Former NCAA DI netminder, and current hockey content creator Connie Craig has used hockey, and her hilarious videos to get through challenges in life. She also wants to bring that joy to others.
In 2022, after the global pandemic ended, Connie Craig, former Quinnipiac goaltender, decided to order new hockey pads for her upcoming beer league season. She had just begun creating videos of herself in the net for her couple-of-hundred followers. She was starting to fall back in love with ice hockey after a long journey. Then her mom was taken to the hospital with a life-threatening illness. Craig was unsure what to do or how to proceed. Then the pads got delivered, and her perspective changed.
“I realized I don’t want to be a negative person. I don’t want to be grumpy. There’s all this bad stuff that’s happened to me. There’s bad stuff that happens to everybody; let’s be honest, bad things happen. I thought, ‘I want to start making videos again’.”
Craig played just one season as the goaltender on the Quinnipiac University’s women’s hockey team. She started in net her freshman year, recording a .911 save percentage over 32 games. That season was the winningest season up till then for the team. Now, 20 years after she played collegiate hockey, she is going viral with videos of her mic’d up in net in her ‘beer league games’. It has been a crazy journey for Craig to get to where she is today.
It was clear collegiate hockey wasn’t the path Craig wanted for herself, but 20 years later she figured out what was.
“I was looking at my future and where I wanted to end up. It was a hard decision, but I made these decisions for my life.” Craig said upon reflection of her decision to step away from collegiate ice hockey.
She also made this decision based on injuries she had dealt with during her time at Quinnipiac.
“I actually tore my MCL very early in the season, and I played on it the whole year. I decided that my body and my health were more important. I kept thinking, ‘where is this going in the future?’” she said.
After one year in college, Craig decided to move back to Canada to pursue a degree in science.
Craig continued to love hockey, and said that if she had to make the decision today, her path may have differed.
“This is a long time ago,” Craig said. “There wasn’t really anywhere after NCAA for a woman to go playing hockey. If the PWHL, existed like it does today, then it might have changed my mind and played longer at Quinnipiac.”
She didn’t stop playing hockey however, she continued to play with the Strathmore Rockies, a Western Women’s Hockey League team.
Craig enjoyed her time with the team, however she did recognize the flaws.
“You weren’t paid to play, you were paying to play. They tried to get sponsors to cover some travel, but for the most part we were paying for all that pretty much out of our own pockets,” she said.
Eventually Craig decided to focus on her career, and began a full time job after graduating from the University of Calgary with a geology degree.
During this time she continued to play hockey in “pretty high level beer leagues,” but never lost her passion for playing.