MULLIN LOOKS TOWARD BRIGHT FUTURE AT STONEHILL

There are a lot of positives on the horizon for the up-and-coming Stonehill women’s ice hockey program.

The school, located in Easton, Massachusetts (about 30 minutes south of the Greater Boston area), just wrapped up its third season of Division I competition and its second season under head coach Lee-J Mirasolo, who came to the team after previously spending multiple years on the coaching staff at Harvard. Stonehill may not have had the most eye-popping statistics in 2024-25, posting a 14-19-5 overall record, but they finished fourth out of eight teams in the New England Women’s Hockey Alliance (aka the NEWHA) and it seems highly likely that a brand new ice hockey arena is in the works to be built sometime over the next few years (according to an article from The Summit), so there is a lot to look forward to for fans of the relatively new team in Division I.

A college hockey program with known coaches such as Mirasolo and current PWHL netminder Aerin Frankel, who joined the staff as a goaltending coach last fall, combined with the potential of playing in a brand new building one day is enough to pique the interest of plenty of athletes from around the country. This includes Masyn Mullin, who is slated to join the Skyhawks in the fall of 2025.

Mullin, a forward who just finished up her senior year of high school hockey at the Academy of Holy Angels in Richfield, Minnesota, had been in talks with Stonehill for a while but she made her commitment to the program official in the fall of 2024.

“I am very honored and excited to announce my commitment to play Division 1 hockey and further my education at Stonehill! Thank you to my family, coaches, and teammates who have helped me along the way. Go Skyhawks!” she posted to her social media back on October 11 to announce her verbal commitment to the team ahead of her senior season.

(from @stonehillwih on Instagram)

“I like the direction the program is going and the players that they’ve recruited. I think it’ll be a really strong program in a few years,” Mullin said in an interview with Clean Sheet Hockey about why she chose to take her skills out east to the Skyhawks organization. “I love Lee-J [Mirasolo] and Kendall [Wagner - assistant coach], they’re both great … They have a good academic reputation too and it’s a well-rounded school.”

18-year-old Mullin is a forward who can fit into a role as either a playmaker or a goal scorer. She spent the past three seasons with Holy Angels and made two Class A state tournament appearances during her time with the squad (in ‘24 and ‘25) and she even led the team in power-play goals (7) and was second on the roster in overall goal-scoring (19) as a senior in 2024-25.

“I’m pretty fast and I can make plays and get stuff done, score in the big games, and I’m also pretty physical. I think those are the strengths in my game,” said Mullin about her style of play. “I think I’m a playmaker and a goal scorer, I can do a little bit of both.”

Although Mullin has lived in Minnesota for the past few years and played her high school hockey there she actually grew up in a few different areas of the United States. The skater was born in Columbus and only briefly lived there before moving to Chicago for a little while and then eventually settled in the Fort Collins area of Colorado, where she spent a majority of her childhood.

The Mullin family has plenty of ties to the sport of hockey, so it only seemed natural that Masyn and her younger sister, Avery, would eventually try it as well. Their father, Jim, was a college hockey goaltender at Denver, and their grandfather played at RPI.

Living in Colorado, there aren’t necessarily a ton of opportunities for girls hockey. Obviously, the state has superb men’s college hockey programs and men’s professional hockey teams, but both the boys and girls youth scene isn’t to the same level as a state like Minnesota. Masyn actually played boys hockey with Northern Colorado Youth Hockey until around middle school (when checking is introduced) and then she switched over to the Lady RoughRiders organization (which was located in Boulder, about 40 minutes away from where she was living) and eventually to the Team Colorado triple-A program.

The summer before her sophomore season, the Mullin family decided to make the move to Minnesota - mostly for hockey, but there were also some family ties to the area as well since they have an uncle that lives in the state and her grandparents used to live there as well. Hockey in Colorado ended up being quite costly and it wound up being a lot of travel in order to find high-level competition, so it made sense to move up to Twin Cities metro area to attend a high school where the Mullin sisters could play a high level of hockey for much cheaper, have many more resources to develop their game, and to have much less travel to find games against other high-level competition.

Obviously, making the jump from triple-A hockey in Colorado to high school hockey in Minnesota was a bit of a change for Masyn during her sophomore season, but she earned a respectable 17 points through 27 games played that year in 2022-23 for the Stars.

“The main difference between triple-A and high school that I’ve noticed is I think there is a lot more pride here (playing in high school) than there is playing in triple-A. There is so much pride - people are super proud of who they play for,” she said about one of the main differences between the two kinds of organizations. “In terms of competition, I do think it’s very similar, I think the top triple-A teams are very good but once you get below that top-20 rank it kind of gets, the hockey is just okay, but there is a lot of depth here, which is cool.” 

(Contributed / Youth Hockey Hub)

Holy Angels went 20-6-1 that season, eventually falling to Orono in the Section 5A championship match, but the Stars wound up being a top team in Class A for the next two seasons after that for Mullin’s junior and senior years.

As a junior, Mullin became a point-per game athlete and one of the top skaters on the team by posting 35 points through 30 contests. She says that learning from some of the older girls on the team is something that really helped her improve her training and transform her overall game.

“I played with Audrey Garton [currently at Division I Minnesota State] and just seeing like those type of players and what they do, I implemented that into how I train and how I can become a better player,” she said. “Seeing all the good players here and learning what they do and making myself do the same things so I could make that jump really helped me.” 

In that 2023-24 season as a junior, Mullin and the Stars would eventually win their section final and earn a berth to the Class A state tournament for the first time in almost 20 years.

“It was surreal,” said the Masyn about the experience of getting play at the Xcel Energy Center for the legendary Minnesota state tournament. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be at Nationals [while playing triple-A] and go to the X, but there is nothing like playing at the X. To play in front of your entire school and you have TV and all that other stuff, it’s just super, super cool to be out there with all your teammates and have the chance to win something big. It was amazing, it was so fun.” 

The team finished up that season with a 22-5-3 overall record. They won their state quarterfinal match against Luverne before falling in a tight semifinal match to eventual state champion Warroad.

Coming into her senior season, the Stars roster looked a little different with some key seniors from the previous year departing due to graduation but Mullin and the squad were confident that they could have another strong year.

“All the seniors knew we could do it again - we knew how to win. The girls who needed to step up stepped up and all the girls filled their roles and I think that’s why we got to the X, I think everybody just believed that we could and we knew how and we just went from there,” she said about the team mentality in 2024-25.

And in fact, the Stars did just that. It was a bit more difficult this time around though to win the section championship and earn that berth to state as Holy Angels had to defeat a tough South St. Paul squad in a match that went all the way to double overtime, but they dug deep and found a way to do it. That victory is one of Mullin’s favorite memories from her time at Holy Angels. The Stars went on to win their state quarterfinal match against Proctor/Hermantown but then again fell in the semifinal round to eventual state champion Dodge County. Mullin earned 33 points that year through 30 games and Holy Angels went 19-8-3 overall.

By posting solid statistics over her high school career, Mullin had been navigating the college recruitment process since the summer prior to her junior season. Sifting through different offers was a bit challenging but Stonehill was one of the squads that reached out early on in the process. The Skyhawks talked on and off with the Holy Angels forward until the summer before her senior year when recruiting discussions really started to pick up and she eventually committed to them in October of 2024.

Mullin joins a small group of other Minnesotans that are currently on, or are slated to join, the Skyhawks roster. This includes another incoming freshman in Nicole Schumm, a goaltender from North Wright County, who will head to Stonehill in the fall, rising high school senior Ella Nonweiler from Holy Family/Minnetonka, and a pair of current athletes on the Stonehill team in former Cretin-Derham Hall teammates Lily Geist (St. Paul) and Lily Barrett (Little Canada).

Now, Mullin is preparing to join the Skyhawks team in just a few short months. Her spring season has been busy after the high school hockey season ended as she is a multi-sport athlete and also plays Lacrosse for Holy Angels. Once she gets out to Massachusetts for college, she is planning on majoring in business with a minor in entrepreneurship.

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