ice official — in Beijing this month

Alicia Hanrahan saw her friend and fellow official Kendall Hanley last week.

Through a closed glass door.

Hanrahan, an Eagan native who refereed at the Sochi Games, dropped off a present for Hanley, who embarked over the weekend for the Winter Olympics in Beijing. As a precaution during the pandemic, Hanley has been on strict quarantine protocols in her St. Louis Park home before she becomes a linesperson for the women's hockey games in China.

Hanley, a native of Raleigh, N.C., first found a love for the game watching the Stanley Cup playoffs on TV and playing street hockey. She went to a prep school in Massachusetts before playing four years of Division III hockey, first at Elmira College, then at SUNY-Oswego, where she got a degree in zoology. Once she graduated in 2009, she didn't think there was going to be much opportunity for women in hockey beyond that.

But when visiting her dad in Dallas in her final semester of school, a woman she met in a pickup game of hockey mentioned she was an official, and it opened up a whole new avenue of possibilities for Hanley.

Since then, she's been moving up in the officiating ranks and bouncing around from Texas to Colorado to Illinois and finally to Minnesota five years ago when her partner's job relocated them here. Hanley has a dog-walking business — she has a yellow lab as well as a coop of chickens for her own pets — and also works for a local fresh pet food company.

Her main focus, though, has been preparing for this Olympic opportunity. She converted her one-car detached garage into a gym for the summer, using the alley as her running runway. For the winter, she commandeers her basement and skates on any of Minnesota's many outdoor rinks, working on her edge control.

"Everybody that's at this level on the athlete side, playing side, is extremely fit," Hanley said. "They're training day in, day out. So we've got to have the same fitness level. So I have a pretty regimented and intense training program that I built around my everyday life."

Plus, she has a lot of research to do, studying up on the rulebooks for whichever league she's officiating and making sure she's familiar with the teams and players with whom she'll share the ice.

Hanley's friends and fellow officials call her the ultimate team player, someone who is always seeking to help and do what she can to fix any problems. It's what has made her such a good official, one who refereed the 2019 NHL Prospect Tournament as part of the first four-woman team to do so. Hanrahan said she can see Hanley breaking more of those barriers after the Olympics, anything from officiating an NHL game to becoming an evaluator or scout for younger officials.

Hanley gives a lot of credit to the women who preceded her, especially those who helped mentor her and exponentiate the openings for women in the sport. But the real reason she's chosen this as her career path has to do with the family she's created within it.

Her favorite memory from her entire career so far wasn't some big international competition. It was in Denver this past May at the girls' USA Hockey national championship.

Hanley and two of her closest friends should have been in Nova Scotia officiating the women's world hockey championships, but the pandemic postponed it. In its stead, a last-minute opportunity arose to officiate the domestic tournament, and Hanley helped her pals do what she's most known for: Make the best of a non-ideal situation.

Hanley roomed with Jamie Huntley-Park — her friend, fellow official and former college teammate at Elmira. They asked to work a game with another close best friend, Jackie Spresser, and completing the friendship quartet was Hanrahan, supervising the officials team for the game.

On the final day of the championships, they all took an off-ice field trip.

"Most people want to work championship Sunday, as we call it, but we asked for the last day off so the four of us went and got tattoos of little zebras," Spresser said of their now-tattooed ankles. "That's what we call ourselves because we wear stripes."

It had been Huntley-Park's idea for the longest time, but the four were hardly ever in the same place at the same time, with Spresser based in Colorado and Huntley-Park in California. But they finally made it happen.

Just more than a month later, Huntley-Park passed away. On June 4, a wrong-way driver hit and killed her and her husband, both detectives with the San Diego police department.

Huntley-Park would almost surely have been one of the officials selected for Beijing, just as Hanley and Spresser ultimately were.

"These women have been a part of my life now for over a decade, and the friendships that have come out of it, I'm just really grateful," Hanley said, referencing their final moments together in Denver. "… Anytime you're on the ice together, it's just so much fun. So I'm always going to have that."