Valeriia Manchak - Jensen is an incredible Skills Coach.

Valeriia is currently a professional hockey player in the PWHPA (Professional Women’s hockey Players Association) for team Adidas out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  The PWHPA unites Olympic players from Canada and the USA into the premier women’s hockey league. She is also a skills development coach for the College Hockey Showcases program nationwide.

Most recently, Valeriia played two seasons for Liberty University where her team won the National American Collegiate championship for the 2020-2021 season. She earned “Rookie of the Year” for Liberty in 2019-2020 seasons and “Forward of the Year” in 2020-2021.  Additionally, she was also “All - American First Team” for ACHA and “All - American First team” for their WMCH division. 

Valeriia is a Ukrainian native where she started playing hockey for a boys’ AAA program (Druzhba 78), a well-known school which has generated many NHL players and is known as a unique skating school.  She continued on to start the women’s hockey league in Ukraine and led her team, the Dnepr Queens, to the first national Ukrainian championship where her number, 77, was retired.   Other notable hockey experiences include playing in Canada for U19 AA program with teammates who now represent Russia, Czech, and Finland on their Olympic teams. She spent a season playing in Russia as well.

As a coach, she started a women’s program in Ukraine “HC Automobilist” and lead them to the bronze medal in National Ukrainian Championship. She worked with U10, U12, U13 boys AAA teams HC Automobillist and HC Kiev as a skills development coach, who were winners of AAA international tournaments in Europe and Russia.

She is a multi-sport talent as evidenced by her boxing career which includes a European Cup, a World Cup boxing championship, and 6 gold medals from World Karate champion in 2015. She was named most technique boxer during the World Cup.  She was a part of the Olympic boxing team and qualified for boxing in the 2016 Olympics in Rio, but did not participate due an injury needing immediate surgery. 

I hope to see all sign up for our June Summer Hockey Camp as Valeriia is excited to work with our youth and varsity players.  Bringing a new light to training and development opportunity for our association and area kids to further develop skills we are all looking to improve on.