Hilary Knight on Shaping the Fleet's Culture: 'We Want This to Be A Family'

The four Olympic and 14 World Championship medals Boston Fleet captain Hilary Knight has compiled shine bright on her resume. The NCAA, CWHL, and NWHL championships she earned further amplify her penchant for success.

But with each glide on the ice during her inaugural PWHL season, the 35-year-old Knight was quietly battling a new challenge that the thrill of electric crowds and best-on-best competition could not overpower.

“Whenever you’re starting something from scratch, you need to do things a certain way to ensure its longevity,” Knight told The Ice Garden. “Obviously, being a professional sports team here in Boston, we’re going to be here for a long time and we want to be a part of that professional scene. So, it was really making sure that we cultivated a culture that, one, we were going to succeed in and, two, people wanted to be a part of, and we can also attract top-end talent.”

However, the mission did not come without a personal cost.

Much has been said about Knight’s turnaround from the inaugural season to this one. There was the lower-body injury she suffered in December 2023, which was as much a mental challenge as a physical one. There were days she couldn’t walk, she says, sometimes resorting to the pool for exercise. 

Knight admits she should’ve taken significant time off to rehab her injury. However, her feeling that she could still contribute to the team's success, combined with her excitement to finally play in the league she fought to build, outweighed that. But it didn’t make it any less challenging.

“You spend so much time on something, you feel like it’s your little baby and you’re excited that the project launched,” Knight said. “Then you have a setback, but you still want to be a part of it, you still know you can contribute. Then you’ve got all this other pressure of ‘why doesn’t she look like what she’s supposed to look like,’...and it’s tough. It was [a] really challenging year.”

The injury was part of what held her to just six goals and five assists in 24 regular-season games, followed by zero points in eight playoff games. However, the weight of building a franchise from the ground up, in a league she had sacrificed over four years of her professional career to build, was also heavy for Knight. Fleet head coach Courtney Kessel watched her captain battle it all season.

“She loves Boston, she wants to be in Boston, and takes real pride where everyone’s enjoying themselves, pushing themselves,” Kessel said. “[But] that’s heavy on your shoulders.” 

With just two days separating them in age, Kessel and Knight carried a mutual respect into the PWHL built through years of playing against each other in the Canada-USA rivalry. That respect made it relatively easy to have open conversations between the coaching staff and locker room from the beginning. However, there was a lot more that went into building the fun-loving, family-like culture that exists today within the locker room walls. The weight of that task set in for Knight at the first team meeting.

“The most critical thing when you’re starting something from scratch is to do things the right way, right?” Knight said. “To set up for success. [It was] not until we got out here and we’re having our first team meeting and you’re thinking about what you want to say, you’re thinking about what are those important points, what is our commonality of language because communication is huge. Who do we want to be, how do we want to move in this area? ... You start thinking about all these things and it becomes real and serious.”

The worries did not end there for Knight. Even once the team culture was heading in the right direction, she couldn’t help but feel personally responsible whenever there was a bump in the road.

“The first year just felt like you were drinking out of a firehouse,” Knight said. “I think everyone felt like that, whether it was the league staff and all the way down to the players…Then also, being a part of the process from day one… I wasn’t, but I felt personally responsible if anything were to go wrong, I was like ‘guys no, it’s going to be ok,’ you know, and really putting your name down as that integrity piece to be like ‘yeah, our flight was cancelled, but I promise we’re going to get there,’ that kind of thing.”

However, this past offseason served as a reset.

After rehabbing her injury, Knight trained better for the rigors of the PWHL than she did ahead of season one, taking into account the increased physicality and faster pace. Off the ice, she was able to focus on just calling up the few new players and integrating them into the culture instead of trying to bring together 26 women from across the globe. It allowed her to enter training camp with a more relaxed mindset, and she shared at preseason media day that she was ready to just have fun playing hockey again.

It’s safe to say things have worked out well for her. Knight might be the second-oldest player in the league, behind only Toronto defender Jocelyne Larocque (36), but she’s showing no signs of slowing down.

She leads the league in points with 28 in 27 games and is tied for second in goals with 15 while logging the most minutes of any forward at 595:26. She notched her first PWHL hat trick and has seven multi-point games this season. Her four game-winning goals are tied with Ottawa’s Tereza Vanišová for second in the league, behind only Montréal’s Marie-Philip Poulin. In short, Knight has been the player this season that everyone expected to see when the PWHL launched.

It’s also worked out for the Fleet’s culture, as they’ve become a team that sticks together through thick and thin.

“It’s a family,” Kessel said. “We stand up for each other, good days and bad days, and we know we’re not perfect. Sometimes we’re going to show up to the rink grumpy or whatever; life affects us. I think the most important part is that we show up for each other off the ice and on the ice every single day. I think that’s what makes us so special.”

The Fleet’s culture is perhaps best summarized by their Takeover Tour walk-ins. While other teams (with a few exceptions) stuck to a few players wearing jerseys representing that city, the Fleet headed down a different path. They all broke out fishing outfits (and unexpectedly tiny fish) in Seattle, “Bad Girl” shirts in Buffalo, and brightly colored inflatable instruments alongside a jazz band serenade in St. Louis. It didn’t matter that they were on a three-game losing streak heading into Seattle or that they had suffered a frustrating loss ahead of St. Louis. They were still determined to have fun together.

For Knight, perhaps the best proof of concept that what she wanted to build worked came last season when the team didn’t give up after a brutal stretch heading into the 2024 Worlds. They had banked just four points in the final seven games heading into the long break and sat far outside the playoff picture.

“Losing is never fun but we still kept it fun in the room,” Knight said. “We still genuinely enjoyed one another’s company and although some games we were in it and then we would just lose in the last few minutes or give up crazy goals in the first and not be able to climb out of that deficit, we just stayed the course. We had buy-in the entire time, and I think that’s what special and really speaks to the character of people that were in that room because it would have been really easy just to peel off and be like ‘yeah, I’m going to do my own thing’ but nobody did.”

At the end of the day, the Fleet still have ups and downs with on-ice results, but Knight is proud of what her team has become off the ice. She remains steadfast in her belief that a team is at its best when there’s a combination of fun, hard work, and family.

“Coaches guide us and stuff but the room has to be able to execute,” Knight said. “...We want this to be a family. Obviously professional sports is an industry of its own but when you’re here, when you’re in that room, when you’re buying in, when you’re out there skating or on the bench or in the stands, you’re buying in to this family and you want to be here. I think when you’re joking around and we keep it light, that’s when we’re going to get the best out of each other.”

The crowds are still electric in the PWHL. The competition is still through the roof. And at long last, Knight can sit back and enjoy being an elite player again.