2025 Top 25 Under 25: Tessa Janecke (14), Ève Gascon (13)

14: Tessa Janecke

by Emma Sullivan

When you think of an electric moment from this last year, it almost doesn’t get any more electric than Tessa Janecke’s golden goal in the World Championships in April. The 21-year-old forward from Orangeville, Illinois scored late into first overtime in the gold medal game against Canada this year, lifting the United States to their 11th title at said championships in the process. 

This goal is just one of the many reasons she’s coming in at 14th in our Top 25 Under 25 countdown this year. 

Janecke has long been a staple on the US national team, as the 2025 world championships marked her third tournament on the team to date. Two of those championships have resulted in gold medals, and it’s a pretty safe bet that she’ll return to the roster for the upcoming Olympics this February. 

Outside of her time in the national program, Janecke’s been the best player in Atlantic Hockey America, where she’s been a top point producer for the Penn State Nittany Lions for the last three seasons. 

Since she started in 2022, the offense has run through Janecke. As a freshman, she led the team in assists with 25, and was second in overall scoring with 47 points. She followed that up with back-to-back 53 point seasons as a sophomore and junior, including 24 goals this past season. With 100 total points in just two years, Janecke was the fastest player to hit the century mark in PSU player history, and only continues to get better as time goes on. It would be a shock if she doesn’t reach 200 career points by the end of her senior campaign in 2025-26. 

What stands out most for Janecke, at least to me, is her faceoff winning ability. In under 80 games in the last two seasons, she’s won over 1,200 faceoffs, including 617 in 2024-25, the most of any player. Her ability to perform, especially in the circle, is absurd, and it’s proven every time she’s on the ice. 

Where she can run into some trouble is with the penalty box — a place she finds herself fairly regularly. With 28 infractions in 38 games this season, Janecke was second in the entirety of Division I in penalties taken, only behind fellow team-USA member Abbey Murphy. Janecke plays with an edge, and it can get her into trouble regularly if she isn’t careful. But with that edge she finds a plethora of success, and it’s paid off for her thus far. 

It’s funny to think that Janecke wasn’t on our Top 25 list this time a year ago, not even as an honorable mention. Especially considering her NCAA Rookie of the Year win in 2023. I guess a golden goal really can elevate one’s stock when it’s all said and done, and multiple outstanding performances at the NCAA level to boot. 

At the end of the day, this is not the last time we’ll see Janecke on this list. At just 21, there’s still plenty of time to see her develop even further moving forward. And when she hits the PWHL draft class, she’ll have multiple teams clamoring to take her. She just has at least the next year at Penn State to finish first.

13: Ève Gascon

by Geremy

It’s been a long, long, long, long, long time coming but Ève Gascon has finally broken onto The Ice Garden Top 25 Under 25 ranking. I understand that goalies aren’t as excited as forwards or blueliners. They play a unique position in a niche sport. Goalies are the least understood position in the game so it’s natural for them to go completely under the radar and not get the recognition they deserve until it’s so obvious that they deserve it. Just look at Annelies Bergmann being 24^th in these rankings, very underrated.

If you’ve followed my work you know exactly how highly I think of Gascon. In 2019 I had declared her as “the future of Canadian women’s hockey goaltending” and she’s done nothing except for live up to that title ever since. In her U16 season Gascon is selected to play for Team Quebec at the 2019 Canada Winter Games in a U18 tournament featuring the best U18 talent from each province. She takes the net from U18 WJC Gold Medalist Mahika Sarrazin and leads Quebec to a Silver Medal.

In the process of leading Quebec to a Silver Medal they beat Team Ontario 1-0 in the semi-final where Gascon made 39 saves against some names you might of heard of: Kayle Osborne, Megan Carter, Kendall Cooper, Julia Gosling, Maddi Wheeler, Nicole Gosling, and Brianna Brooks. Quebec would later play Team Alberta led by Danielle Serdachny and lose 2-1. Not a bad start for a 15yo going up against U18 WJC Gold Medalists.

At the start of Gascon’s U17 season she’s of course taken to Canada’s U18 National Championship to play for Team Quebec. The now 16 year old Gascon takes Quebec to the Bronze Medal game winning a 2-1 OT game vs Team Ontario Blue finishing third in tournament SV% (0.929) with the two goalies in front of her being in their U18 seasons. It’s clear Gascon is going to make Canada’s U18 WJC team and she unsurprisingly does while also taking the starting position on the squad over the older Kayle Osborne. It’s a great tournament for Gascon who posted the third-best SV% (0.938) in the tournament but unfortunately ends in OT 2-1 for the USA in the Gold Medal Game.

With still her U18 season to go it’s expected Gascon is going to reach another level of U18 greatness. She’s been at the U18 Nationals and U18 WJC’s as an underager seeing success. The 2020/21 season should have been Gascon’s launch into the mainstream women’s hockey media and even just hockey media as the future of Canada’s crease. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be the case as COVID hit and the world stopped, including Gascon’s hype.

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Her U18 season wiped out, Gascon focused on the future ending up in the men’s QCHL with the Saint-Laurent Patriotes. In her first season she’d finish sixth in league SV% (0.897) with a 12-6-0 record but bowed out quickly in the playoffs. The most memorable part of the 2021/22 season for Gascon wasn’t having a great rookie year in the QCHL but getting the call to play two regular season games for the QMJHL’s Gatineau Olympiques. She would be the third female goalie in QMJHL history to play a regular season game following in the footsteps of little known goalies Charline Labonté and Manon Rhéaume.

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With some level of normalcy back in the hockey world Gascon’s career took off once again. The 22/23 season would see her finish second in league SV% (0.923) and then help to lead the Saint-Laurent Patriotes to a QCHL championship! Gascon’s momentum didn’t slow down as she’d join the University of Minnesota-Duluth the very next season and immediately post a 0.946 SV% in 21 games which included a 1-0 OT win in her first ever NCAA national tournament game over the University of Connecticut. As the cherry on top she’d be named to the WCHA All-Rookie Team.

Now we’ve arrived at this past season, 2024/25. The UMD crease was all Gascon’s as her goalie partner Hailey MacLeod transferred to the Ohio State University. If UMD was capable of scoring against a top 10 ranked team, they’d have won the NCAA National Championship. On the fourth ranked team in the WCHA and the fourth best scoring team in the WCHA, Gascon finished second in SV% (0.942) in 30 games only behind Ava McNaughton (0.944 SV%) who played behind the three-loss, only +200 goals-for team in the NCAA, University of Wisconsin. To really put a nail into this point UMD would lose 1-0 in the NCAA national tournament to Cornell.

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In her second year Gascon would nearly sweep the NCAA awards. She was named to the NCAA and WCHA First All-Star Teams. Gascon would also be named the WCHA Goalie of the Year and somehow finished second in NCAA Goalie of the Year voting to fellow WCHA goalie Ava McNaughton despite beating her in voting for the three other accomplishments. An Emerance Maschmeyer injury later and Gascon gets to make her senior team national debut as the third goalie for Team Canada at the 2025 WHC.

It's clear the moniker of “Canada’s Future in the Crease” isn’t going away for Gascon. She’s currently at Team Canada’s Olympic orientation camp fighting for the inside track at a spot. Presumably she’ll be invited to Rivalry Series games though whether or not she plays will be up to the coaching staff. Apart from the Olympics Gascon is going to be counted upon to play a major role once again for a UMD squad who added a bit of firepower but will still probably have the fourth best offence in the WCHA. If they can manage to score two goals versus OSU, Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota that’ll be an improvement over last year making them a NCAA National Championship threat.

Too High/Too Low?: On my list I have Ève Gascon seventh and while one could argue that 13^th isn’t that far off I’ll be firm in my stance at say it’s too low. She was undoubtedly the best goalie in the NCAA last season and has done nothing but increase her hype year after year. Now she’s getting to vie for an Olympic spot over established goalies such as Corinne Schroeder and Kristen Campbell. Putting it in PWHL terms, she’d have been the second goalie picked after Gwenyth Philips in the 2024 draft and been the first goalie off the board for the 2025 draft. Barring injury we’re witnessing something special here.