Caroline Harvey and Laila Edwards, best friends and Olympic champions, prepare for life apart

NEW YORK, One month before the Professional Women’s Hockey League draft, Caroline Harvey and Laila Edwards were plotting.

After a whirlwind 2025-26 season, the duo were in New York as keynote speakers at the espnW summit. For over 30 minutes, they discussed winning Olympic gold medals with Team USA, where Edwards and Harvey were among the top scorers in the tournament, and their third national championship victory with the Wisconsin Badgers.

But after the panel was complete, their conversation turned to the future, and the fact that the two best friends will be separated for the first time in nearly a decade.

“That’s a lot of our conversations lately,” Harvey said in an interview with The Athletic last month.

At the 2026 PWHL Draft on Wednesday night, Harvey, who won Olympic MVP and the 2026 Patty Kazmaier Award as the top player in college hockey, is expected to go first overall to the Vancouver Goldeneyes. In a perfect world, Edwards, a 6-foot-1 dual threat who can play forward or defense, also lands in the Pacific Northwest, as the Seattle Torrent have the No. 2 pick. Their Team USA teammate Abbey Murphy, who was second in The Athletic’s prospect ranking in March, could also reasonably go second overall.

Both Edwards and Harvey have said they’d be happy to play anywhere in the PWHL.

Still, in the weeks since their decorated college careers ended, they have tried to game out scenarios where they end up on the same pro team next season. Maybe, they say, there will be a big draft-day trade. It happened in Vancouver before in the NHL. It could happen again.

Realistically, though, the best they’ll be able to do is meet for lunch.

“Once or twice we’ve been serious, like, ‘Yeah, this is it,’” Edwards said. “But then we come up with all these scenarios of how we’re still gonna see each other a lot.”

“If we’re both out west we’d be driving distance,” Harvey said. “We could meet for lunch on off days.”

To just call Edwards and Harvey best friends feels like a disservice to the nature of their connection. They’ve grown up together, going from high school to the Wisconsin Badgers and becoming Olympic gold medalists at each other’s side. Their families are so close that when Harvey won the Patty Kazmaier in March, Edwards’ 6-year-old nephew Shiloh joined the Harvey family picture. “(He’s) part of my family,” Caroline said.

Now, after years of playing together, eating every meal and spending nearly every minute together, Harvey and Edwards will soon go their separate ways.

“I think they’re really going to miss each other and I really hope that they’re not too far apart,” said David Harvey, Caroline’s father. “They’re best friends and I think they’ll be best friends for life even outside of hockey. They’re two different people and they just work because they love each other.”

When the duo first met, Edwards was 10. Harvey was 12, and wearing a standout matte black helmet over a classic bob cut with blunt bangs.

“That’s just how I remember her,” Edwards said. “She had these bangs, and the helmet was almost egg-shaped.”

It was an old Easton helmet that Harvey’s father found on a local sale rack when his daughter first got into hockey. David Harvey likened the helmet, which also had a half-cage, half-bubble mask, to the Great Gazoo’s helmet from “The Flintstones.” Not that he ever told his daughter that.

“She used to say people would make fun of the helmet,” David said. “And I’d be like, ‘No, it’s really cool!’”

Edwards also never said a word. She was admittedly pretty shy back then. And Harvey, who joined her Pittsburgh Penguins Elite girls hockey team for a tournament that summer, was already too good to chirp. Looking back on it now, though, Edwards said, “I should have chirped her.”

Less than a year later, Harvey was attending Bishop Kearney, an elite hockey prep school in Rochester, N.Y. Edwards, in seventh grade, was visiting the school as a prospective student.

As an eighth grader, Harvey, whose friends call her “KK”, served as Edwards’ host, showing her around the school and hockey facilities. Edwards followed Harvey to class and went on the ice with the team to get the full “day in the life” experience as a BK student athlete. They clicked right away and within a few hours, they were playing mini sticks in the hallway.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” Harvey said. “It was just so light and easy. … It just made sense that we were such good friends right away.”

That summer, they landed on the same team again for the annual Beantown girls hockey showcase in Boston, and after one of the games, Harvey invited Edwards back to her home in New Hampshire to watch a movie. They can’t recall the exact movie; it was definitely a scary one, they say. But, they do know they’ve been best friends ever since.

When Edwards officially enrolled at Bishop Kearney in the fall, they became inseparable. For most students, Bishop Kearney is a private Catholic prep school. But for the 100-plus athletes who reside on campus, it’s also an elite hockey program with daily access to ice and training facilities, including a gym and multiple shooting rooms exclusive to players.

At 13 and 14 years old, Edwards and Harvey were away from home, living in the BK dorms, going to class together and playing on the same under-16 team.

“What the world is seeing of them today, from the TikTok videos, to on the ice, that’s been KK and Laila since seventh and eighth grade,” said Cari Coen, who has been the director of girls hockey at Bishop Kearney since 2018. “They share this unique bond of moving from home chasing these big goals at a very young age.”

For three years at Bishop Kearney, Harvey and Edwards were building their friendship while developing as young elite hockey players. Sometimes that meant walking to nearby Starbucks or Chipotle. Or pulling pranks on their teammates.

“Those two are very light-hearted and so funny,” said Coen. “They’re always looking for a laugh or being goofy.”

On the ice, though, Edwards and Harvey were special talents and already dominating their age group. They’d train every day together in the gym, on the ice and in the school’s stick handling and shooting room. All those early reps laid the groundwork for Harvey’s now lethal curl-and-drag from the blue line, and Edwards’ shot that made her one of the best goal scorers in the NCAA.

According to Coen, Edwards and Harvey’s work ethic helped shape the culture of a young program that has since become one of the key feeders into college hockey and now the PWHL.

Since it launched in 2016, the Bishop Kearney girls hockey program has sent 100 players to NCAA Division I programs, including Slovakian teen phenom Nela Lopušanová. Four alumni currently play in the PWHL, headlined by 2025 second-overall pick and Olympic gold medalist Haley Winn. Ten BK alums have declared for the 2026 draft, including Harvey, Edwards and Kirsten Simms, who is also projected to be a first-round pick.

“They had these big dreams and they just took the opportunity and ran with it,” said Coen. “They set the standard at BK. I don’t even think they know that, but it all started with those two.”

Over her four-year career at Bishop Kearney, Harvey scored 370 points in 254 games and developed into one of the very best offensive defenders in North America. She played on the American under-18 team in back-to-back seasons, winning a gold medal in 2020 as a top-three player on the team. By the time she was 18 years old, Harvey graduated to the senior women’s national team that won a silver medal at the 2021 Women’s World Championships.

Edwards’ own ascension was swift and undeniable. First, there was a growth spurt, where she went from 5-6 to around 5-10 between eighth and ninth grade. Her first tournament with USA Hockey, the 2022 U18 women’s worlds, came shortly after. And Edwards was a star, winning MVP and leading the tournament in goals.

In a bit of good luck, Harvey, who should have been a freshman at Wisconsin, took that season off to compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics as a teenager, which meant the two best friends were able to start their college careers together.

At Wisconsin, they each established themselves as two of the biggest stars in college hockey, winning a national championship as freshmen, and as key building blocks for Team USA.

Edwards made her debut in November 2023, becoming the first Black woman to play for the U.S. senior women’s national team at the Canada-USA Rivalry Series. By then, Edwards had grown to 6-1 and came armed with an elite offensive toolkit.

None of that meant Edwards was a lock to make the upcoming women’s worlds roster, though. And on the final day before the team was to be named, her father Robert didn’t know what to expect.

Harvey, however, was confident and assured her friend’s parents: “Laila is going to make this team.”

“She was so enthusiastic and just behind Laila,” said Robert. “That has always stood out to me.”

As Harvey predicted, Edwards was named to the U.S. national team for 2024 women’s worlds in Utica, N.Y., and they went from best friends and college teammates to representing Team USA together on the international stage.

For the last two years, they’ve lived together at an apartment in Madison, conveniently close to LaBahn Arena, which is home to the Badgers women’s hockey team. They took a minimalist approach to designing the space with just three items on the walls: an Edwards jersey, a Harvey jersey and an Ice Spice poster.

“They had terrible style,” said David Harvey. “It was lacking some stuff, but it kind of fit their personality, like, ‘We sleep here, we live here and that’s good enough for us.’”

The apartment served as a great home base. Almost every day, they’d go to practice and training with the top-ranked Badgers, split up for class, and meet back up at home, where they’d cook, watch movies and make the TikTok videos that have made them even more popular with women’s hockey fans. Edwards and Harvey have over 200,000 combined followers on the app, where they mostly post dancing videos or film an “outfit of the day.”

Edwards said it’s Harvey who comes up with the best ideas. Harvey, who took a page out of the Marie-Philip Poulin book of humble, disagrees.

“Your algorithm is just better,” Edwards argued with her friend. “Mine is all Billie Eilish and Michael Jackson edits.”

“She has great ideas,” Harvey contends. “The dances are our go-to videos. We just like to have fun together.”

In their senior year, Harvey and Edwards took a bit of a side quest by fostering two animals, first a cat and then a rabbit. That meant daily calls home to Harvey’s mom, Martha, with questions like: What do rabbits eat? And what are these pellets on the ground?

The answer, of course, was lettuce and “that would be poop.” (The cat and rabbit were both eventually adopted to their forever homes.)

“When they’re together, they’re quite the duo,” said David. “They’re just pure hearts.”

Through it all, Edwards and Harvey only continued to level up on the ice. Last season, Edwards led the NCAA in goals (35 in 41 games), was named a top-three finalist for the Patty Kazmaier Award and made an unprecedented swap from forward to defense on Team USA.

“It’s been so cool for me, watching Laila’s journey and what she’s done and the trailblazer she’s become and continues to be,” Harvey said. “It’s incredible to see how many people she’s touched along the way.”

This year, they both made the U.S. team that won gold at the Milan Olympics. Nobody had more points in the tournament than Harvey (9), who won Olympic MVP and set a record for scoring by an American defender at just 23 years old. Edwards, in her Olympic debut, scored eight points and had the primary assist on captain Hilary Knight’s clutch game-tying goal to force overtime against Canada in the championship game.

When they returned to Madison, Harvey and Edwards led the Badgers to a second consecutive NCAA championship. Harvey finished second in the nation with 1.94 points per game and had the second-most productive season by a defender ever with 64 points, behind only Hockey Hall of Fame defender Angela Ruggiero, who scored 83 points in 34 games in 2002-03.

When Harvey was officially awarded the 2026 Patty Kazmaier Award, she thanked her family, teammates and coaches, and made special mention of her “best friend Laila.”

“To my best friend Laila, thank you for everything,” she said in the speech. “It’s been quite the ride with you. I’ll miss your constant friendship and the daily connection we share both on and off ice.”

Harvey and Edwards have spent the last couple months since their college careers ended preparing for the next phase of their lives, and spending as much time together as possible.

With the exposure that comes from winning an Olympic gold medal with a record 5.3 million people watching in the U.S., there’s been a flurry of major opportunities for Edwards and Harvey. They appeared at the espnW summit, which was packed with stars like the WNBA’s Breanna Stewart. They filmed an episode of “Celebrity Family Feud” and went to the Coachella music festival in California, where Edwards’ favorite artist (Billie Eilish) made an appearance.

“We’ve been doing some really cool things outside of hockey with the downtime we’re finally getting,” Edwards said.

As seniors, however, they had to work out in their condo gym so the next year’s team of Badgers can start their own preparations.

They’d bring a speaker into the gym and blast music, including what Harvey called a “big booty mix” on YouTube, which earned rave reviews from other tenants in the building.

“They’re actually good,” Harvey swore. “One guy took his headphones out once and was like, ‘This is fire.’”

After graduating last month, though, both Harvey and Edwards returned home, to New Hampshire and Cleveland, respectively, for the summer. They will meet again at the PWHL Draft in Detroit and then return to their apartment in July to officially move out. Soon, the jerseys on the walls and the pictures on the fridge will need to come down.

But first, on Wednesday night, they’ll find out exactly where they will land.

“All the experiences we’ve had on both the national team, Olympic team and then University of Wisconsin, to be able to do it alongside Laila has just been so special,” Harvey said. “This chapter might be closing, but we’re excited to write whatever’s next.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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