Across the ice, two women sat huddled against the cold, wearing red-and-white Canada mittens and tracking the movements of the near-certain 2018 Korean Olympic team member Mike Swift, who was centering High 1’s top line. The women were Swift’s mother and aunt, visiting from rural Ontario, Canada, where Swift was reared.

Swift’s mother, Darlene, was asked when her son last played a competitive game in front of so few people. “I don’t think he ever has,” she said.

Swift, 29, is a 5-foot-9 center with a sting, quick to throw a check. His physical style of play has no translation in Korea, where hard hits remain a largely foreign concept. Even if the body is willing, Korean players said, the mind is inclined to think twice because of an age-based team hierarchy that frowns on a younger player checking an elder. The North Americans have heard stories of a Korean forced to pay a postgame visit to the opponents’ dressing room to apologize for a crushing hit delivered to an older player.

The hits are less likely to come from hips than sticks, which are sometimes wielded like swords. Swift said his body had not taken a beating in the Asia League, but his face had. He smiled to reveal a few missing front teeth.

Sarah Murray, the Canadian-born women’s coach who won two national titles playing at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, said communication posed her biggest challenge.

“Sometimes players look scared when I talk to them,” said Murray, whose father, Andy, coached in the N.H.L. “There’s so much I want to say to them, and I do want to have a very personal relationship with my players. Sometimes it’s hard to say with someone else saying it for you.”

Murray confronted one cultural barrier that was easier to surmount. When she first arrived in Korea, she was taken aback to see that her players did not know how to hop over the boards from the bench onto the ice. “They always used the door,” she said. “They were literally running into each other coming off and going on.”

For the men and the women, progress has come slowly, yet expectations will be lofty. “I love being an underdog,” Murray said. “That’s what I want at the Olympics. Nobody knows what to expect. I would love to shock people.”