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With the start of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, ice hockey will be a major focus, as NHL players return to the competition for the first time since 2014 and the recently launched PWHL strengthening the women’s competition.
But for USA Hockey, the sport’s national governing body, the spotlight is about more than medals. It’s an opportunity to inspire the next generation of players and grow the sport safely and sustainably. Few people get a better seat to all of that than USA Hockey chief financial officer Kelly Mahncke.
Since joining the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based organization in January 2019, Mahncke’s role has extended beyond traditional finance. Like many CFOs today, she has become deeply involved in technology strategy, digital transformation, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Her experience reflects this broader evolution of the CFO role, but with an interesting twist: USA Hockey is a nonprofit with 1.2 million members. Its mission is rooted in community and safety as much as in financial performance.
Mahncke said that when she arrived at the organization, it was pursuing an ambitious but ultimately unsustainable strategy: building a mass email system, CRM, project management software and other proprietary technology systems in-house, with the goal of eventually monetizing them.
