Some two decades past, Brandon Saine was a football and track sensation at Piqua High who continued to make headlines with Ohio State and ended up with the Green Bay Packers.
But no one has had a better rise-to-prominence story; was embraced more by the people of Piqua and has given back more to their hometown since those glory days than Kristin King.
Even though Piqua didn’t have a hockey team, a hockey rink or any history in the sport, Little Kinger, as the fearless 5-foot-4, multi-sport athlete was known back then, extended herself beyond fathomable expectation — as did her late mom, Mary Ellen — and went on to make the U.S women’s Olympic hockey team, compete in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy and win a bronze medal.
With the start of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games just as days away, Kristin King or Kristin Wright as she’s known in Acworth, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta — where she’s launched P360 Physical Therapy and Wellness, an orthopedic clinic specializing in ACL prevention in girls and young women athletes; is the mother of two young sons; and is married to fellow Piqua grad Jeremy Wright — is one of the very few Miami Valley athletes ever to have medaled at the Winter Olympic Games.
As these Winter Games, which are also in Italy, play out, you’ll likely hear several stories of athletes beating the odds and ignoring disbelievers in pursuit of their dreams.
Few of those tales though will eclipse the unlikely journey she took to the Olympic medal stand.
Her mom, a second-grade teacher in Piqua and a single parent raising Kristin and her two brothers after her divorce, didn’t let a demanding daily schedule, a lack of money or even lack of sleep, deter her from helping Kristin follow a passion that initially was even bigger than her imagination.
Although Kristin had started playing hockey at Hobart Arena in Troy, where she was the only girl on a boys’ team, she learned of a select group of girl hockey players in Detroit and soon her mom was driving her there three and four times a week for practices and games.
“We’d leave around 3 p.m. right after school would get out, and we wouldn’t get back home until 1 a.m.,” Kristin said.
“I could sleep on the way, but my mom did all the driving, then had to get up early and teach all day.
“She never complained, never hesitated. Early on, I was just going because I was having fun playing hockey, but down deep I think my mom saw something greater in me that I didn’t even know was there.”
Credit: Getty Images
Credit: Getty Images
Although she doesn’t mention it, Kristin sacrificed, too. As she endured the rigors of travel and was short on sleep herself, she often missed out on the after-school teen life of her peers.
And yet, she blossomed in school. She was a standout multi-sport athlete, had a 3.9 GPA, and was the student manager for the football team.
As she considered colleges — and decided she wanted to play two sports, hockey and softball — she met resistance. Most places told her she should focus only on one.
Dartmouth College was an exception and once again she blossomed. Along with being a top student, she won All-Ivy League honors in hockey four years in a row and twice was named the MVP of the softball team.
Eventually she was chosen as one of the 20 young women hockey players who would represent went the U.S. in Turin.
Hometown’s embrace
I covered those Olympic Games and reported on her daily exploits. I remember she was unsettled at the start and it took her a game to find her groove.
That process was helped along greatly once she started getting well-wishing messages and cards from people in the Miami Valley, especially entire classes of school kids.
She had her best game in the semifinal match against Sweden, scoring the first goal for the U.S.
The American team through faltered that day and was upset 3-2 by the Swedes, a 25-1 underdog.
The team rebounded and won the bronze medal and when Kristin returned to Piqua, she got a hero’s welcome that included a parade through town.
She was placed in the bucket of an aerial ladder on a fire truck and driven through the heart of Piqua where people lined the street, sometimes four deep, and waved signs and cheered.
A TV station’s helicopter flew overhead and filmed the spectacle as red and blue confetti rained down from atop nearly every multi-story building along Main Street, a scene reminiscent of the famed ticker tape parades in New York City that have honored everybody from Charles Lindbergh and the Apollo 11 astronauts to the World Champion New York Yankees.
Kristin got the key to the city of Piqua. And one from Troy, too.
Susie’s Big Dipper on Main Street named a sundae after her. Hobart Arena put up a display that held her jerseys from Troy and the U.S. national team.
Credit: Photographer Bill Garlow
Credit: Photographer Bill Garlow
A sign — (which in my opinion has been wrongly taken down in recent years, as has one honoring Saine ) — was placed along Route 25A near the high school to celebrate Piqua as the hometown of Kristin King, Olympic medal winner.
Although Kristin’s pursuits have since taken her elsewhere — she played pro hockey throughout British Columbia and Saskatchewan; went to grad school at Texas Tech and got her doctorate at the University of North Carolina; married Jeremy 15 years ago and today in Georgia, where he is an engineer for Clorox and she works for a private clinic while launching her own business, they are involved in the sports-filled lives of their two sons, Logan and Kettler — she has not forgotten her hometown’s embrace.
Not long after the Olympics — with the help of family and friends and some U.S teammates who came to Piqua to help put on a fundraiser that took in $25,000 — she started the Little Kinger fund to help girls follow their dreams to play intercollegiate sports at a four-year college.
Run under the umbrella of the Piqua Community Foundation, the Little Kinger Fund has awarded a $1,000 scholarship to high school senior girls not only from Piqua, but several other schools in the area.
As the fund becomes more self-sustainable, sports programs at local schools and other organizations will get money to help develop programs for girls.
“It all goes back to supporting the community that did so much for me,” Kristin said.
‘We just got the bronze medal’
The other day, she said she was on the phone with Chip Hare, the former Dayton Flyers basketball standout who is now the Piqua High athletics director.
“Even though she’s not in Piqua anymore her presence and her thumbprint are here all these years later,” Hare said Friday.
He is appreciative of what she does for her alma mater and other schools in Miami County. In turn, Kristin can’t say enough good things about the teachers and administrators who helped her realize her potential
“From the time I was five years old, all the way until I graduated from high school and even beyond, nobody really ever said ‘No’ to me,” she said.
“I’d ask Coach Palmer, ‘Can I go up to the weight room and get a lift in?’”
She said he’d say, “Sure, here you go,” and hand her the key: “He trusted me to be responsible.
“Coach Gold let me do his baseball camp, even though I was the only girl at it.”
With a laugh, she added: “Even Coach Nees asked me when I was going to try out for the football team.”
No one though had been more supportive than her mom, but Mary Ellen had died three years before the Turin Games after a battle with cancer.
For the semifinal game with Sweden she did have her own cheering section though.
Her late father — a lawyer in town who had been part of her life and sometimes had driven her to Detroit — was there with her two brothers, some other relatives and her coaches from Piqua and Cornell.
“Seeing them made the moment more personal for me,” she said. “Instead of the millions watching us on TV, it came down to that small group who had loved and supported me my whole life.”
The absence of her mom still weighed heavily on her and that’s when something remarkable happened.
After she scored, she was getting ready for the ensuing face-off and happened to look up in the stands where her family was.
“I saw my aunt from Texas,” she said. “She was 10 years younger than my mom, but at that moment she looked exactly like her.
“For just a moment I was like, ‘Is that Mom?’ It was like she was there, looking over me in my biggest moment.”
Kristin’s goal was captured in a photograph that soon was turned into a postcard. Today she has one displayed in the basement of their home, along with some jerseys, a World Championship ring she won in 2005, some posters and other mementos.
Her bronze Olympic medal — which years ago she kept everywhere from the glove box in her car to her backpack and sometimes a dresser drawer — is now in a safe. One day it will be displayed as well.
The more reverential treatment of her Olympic hardware shows how, over the years — she’s 46 now — she has become more appreciative of what she did, what the medal stands for and the sacrifice she made to get it.
“That loss really bothered us,” she once told me. “And I can remember since then being someplace and someone would go, ‘You went to the Olympics? How’d you do?’
“And I’d go ... ‘Aaaaah, we just got the bronze medal.’ And they’d look at me and go, ‘What are you complaining about? How many people in the world have a bronze Olympic medal?’
“That kind of reminds me just how thankful I should be for the experience.”
Olympic legacy
She’ll be the featured celebrity March 7th when the Columbus Blue Jackets hold their annual Girls Hockey Day at Nationwide Arena.
The noon to 4 p.m. program will include on-ice instruction; empowerment sessions with Ruling Our eXperiences (ROX), a non-profit, national mentoring program for girls; and a ticket to that evening’s Blue Jackets’ game with Utah
Back home, Kristin and Jeremy are busy raising their two sons. Logan is 14 and Kettler is 10.
Both boys play soccer, flag football and are working up the ranks in a couple forms of martial arts.
Kristin’s focus of ACL injuries was heightened when she tore her own while making a cut going out for a pass in flag football during grad school in 2009. She returned to Ohio State for her surgery.
Later she studied under Dr. Frank Noyes, the renowned orthopaedic surgeon at the Cincinnati SportsMedicine and Orthopaedic Center he founded.
While she works at Pure Rehab, a private clinic, she started P360 in March and focuses on prevention of ACL tears in girls, though she also works with rehabbing ACL injuries regardless of gender.
She said ACL tears are an “epidemic” for girls and young women athletes, but added that research shows with proper preventative measures athletes can cut down the chance of an ACL tear by as much as 80 percent.
Away from their jobs, she and Jeremy still are the adventurers they were when they first married.
She said there are 40 miles of trails about a mile from their home and they mountain bike about 10 miles every Friday afternoon. And since Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield is nearby, they regularly hike or trail run the six mile loop around it.
They convinced a friend from Ohio to join them on a hike of the 77-mile Foothills Trail from North Carolina to Georgia and in return have promised to come to Ohio, possibly this fall, and run a marathon.
As she explained: “The way I see it, I’ll try to stay active, have fun and push myself trying things people think you can’t do.”
It worked for her in high school and in college. And now her Little Kinger Fund is helping other girls realize their dreams, too.
That’s her Olympic legacy.
And it’s a good reason that road sign should go back up in Piqua.
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