Milena Harned

On limits, math, and hockey.  

By Schuyler Daffey

Illustration by Audrey Wang

Milena Harned CC ’26 reminisces fondly over skating in front of Heads of State. At the Ice Hutch, CU Hockey’s former home rink, Milena would drill in front of a dignified audience of cardboard cutouts, among them Rachel Green, Chewbacca, and Michael Jordan. The team has since moved to a different rink, but Milena will never forget “seeing Obama watch me skate in his inhumanly large cutout form.”

Milena started playing hockey at age 7 on her local “mosquitoes” team in Boston. She was a defender, spurred on by her grandfather’s insistence that this was what “all the smartest players” did. At the club fair in her freshman year at Columbia, Milena searched in vain for the women’s club hockey team (it became defunct in 2017 due to a lack of members). She was told that the women simply played on the men’s team, so Milena decided to “give it a try”. She quickly realized that there were not, in fact, a lot of women on the team, but “it was still a lot of fun. So I stuck with it.” 

“We were not good at all that year,” mused Milena wryly. “We were losing games where they were in the tens, and we were in single digits.” In one such matchup against SUNY Maritime’s D1 Varsity team in October of her Freshman year, Columbia had only seven players to Maritime’s full roster of 18. Milena was placed on the starting lineup with Scott “Slatz” Slater GS ’23 as her defensive partner; they made a good pair, though he was 31, and she only 18 at the time. The game consisted of full NCAA rules: three periods of 20 minutes, with ice cuts in between, and the national anthem sung at the beginning. The stands were overflowing with rowdy Maritime students throwing beer cans onto the rink; more fans, probably, than had ever attended any Columbia Homecoming game, and more than Milena had ever seen at her tournaments in high school.

It might seem unlikely that Milena, who stands at just 5 feet 2 inches, would play a sport renowned for the blatant fist fights that take place mid-game. “When you're smaller, you have to be faster,” Milena explains, to avoid being body checked, which was officially introduced by the Professional Women’s Hockey League as part of its 2024 league rules. Body-checking, however, remains forbidden in Olympic-level play, so Milena grew up playing only non-contact hockey. This meant that when she started playing on the men’s club team at Columbia, she didn’t know how to receive hits, leading to a serious concussion in her second semester on the team.  

During an away game in Pennsylvania, a player on the opposing team rammed Milena, who did not have possession of the puck at the time, illegally into the boards. Despite being insistent that she was unhurt, Milena was undeniably exhibiting clear concussive symptoms. As the team van careened down the highway back to New York that night, Milena can recall lying in the back row, feeling unnaturally cold, and shaking irrepressibly. This concussion was severe, and Milena’s third. Aside from the interminable weeks of headaches and resting, it meant that she would never be able to play in contact games—and for CU Hockey—again. 

The resilience hockey taught her, which is the same resilience that allowed her to brave a turbulent bus ride with a concussion, is what kept her from quitting the sport. When, in 2023, the team lost their funding, their status as a Club Sport, and their eligibility to play in their competitive league, Milena worked tirelessly to restore the team’s status and ensure the season ran as smoothly as it had in years prior. “It took months and months of following up [with the Club Sports Governing Board] for us to eventually hear that we had been approved to appeal for reinstatement. So we put together this presentation to CSGB and gave our case. And that was kind of a big push. And after that, a couple months later, we learned that we were reinstated. And then, we had to do our contracts. We had to do our transportation. We had to figure out who would ref the league.” And in quintessential Milena fashion, when she saw a problem, she stepped in to solve it herself. She decided to run for a Representative position on the Club Sports Governing Board, where she now strives to streamline the bureaucratic, often torturous processes of club funding, management, and instatement. Oh, and she’s also currently co-President of the Hockey team.

When asked about navigating the dynamic of being one of the few women on a predominantly male team, Milena responded that, “I think I was really worried about it at first, and especially the year I joined, we were a much older team… There were a lot of GS people, grad students, so they were more like uncles to me. I always felt welcome, which meant a lot to me. I felt like I was part of this adopted family.” There is perhaps a parallel to be made between the “boys club” culture that still pervades the world of finance—an environment to which Milena is now accustomed from her summer trading internship at Goldman Sachs, where she will be returning full-time in the fall—and her experiences playing in a men’s hockey league. For Milena, “Assimilating into male-dominated spaces is just having the confidence that you belong there.”

Milena's meticulous work ethic glides smoothly into a world outside of hockey: she has published three original Mathematics research papers to date. She started working on the first when she was still in high school, and it assesses the infinite union of perimeter and angle bisectors of different shapes. She discovered that for four-sided shapes, only one specific type of shape yielded a continuous bisection envelope, a term, naturally, she coined. Her results can be found in the International Journal of Geometry. 

An early love of coding transformed into a fascination with math, and by 3rd grade, Milena was competing in Mathletes-style competitions. She credits an elementary school mentor, who taught her to learn theorems by deriving them herself, rather than just memorizing them, with fostering her early passion for research. By sixth grade, she was writing articles for a research bulletin called Girls’ Angle, and just a year later, Milena was conducting research of her own. She found the main result for her first published article in eighth grade, which she would later submit to a journal for peer review. 

Another paper, which she wrote with a friend in high school, was recently peer reviewed and recommended for publication in the journal La Matematica, the official journal of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She explains its subject to me slowly, empathetically, using layman’s terms while sketching out diagrams for reference: “If you were to imagine a bunch of different lines of that form, you have different slopes, different interceptions. But you restrict it to all integers, so it has to be like, equals x plus 2, y equals negative 3x plus 4, those kinds of things, and you just plop, say, 100 of those in the plane. Except for this one centre around the origin, all the other regions are going to be triangles or quadrilaterals. Like, they're gonna have three or four sides. Which, as you tend closer to infinity, remains true and that was really, really unexpected.” 

Math is something of an art form for Milena: her tools are a series of lines and vertices, and her medium is the theorem she pores over and perfects. “I very much believe that you can drive creativity with constraints. So I like that about math research. The more restrictions or guidelines, whatever you want to call it, you have, the easier it is to be creative and to build on top of them.” This is undoubtedly the perfect analogy for her time on the Hockey team. Milena has weathered a series of setbacks—the lack of a women’s team and her near athletic career-ending concussion—and has managed to thrive by building from them.

…

It is a blustery Sunday night in mid-September, but the remnants of a sticky New York summer still cling to the air. I walk down a series of long, narrow halls and ascend several stories in an industrial-sized elevator to reach the Chelsea Piers Sky Rink. Tonight, the Capital Crusaders play their rivals, the Molar Bears. Face-off is at 10:30 p.m. I stand next to the rink’s plastic shield, my breath clouding in the chill air, waiting for the game to begin.

The puck flies out of the center of the rink, moving so fast it is almost imperceptible to the eye, and shoots towards the Crusaders’ net. Their goalie narrowly saves the puck from skidding in and passes it to the wing, Milena Harned, who skates it out of the goal area with precise, sharp motions and swiftly transfers the puck to another team member. Milena is aggressive but unflappable, poised on two thin slivers of metal, weaving through a knotty labyrinth of attackers, fending off their efforts to steal the puck from her. 

Milena now plays several nights a week for the Capital Crusaders in a no-contact hockey league. Her teammates, former college players, are predominantly mid-career professionals. There is something inherently triumphant about this. Despite all odds, Milena is still playing hockey, still finding ways to drive creativity within constraints.