First Shift: Vegas Is Betting on Tessa Janecke to Build Its Future
Written by Luke Ballard
LAS VEGAS – Tessa Janecke has spent most of her hockey career proving that the moment is never too big for her.
Now, she will face a new kind of challenge.
With the first draft pick in franchise history, the PWHL’s newest expansion team in Las Vegas selected Janecke, making the Penn State star one of the first players tied to the identity of a team that has yet to play a game.
For Janecke, the selection represents another major step in a career that started far from professional hockey. She grew up in Orangeville, Illinois, a town of roughly 800 people near the Illinois-Wisconsin border. She first stepped onto the ice at three years old and spent much of her childhood competing against older players alongside her brother, Cade.
Long before she became one of the best women’s hockey players in the country, Janecke was simply an athlete willing to compete wherever she could. Starring in softball and earning First Team All-State honors three times, Janecke helped Orangeville finish third in the Illinois Class 1A state tournament in 2021.
That competitive background followed her to hockey.
After leaving Orangeville to play for the North American Hockey Academy in Massachusetts, Janecke produced 120 points during the 2021-22 season and helped NAHA win a JWHL U19 championship. It was at Penn State where she developed from an elite prospect into a player capable of becoming the face of a professional franchise.
Janecke finished her four-year career with 201 points, the most in Penn State history. Her 89 goals and 112 assists explain why Vegas was willing to make her its first draft selection, but the bigger story is what she did while producing those numbers.
She became the 2023 CHA Rookie of the Year. She followed that with conference Player of the Year honors in 2024 and 2025. By her senior season, she wore the captain’s “C” and recorded 26 goals and 22 assists in 31 games.
Most importantly, her final year ended somewhere Penn State women’s hockey had never been before: the Frozen Four.
Janecke helped take the Nittany Lions to their first national semifinal appearance in program history. For Vegas, that matters. The expansion franchise is asking Janecke to enter another situation where there is no established history and help create one.
The expectations will be different in the PWHL. Janecke will be playing against stronger, faster and more experienced competition every night. She will also carry the distinction of being Vegas’s first draft pick, a label that naturally comes with attention every time she steps onto the ice.
But she has already shown that pressure does not have to change her game.
Janecke enters the PWHL without professional experience, but she does not enter it without experience on hockey’s biggest stages.
She has already won Olympic gold with Team USA and two World Championship gold medals. At the Milano Cortina Olympics, she recorded five assists while competing as one of only seven NCAA players selected to the American roster.
Her clearest example came before that, in the 2025 World Championship final against Canada. With a gold medal on the line, Janecke scored the game-winning goal in Team USA’s 4-3 victory. That moment tells Vegas more about its first draft pick than another line on an awards list could. Janecke has already experienced the pressure of representing her country, playing for championships and being expected to produce against elite competition. The PWHL will present a new challenge, but playing meaningful hockey will not be new to her.
That should excite Vegas fans.
An expansion franchise needs players who can give supporters a reason to care before traditions and rivalries have time to develop. Janecke has the chance to become one of those players from the beginning.
Vegas is placing considerable faith in that possibility. The franchise’s decision to move Hilary Knight, one of the most accomplished players in women’s hockey history and Janecke’s former Team USA teammate, in exchange for the third-overall pick that became Janecke was more than simply a move to acquire another draft selection. It showed that Vegas was willing to prioritize the future of its franchise, believing that Janecke could become an important part of that future.
Knight brought years of professional and international experience, leadership and name recognition to the table. Moving a player of her stature for a draft pick created a significant opportunity, and an equally significant expectation, for the player Vegas chose with that pick.
For Janecke, that means the pressure is not simply to become a successful professional player. She now has the opportunity to grow into one of the players who helps define what hockey in Las Vegas can become.
She will at least have one familiar face with her.
Longtime Penn State teammate Kendall Butze will also join Vegas after being selected 49th overall in the 2026 PWHL Draft. After helping Penn State reach new heights together, the two will enter another program trying to establish itself from scratch.
For Janecke, the surroundings have changed dramatically from where her career began. She has gone from a town of roughly 800 people to Penn State, Team USA, Olympic gold and now professional hockey in Las Vegas.
The statistics explain why she earned the opportunity.
Now, Janecke has the chance to show Vegas why the franchise believed she could be more than its first draft pick. She could become one of the players who gives a new team its identity, gives its fans a player to believe in and helps establish the standard for everything that comes next.
