Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics – Preview – Livigno, Italy – February 2, 2026 General view of the Olympic rings ahead of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.
Marko Djurica | Reuters
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.
“We’re not a technology company,” she said. “It just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
She knew she needed to pivot the organization, so she put in play a comprehensive reset of its IT strategy. That included what Mahncke calls a “lift and shift” of decades’ worth of data, dating back to the early 1990s, into the cloud to ensure redundancy and resilience. It also meant confronting years of accumulated technical debt and moving away from custom-built systems toward best-in-class SaaS solutions wherever possible.
The changes weren’t just technical. Mahncke helped to rebuild the IT function, formed an IT subcommittee with USA Hockey board volunteers, and focused on getting “the right people on the bus with the right skill sets,” she said. Her timing, she noted, was “lucky” since the groundwork was laid before the pandemic shut down in-person sporting events and forced the organization into survival mode.
Today, that digital foundation is enabling USA Hockey’s next phase: using analytics and AI to drive better decisions across its business. Mahncke said the first step in that process was visibility into and understanding of what data the organization had and how it connected across all its systems. “We needed to walk before we ran,” she said.
USA Hockey memberships, required for players, coaches, officials, and volunteers participating in sanctioned leagues, tournaments, and events — and which accounts for roughly 65% of the organization’s revenue — was a natural starting point. With clearer data, Mahncke said the finance team is able to ask more strategic questions. “Now they can say, ‘What is the lifetime value of a member? What does it cost to acquire and retain players, coaches, and officials? What happens to cash flow if more members renew earlier in the season?'” she said.
AI as a tool for player safety
Abbey Murphy, No. 37 of Team United States, looks on during training on day minus three of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena on February 03, 2026 in Milan, Italy.
Bruce Bennett | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
One of the more interesting applications of data and AI at USA Hockey happens outside traditional finance. The organization operates a captive insurance company that provides player accident coverage for members participating in sanctioned events. In the past, claims data offered little more than cost.
Mahncke said that’s changing. By digitizing claims and collecting richer data, such as what period in the game an injury occurred, where on the ice it happened, what body part was injured, and whether a penalty was involved, USA Hockey can now analyze injury patterns in far greater detail. Over time, Mahncke said AI-driven analytics could reveal trends by age, period of play, or type of injury, and feed those insights back to coaches, officials, and safety committees.
“If you prevent even one injury,” Mahncke said, “it means the world to that person and their family.”
Longer term, she said, that same data could be shared with equipment manufacturers to create safer helmet and pad designs, for instance.
Mahncke said she meets with the IT team twice a week and works closely with a dedicated project manager who serves as a bridge between technology and the rest of the business. Current priorities include consolidating event management into a SaaS platform, advancing analytics and AI initiatives, and rebuilding a long-neglected registry portal that must accommodate complex, hockey-specific business rules.
The organization is taking what she calls a “measured approach” to AI internally. With employees ranging from early-career hires to veterans with more than 30 years at the nonprofit, Mahncke has prioritized establishing privacy and AI policies before encouraging broader experimentation through generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot.
With the world watching the Olympics over the next few weeks, Mahncke said such outsized visibility is only a plus for ice hockey, inspiring kids and grown-ups alike who might never have considered the sport.
Growing the game, she explained, means both retaining the core membership as well as opening the door to new participants across ages, backgrounds, and communities, while making the sport as safe as possible.
“So many kids watch these games and at some point they think ‘I’m going to play in the NHL’ or ‘I’m going to play hockey in the Olympics,'” Mahncke said. “That helps grow our game because if you can see it, you can do it.”
Disclosure: CNBC parent Versant is carrying NBC Sports-produced Olympic coverage on its networks, including USA Network and CNBC.