By Will Hopkins
Jacquie Pierri has been looking forward to hitting the ice in Israel for a while now, but the full story of how her journey reached this point starts long ago. Pierri, a defenseman for the Open Women’s Ice Hockey team, is a first-generation American. Her mother, Caroline, was born in Sudan before going to London and arriving in New Jersey at about six years old. It goes back further, though. Jacquie’s maternal grandmother was born in the land of Israel after her parents fled Turkey. This is part of what makes playing in the Holy Land so special for Jacquie. She still has family in Israel. Pierri says, “I’ve been to Israel maybe four times. It seems like more because they’re always really memorable experiences.”
That’s just one half of the story. Her late father, Al, was born in southern Italy before moving to New York and later becoming an American citizen at the age of 18. Jacquie grew up spending summers in Italy with that part of her family, and she now plays hockey professionally in Bolzano in the north of the country. She recently found herself on a mission to represent Italy at the 2026 Winter Olympics on the ice. Between her father giving up his Italian citizenship in order to gain American citizenship and ever-changing laws, it was hard for Jacquie to obtain an Italian passport. She was nervous she wouldn’t get it in time to make the Olympic team. Pierri calls it a miracle that she did, saying about her father, “I like to think that he had something to do with helping that get done.”
“Home Olympics is really something special,” says Pierri about representing Italy in the Milano Cortina Games. She was a part of history as Italy picked up its first ever Olympic win in its opener against France. Pierri says that there was extra meaning in honoring her father, whose last name she wore on her jersey and whose side of the family makes her Italian. He passed away from a heart attack while playing hockey in December 2012, soon after Jacquie graduated from Brown University, but she carries him with her on the ice. On her stick, she writes ‘DAD’, along with other late family members’ names. She also wore 55 as her jersey number at the Olympics for his birth year of 1955.
After representing her dad’s ancestry in the Olympics, she now gets to represent her home country at the site of her mom’s lineage. Despite hostility towards Jews and Israelis across the world, Jacquie says, “More than ever, I feel really a huge desire to be publicly Jewish and publicly Israeli.”
She says the hockey world has been “mixed” in its stance on Israel, but she had more struggles in the climate space, where she is very involved. “At the beginning, I tried my best to have some constructive conversations about some of the misinformation that was kind of fueling them, but in the end, I decided to just remove myself from those communities because it just was really discouraging, and I didn’t feel like they were open to real conversation,” says Pierri. She has since found a way to stick with her passion for our planet without feeling unwelcome at EcoAthletes, where athletes from around the world use their platform to talk about climate change.
“Sometimes I feel like sports are like the one thing left that can bring people together,” says Pierri. She mentioned that many people don’t want to talk to those on the other side of political opinion but thinks that sports can serve as a bridge. Jacquie Pierri hopes that her participation in the Maccabiah in Israel will get people to ask her more questions about herself and her heritage.
Will Hopkins is the play-by-play voice for several sports at Division III Emory University in Atlanta. He also helps out behind the scenes for radio station 680 The Fan, the flagship station of the Atlanta Braves.