South Korea women's hockey team win first game in 19-year history

South Korea’s women’s ice hockey team needed almost two decades to record their first ever victory.

The scoreline for Saturday’s breakthrough result would suggest it was worth the wait – and right on time with the Winter Olympics in Pyeonchang less than year away.

The South Koreans, currently ranked 23rd in the world out of 38 countries, romped to a 20-0 win over Thailand on Saturday in the opening game of the round-robin stage at the Asian Winter Games in Sapporo.

The 20 goals came on a whopping 108 shots, compared to a scant one for Thailand.

While they followed their historic triumph with Monday’s 3-0 loss to Japan and Tuesday’s 1-0 setback against Kazakhstan, South Korea can earn a bronze medal with a victory over 16th-ranked China on Thursday at Tsukisamu Gymnasium.

A podium spot would represent a giant leap forward for a team that went winless in each of the four Asian Games it had previously entered, scoring only four goals in 15 games. The nadir was a 29-0 defeat to Japan in Changchun a decade ago.

“At the time, Japan had 136 shots on target, and we couldn’t get past their offense line,” Shin So-jeong, the team’s longtime goaltender, told the Korea Joongang Daily. “My entire body was bruised from blocking pucks coming at an average speed of 100kph [60mph], but what hurts most is when others talk about our team in negative ways.”

Japan goaltender Nana Fujimoto had nothing but praise for the South Korean side after Monday’s hard-fought contest, which offered a preview of next year’s assured group-stage clash at the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.

“They are so much better than they used to be,” Fujimoto told the Mainichi. “They came out with an underdog mentality. They have a solid system and they executed it well. They have some girls who can really skate. We’ve got a year to go and we are going to have to get stronger, because they certainly will.”

South Korea have charted improvement since hiring American Sarah Murray, a former defenseman who won a pair of NCAA championships as a player with the Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs, to serve as national team coach in 2014.

Consider that the South Koreans had been outscored 102-1 by Japan in six previous meetings, with their rivals scoring 20 or more goals in three of them. On Monday, they held Japan scoreless through two periods before the favorites broke through in the final stanza.

“We’re showing people that we’re not being given this great present to go to the Olympics. We’re showing more and more that we’ve earned it and that we deserve to be there,” Murray told Yonhap News Agency last week. “I think the players are starting to realize that we’re not going to the Olympics just to enjoy the experience. ... We want to win and surprise people and show what Korean hockey can do.”

Murray, whose father Andy helmed Canada to three world championships and coached the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and St Louis Blues, leads a team drawn mostly from untraditional backgrounds.

Han Soo-jin graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in piano perfromance, Ko Hae-in has a background in short-track speed skating, while Park Eun-jung is a Korean-Canadian who once played at Princeton University before taking leave from her medical studies at Columbia to compete in the Winter Olympics.

South Korea will have their hands against 16th-ranked China full in their bid for a historic first medal. They’ve been outscored 90-2 in seven all-time meetings between the countries, all losses.