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Describing Joy Dunne in one word is a fool’s errand.There are too many ways to talk about the St. Louis area native who played goalie, defender and forward as a young hockey player.
Some people around her use the word “lion.”
“She has a heart of a lion,” Dunne’s sister Jincy Dunne, a defender for the New York Sirens and member of the 2022 silver-medal-winning USA Olympic team, said. “She’s tough, resilient, tenacious, fierce, has drive and is a crazy good athlete.”
All of those traits have been ingrained in her because of people such as Jincy and her four other siblings, all hockey players. Dunne’s oldest brother, Josh, plays for the Buffalo Sabres; her other brother, James, played for Oklahoma State. Her sisters Jincy and Jessica played at Ohio State, and another sister, Josey, currently plays at Lindenwood after spending four years at Minnesota.
Dunne is the youngest, though, so she was pushed to the edge by everybody. Once she was old enough to sit in the front seat of the car, she had to fight to take that away from her siblings.
Board games became contact sports, hockey was incredibly competitive, and even moments such as pool volleyball left Dunne walking around with black eyes or busted lips.
There was no backing down in the Dunne household, not even for the youngest sibling. It’s part of the reason why being the youngest player on this year’s U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team doesn’t scare the fourth-line forward, who is 20.
“In that family, if she wasn’t tough, she wasn’t going to eat,” said Ohio State coach Nadine Muzerall, who coached Jincy and Jessica and now coaches Dunne. “They’re all tough kids.”
But the bond they have goes beyond competitiveness. Her siblings are the first people she calls with good news and the first she calls to get advice on how to navigate bad news. They push each other, they keep each other humble and in the process help Dunne, who is the NCAA’s third-leading goal scorer, reach the mountaintop of hockey.
Now, the next member of what is referred to in St. Louis as the “Dunne hockey dynasty” is making her own mark on the international hockey landscape. She has totaled four points in four games, including two goals, with her first coming in her Olympic debut against the Czech Republic last week.
“My siblings and my parents have definitely been my number one cheerleaders, and sometimes I’m like, ‘OK, it’s a little much, like, not that good. Like, let’s calm down,’” said Dunne. “But it’s very sweet to live in an environment like that.”
When Jincy was at Ohio State, from 2015-19, she kept in coach Muzerall’s ear about her younger sister.
She was adamant that Dunne was the best hockey player in the family.
“She kept telling me, ‘My sister Joy, she’s better than me. She’s better than any of us,’ ” Muzerrall recalled.
That realization came early for Jincy.
Dunne was always more athletic than her siblings. She has the size to play anywhere on the ice, with the speed to catch defenders off guard in the attacking zone and the reaction time to put a quick touch in the back of the net.
Her skill is evident with her 73 career collegiate goals, but it’s the attitude she plays with that has always shined in the biggest moments.
When Ohio State won the 2024 national championship, 1-0 over Wisconsin, it was Dunne, then a freshman, who scored the game-winning goal with 7:12 left in the third period. In last year’s national championship loss to Wisconsin, Dunne went the length of the ice to score a short-handed goal.
“She got pissed and took it end-to-end and scored,” Jincy said. “She just has that.”
That resiliency in Dunne was bred into her from a young age.
When things got tough around the house, Dunne had a tendency to take a hit and then whine to her siblings. They put a stop to that early.
“We told her, ‘Joy, stop it. You can’t whine.’ And now she doesn’t whine at all,” Jincy said with a laugh. “She took that to heart.”
Dunne hasn’t just been the youngest in her house — she’s often the youngest player on the ice, too. Growing up in the St. Louis area, she was the only girl playing in shorty-level boys hockey and shined.
“Being the baby you’re kind of even more battle tested,” Tom Dunne, her father, said. “There’s no trepidation in her game.”
So it was more of the same when it came to USA tryouts. She wasn’t new to the USA system.
She was a member of the 2022 U.S. U18 select team, scored three goals in the 2022 USA Hockey Women’s National Festival and was a member of the U.S. 2023 collegiate select team.
But trying to make an Olympic team is not for the faint of heart.
“They can bring out the best and worst in people in my experience,” said Jincy, who made one team but was cut three other times. “They can be uplifting and they can be hurtful. They can make or break careers. There’s a lot on the line.”
Dunne knew she was young, and she knew that if she didn’t make this Olympics, she had a chance at the next three. But still, the young girl who followed around her siblings and played hockey with the boys had been dreaming about playing in the Olympics, so she went for it.
There were good days, but there were bad ones too. There were injuries, bad practices, bad moments, all of which made her second-guess whether she was cut out for the team.
“Something happens and you think, ‘Oh, I’m getting cut,’” Dunne said. “I was having some issues with myself injury-wise and I was like, ‘They’re not going to want someone who is like that. Even though you are in the top 30, you badly want to be in the top 23 and you kind of lose sight of how cool it is to be in the top 30. Sometimes it was hard for me. I would lose perspective pretty quickly.”
Dunne’s response was to slowly step away from her phone. The same people who gave her a busted lip and black eye in the pools growing up were the people who could break down Dunne’s wall and help her navigate the struggles of making Team USA.
“I was cut twice, made it and then cut again, so I understand it, but hockey is something we do, not who we are,” Jincy said. “She has the hockey side. She needed help with the mental side and when we tell her she deserves to be there, she knows we are not lying to her. We just worked through those fears, that there’s more to life than hockey.”
It made the phone call when Dunne made the team, even better.
“We both cried,” Jincy said. “Her journey wasn’t easy. She had to work for things. There were days when she sacrificed a lot, her time and her body, but this is her dream and she gets to live it.”
The Dunne family, as a whole, does this time, too.
When Jincy made Team USA, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, so her family couldn’t attend the Games.
This time, Tom, Tammy and Dunne’s older brother James are in Milan. All to watch the youngest member of the family dynasty mark her legacy on the Olympic stage.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Buffalo Sabres, New York Sirens, NHL, Women's Hockey, Women's Olympic Ice Hockey, Olympics, Women's Olympics
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