TRUE PASSION
Suisham’s time with the Steelers reconnected him with hockey
Like a lot of kids growing up in Ontario, Shaun Suisham harbored dreams of a pro hockey career. That sport was — and years later still is — his true passion. But Suisham had a gift for booting footballs, tiptoeing into the American game when an uncle asked him to moonlight as the kicker for his high school team.
He was midway through his senior year, and sidelined from hockey after he got hurt in an on-ice scrap, when he got a scholarship offer that changed his life.
“[Playing football] was not something that I had dreamt of, but it was a great opportunity. When I got to Bowling Green, I showed up without kicking cleats. I showed up with a broken hand from a fight. I had just turned 18 when I came to the U.S.,” he said with a laugh. “And that was the start of my football career.”
And what a career it was. After a successful stint at Bowling Green, Suisham spent a decade in the NFL. He split the uprights 211 times, retiring in 2016 with a field goal success rate of 84.1%. That ranks 27th in NFL history. His football days abruptly ended when he tore up his knee while playing for the Steelers.
It was that painful, unfortunate injury that put Suisham on the path that recently saw him be named the girls hockey director for the Pens Elite youth program.
This week, he was down in Tampa, Fla., coaching the girls at Tier I nationals.“I have such a passion for it,” Suisham said. “I love these girls. I love this job.”
Suisham started out as a figure skater at age 4. “The following year, thankfully Mom and Dad gave me a hockey stick,” he said. He played up until he left for college. He didn’t regularly lace up his skates again until he was kicking for the Steelers and started to play with Penguins employees at PPG Paints Arena.
“When I came to Pittsburgh, the Penguins were fantastic to me,” Suisham said. “And I started going out to the staff skates on game day. That started about 10 years ago. Once I started to get back on the ice, I checked in with Kevin Colbert and Mike Tomlin and said, ‘Are you guys OK with this?’ They were all for it.”
He suffered a torn ACL in the 2015 preseason. His knee was never the same after he was injured covering a kickoff. But there was one activity he could still comfortably do — skate. He called being able to play hockey “the greatest gift.”
“After my NFL career ended, I jumped straight back into hockey,” Suisham said.
Suisham started to play beer league in Pittsburgh, where his family planted its roots, and helped coach little kids. His two daughters got into the game, too.
“They love hockey, and Pittsburgh is an unbelievable place, in large part due to the support of the Pittsburgh Penguins. There aren’t a lot of places in the entire country like Pittsburgh,” he said. “It’s a big part of the reason that we stayed.”
But Suisham and his wife also saw ways they could improve that experience.
He remembers taking his girls at Baierl Ice Complex in Warrendale back in the day. At that time, there was no dressing room that was exclusively for female players, so they had to put their gear on in a bathroom or the referees’ room.
“I was like, ‘This sucks. It’s not the experience that I had as a boy,’ ” he recalled.
So Suisham said they worked with Teammates for Kids, a charity organized by Garth Brooks, to have a girlsonly dressing room installed at Baierl Ice Complex.
“That was the beginning,” he said. “Then it dug a little deeper with Pens Elite.”
The Pens Elite program, based out of UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, had only a part-time program for girls when Suisham first started working there formally.
During the past six years, during which he has exclusively coached girls, the Pens Elite program has evolved to the point where there are seven girls teams, some of which travel to premier tournaments like the one that Suisham was coaching at this week. Pens Elite has put some girls on track to earn NCAA scholarships.
“We wanted to create the greatest experience for our female hockey players,” Suisham said. “And then watching it happen in real time, it’s really exciting.”
Suisham, 42, laughed when told the storyline of a former NFL player who became a girls hockey coach sounded like something out of a Disney movie. He feels blessed that everything played out this way, helping him reconnect with his “first love.”
“The sport has given so much to me,” he said. “And I know I can help us to continue to grow in our pursuit of creating the greatest girls hockey experience in North America. I’m really excited about what we have coming up.”