How the Hughes hockey family stays grounded

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – On a recent morning in early July, uber NHL prospect Jack Hughes was on the ice at the Kings’ training facility, at an orientation camp hosted by CAA, the agency that currently advises the family. Weeks earlier, Jack’s older brother, Quinn Hughes, was taken seventh in the NHL draft by the Vancouver Canucks and the defenseman is mulling his future – whether to turn pro or return to the University of Michigan for his sophomore season.

The focus now shifts to Jack, the middle of three sons of Jim and Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who is projected to go first in the 2019 NHL draft.

The camp in El Segundo was a chance to mix hockey with a bit of Hollywood before it becomes serious again with the World Junior Summer Showcase starting July 28 in Kamloops, British Columbia. Jack relished the chance to get some beach time and try his hand at volleyball on the sand.

“First of all, the weather in California is unreal,” Jack said in an interview with The Athletic. “The ocean, we don’t have that in Michigan or Toronto. Anytime you get the chance to come out here and learn new things, it’s really good. I love watching basketball, so I’d love to meet a guy like LeBron [James].  I love watching him.”

Hockey’s never-ending season spills into summer nowadays, which is why Jim Hughes was in Southern California with Jack, while Ellen stayed behind in the East with their youngest son Luke. This week, they’ve been watching Luke at an under-15 camp in Amherst, N.Y.

Throughout the generations, hockey has had a long history of brothers who’ve made their marks at the NHL level – everyone from the Hulls and Howes to the Sutters and Staals. But the Hughes family looks as if they will be the first, where deep hockey blood lines run on both parental sides.

Dad Jim played college hockey at Providence and eventually coached all over North America before moving to Toronto, where he became director of player development for the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2009-10 to 2015. Since 2016, he has been CAA’s  director of player development.

Mom Ellen was a pioneering presence in women’s hockey, a three-sport athlete at the University of New Hampshire in hockey, soccer and lacrosse. She played for the United States in the women’s World Hockey Championships in 1992 in Finland, on a team with Cammi Granato and against the trailblazing Canadian goaltender Manon Rheaume.

Two of their three sons – Quinn and Jack – were born in Orlando when Jim was an assistant coach with the IHL’s Solar Bears, but mostly the boys were raised in Mississauga, Ontario which is also where they are based this summer when not attending hockey camps.

These days, at the highest development end, if it doesn’t exactly take a village to raise a brood of hockey players, it does require a full-on family commitment – which is what Jim and Ellen have made to support their children’s puck dreams.

The two each had their own careers, Jim in coaching, Ellen in broadcasting soccer and hockey on U.S. television. Among other assignments, Ellen was a sideline reporter for ESPN at the 1999 Women’s World Cup of soccer in the United States, a team that featured Brandi Chastain and Mia Hamm, two players that she’d played with and against at different development camps along the way.

The Hughes family reached a crossroads around 2009, after Jim stopped coaching and transitioned into player development with the Maple Leafs.

At that point, they had a decision to make: Collectively, what could they do to best support their boys as they moved up the ladder. In the end, they determined that Ellen would put her broadcasting career on hold.

“By then, Jimmy was in Toronto,” explained Ellen, in an interview with The Athletic. “I was on the air with the Big Ten network soccer package, which was awesome. When he was still in coaching it was great. I could look at his schedule and pick the gigs I wanted. Once he got into player development, it was much tougher. We were throwing kids here, throwing kids there.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘With three kids trying to play sports, it was too much.’ Especially living in Toronto, where we had no family. That was the best decision we made for our kids as athletes.”

But even though Ellen long ago stepped away from her broadcasting career, her investigative instincts frequently bubble to the surface with the boys.

“It’s the reporter in me,” she said. “It’s like I have a thousand questions for them. They’re like, ‘All right mom. You get 10 questions. That’s it.’ The thing is, at dinner, it was always hockey. I’d say, ‘No hockey talk at dinner tonight – and then the place was silent.’

“It’s gotten better over the years. They want to talk about other sports now. They’re basketball fans. But when they were little kids, all they wanted to talk about was hockey – and this guy or that guy. I always tried to bring it to other things and make them as well rounded as they could be.”

Mom’s career playing highlights have been preserved in a box of old video tapes; and Jack will admit, he hasn’t watched them yet.

“But I’ve heard she was pretty good,” he said. “She was taking us to the rink, the outdoor rinks, and teaching us how to skate. She really helped us grow our passion, driving us around everywhere, a full car. I’m super thankful.”

Once settled in Toronto, the Hughes family was fully immersed in the hockey life – and for about three weeks, acted as a billet family for William Nylander. Jack gave up his room to Nylander until Nylander could find a more permanent residence.

“Willie is such a good person and such a good guy,” said Jack. “He never went out. He just went to work. I mean, William Nylander at our house. It was sick. It was unreal.”

Said Jim, “It was unreal because, as Jack says, he’s a really good human being. His habits, sleeping and eating and preparation and details, he was a role model for our kids and they were watching him very, very closely. They were at a young age where they could almost say: ‘I want to be like him’– and it wasn’t just the hockey part.

“He was just a cool kid and an authentically nice person. He would say, ‘Jack we’re going to go golfing or we’re going to the basement and we’re going to play ping pong.’”

They played for hours, William with his left hand, Jack with his right, and William would come out on top.

In all, Jack has spent most of his life living in Canada, though he considers himself an American through and through.

“I always tell people I’m really proud to be an American growing up in Toronto,” he said. “All my good friends are Canadians. Toronto is a special place in my heart because I lived there for so many years. It’s a good spot and I’m really thankful for what Toronto gave me.”

What sets Jack Hughes apart from the rest of the projected 2019 NHL draft class is an all-around skill set that TSN’s director of scouting Craig Button positively raves about.

“He has some different elements of players,” said Button, a former Calgary Flames’ general manager. “He has a Paul Kariya like quality in his skating in that he can gain advantages with speed, quickness, agility, edge work and change of pace and keep opponents on their heels. He has an imagination and creativity like Wayne Gretzky and is elusive in a very similar manner. He has great puck skills like Patrick Kane and can make all manner of plays with the puck. And he’s damn exciting like Guy Lafleur – my idol growing up – in that when he jumps on the ice, you can feel something special can happen.”

Jack Hughes out here foolin' everyone pic.twitter.com/xXyog2HLpD

— USHL (@USHL) March 16, 2018

Jack Hughes was in the seats at the American Airlines Center in Dallas – his mom spent much of her childhood in Dallas – last month, when Quinn was picked by the Canucks. It gave him a glimpse into what the future may hold for him, though the Hughes family has been watching the NHL drafts on TV for a long time.

“We watched all of them, I think, dating back to [Taylor] Hall,” said Jack. “That’s when we really locked in. Of course, [Drew] Doughty/[Steven] Stamkos, you see that when you’re still young back then [in 2008]. But when Hall and [Tyler] Seguin came around that’s when we really started to get it. We got to go to the draft with my dad in New Jersey when [Nathan] MacKinnon went first overall. It was really cool. You just dream about that day.”

Said Jim Hughes, “We lived in Toronto when Jack was playing with the [Mississauga] Rebels and the Marlies and we knew all these kids. Jack used to watch Ryan Strome. He used to watch [Connor] McDavid on Friday nights and [Josh] Ho-Sang.”

Added Jack, “To see a lot of those guys come up and get drafted, it’s pretty cool. Knowing you watched them back in the [GTHL] or the OHL and to know that they came from the same roots you did is pretty cool.”

Next year’s draft is in Vancouver, and with Quinn in the Canucks’ organization, Jack will likely get a warm reception.

“Of course [the draft] is in the back of your mind,” said Jack, who turned 17 on May 14. “You play for the NHL, and the love of the game. You dream about moments like that. You live it day in and day out. You try to get better, so you can have fun when you get to the draft.”

Coming from a hockey family, Jack Hughes knows that there’s still a long way to go – from being a world-class prospect to establishing himself as an NHL player, and hopefully one day, an NHL star. This past season, he had a eye-catching 116 points for the USA National Team Development Program and is returning to the program.

In the past 12 months, Hughes said he has added two inches of height, 10 to 15 pounds of weight and is listed at 5-foot-10, 161 pounds. He’s also made gains on the cerebral side of the game.

“The more and more hockey I watch, my brain kind of expands a little bit,” said Jack. “Just getting more thoughts on the game, I’ve been growing too.  I feel like I have the skills, and the skating, but now that I’ve put on weight and put some height on, my game really popped then.”

And while Jack Hughes plays forward, his siblings are both defensemen. According to Jim, “I still think Luke can be as good as Quinn. Luke is our ’03 [born]. He’s got so many similar traits to Quintin at the same age. Quinn can be a forward the way he skates. All three of them are very, very competitive – probably in many areas of their life. So that’s probably one of the biggest similarities I see, their competitive natures.”

At last month’s draft in Dallas, Ellen Hughes got a helping hand from Chantal Tkachuk, whose son Brady went fourth to the Ottawa Senators, exactly two years after Matthew Tkachuk went sixth to the Calgary Flames.

The families forged a friendship when Brady and Quinn were in the NTDP in Michigan together, and Ellen said she told Chantal she needed to come to Vancouver next year to act as part of her support group.

Coaching hockey almost came naturally to Ellen, long before the boys were born – Quinn in 1999, Jack in 2001 and Luke in 2003. Women’s hockey was not yet an Olympic sport in 1994 when Ellen was in her prime, but she spent time in Norway before and during the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics to promote the sport on the female side.

“They were hoping women’s hockey was going to be sanctioned in the ‘94 Olympics and it wasn’t, so the Norwegian ice hockey federation had all this extra funding so they asked USA Hockey for an ambassador to go over and help grow the women’s game,” she said. “We had played in the ’92 World Championships and I was one of the older people and they offered me that opportunity to go over and work with the Norwegian ice hockey federation and what I did was I lived in Oslo.

“And I went around to all the little towns and taught the girls how to play. It was awesome. Since Norway was such a small country with four million people at the time, they needed all the buses during the Olympics so everyone went on holiday, so my job stopped for three weeks.”

Later, when it came to their sons, Jim and Ellen realized that learning wasn’t restricted to the boundaries of their household. The kids were eager to absorb hockey, and life lessons, from other sources.

One key figure was former Kings, New Jersey Devils and Boston Bruins coach Robbie Ftorek. Jim was an assistant on Ftorek’s staff with the Bruins and the families have spent time together in the summers in New Hampshire. Ftorek was a prep star in Massachusetts, albeit in a different era, but has a deep understanding of what it is like to be under the microscope as a teenager.

“Robbie is Mr. Everything,” Jack said. “He’ll take us on the golf course. He’ll teach us how to fish. He would do everything with us. He’s like ‘Mr. Do It All.’ He can do everything.”

Ftorek, at 66, still loves being behind the bench. Since November 2016, he has been coaching with the Norfolk Admirals of the ECHL.

“When the boys were young, Robbie would pick them up and bring them to Katie’s Kitchen in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire in the middle of the summer,” Jim said. “I loved it because I knew they were going to learn something. I knew they were going to be taught something that day. I knew they were going to become smarter, something good was going to happen to the boys.”

Jack smiled when he remembered the days on the golf course and fishing. For all of his accomplishments, he’s a humble teenager and quickly shot down the notion that he was a gifted golfer with a dash of humor.

“I said I like to golf,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t say I was good. You know sports. One day you can be unreal, the next day you can be terrible. It’s one of those sports where anything can happen.”

(Top Photo of the Hughes family provided by Ellen Hughes)