The Graeme Roustan Show: Pat Kelleher In 2025

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including USA Hockey executive director Pat Kelleher.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: The one thing that jumped out at me when I was doing research for our get-together here was the growth, the numbers. They’re just, across the board, solid. Everything from boys, girls, referees – you name it. It’s above pre-pandemic numbers. Walk me through what’s happened in the last year.

PAT KELLEHER: Our job No. 1 at USA Hockey is to grow the game. All day, every day. That’s the No. 1 priority, right? We have a lot of other things that go beyond that too, but how do we introduce families to the game? We recently had a Try Hockey For Free weekend. Over 8,000 kids introduced to the game.

From an organizational perspective, we focus on how to bring people into the game, and that permeates from our national-level team and people, through our volunteer structure, to the grassroots communities where hockey is played and the people that actually do the work to grow the game. We’ve had great success doing that, great focus and partnerships with the NHL and NHLPA for learn-to-play programs that make it easier for that family to get started in hockey. And fortunately for us, we all know it’s the greatest game going. So once we get them started, we get a pretty good chance of keeping them in the game.

WGR: And you’ve got women’s hockey leading growth, really, isn’t it? Talk to me about where it’s been in the last five years, where it is today and where it’s going.

PK: Where we are going is we will go over 100,000 females registered in USA Hockey probably this year. It’s just outstanding when you go into arenas and rinks across the country, and you see girls’ teams playing and see the energy around that. And then the high-level players. I was recently – we had a selection camp for our U-18 women’s program for their world championship. We had, I think, the 30 best under-18 girls in our country on the ice, and it was incredible. The skill level. The passion. The commitment. It was really fun to just watch that and see how the level continues to go (up). It’s awful hard for our selection committee to pick a final team, but it’s a good problem to have, to have that many great players.

And then just the overall numbers. We go back to – the foundation of our membership is the eight-and-under age category, and we’ve consistently been over 125,000-ish eight-and-unders, and of that, we’ll be closing in on 40,000 girls in that age category.

WGR: Being that you are now the No. 1 producer of hockey players in the world, do you feel more pressure to have more programs for sled hockey, for women’s hockey, for every type of hockey that there’s out there?

PK: Yeah, we talk a lot about being a full-service organization. So again, from Try Hockey for Free for a kid that’s never been on skates before to a learn-to-play program, through all of our programs. We have a hand in a lot of things.

The best part of that is it drives us to continue to be better in all of those areas, and we continue to look for ways to be better in all those areas, and I think para sled hockey is a great example. If you go back 10 or 15 years, we had some great people and players in our programs. Now you look at it, and we have a generation of players that grew up in sleds. Before, we had a lot of veterans, wounded warriors, that would come back and play sled hockey that may not have grown up with hockey – which is another fantastic story. But now, we have a development model that supports our sled hockey teams and programs, and it’s similar in other aspects of disabled sport. We have deaf programs. We have blind programs. We have special hockey. We try and be as inclusive as we can in our sport, and it’s certainly paid off for us to have that depth of programs and the depth of people that we have involved.

For this and more interviews with a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.