Blue crease, grey matter
Leafs goalie Woll is a student of the game — and a classical scholar with a finance degree
Joseph Woll rarely forgets.
Whether it’s his favourite excerpt from a book about the human mind, the formula needed to solve an advanced calculus problem or the piano keys to replicate a song he heard, his memory almost never fails him. He even remembers the family doctor back home in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., who asked a seven-year-old Woll what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I said I wanted to be a hockey player in the NHL,” Woll recalls. “Then he said, ‘Oh, well what do you actually want to be? A doctor or something?’ ”
Maybe Woll could have been a doctor. He could have been many things.
Woll is a lifelong straight-As student and former valedictorian with both a finance degree and scholarathlete award from Boston College. He has an ardent interest in making music and understanding the depths of how the mind works. He’s also widely regarded as the goaltender of the future — and perhaps the now — for the Maple Leafs.
And while the 25-year-old who modelled his goaltending in part after Montreal Canadiens great Carey Price has been called a student of the game, to his core, Woll is far more than a hockey player. He always has been.
The first time Shelley Woll realized her son was “very, very bright” was when she got her two-year-old toddler a set of dinosaur flash cards and he quickly learned all of their names. From kindergarten to adolescence, he loved school, gravitating toward math and science and leaning into his competitive nature to get the best grades he could.
“He was always genuinely interested in learning, and he still is,” Shelley tells the Star. “It wasn’t just memorizing it to then scribble it down on a piece of paper. He likes to learn about lots of things: meditation, space, he loves music. He’s a lifelong learner.”
If school was Woll’s first crush, when he got his hands on a hockey stick the sport became his true love. His parents, both with accounting backgrounds and a firm belief that school always comes first, saw hockey as an opportunity for their oldest of three children to learn valuable life skills like time management and being part of a team.
Once he started to stand out on the ice while maintaining his grades, it became clear that the sport Woll had fallen in love with might be more than a training tool for the real world — it could be an avenue to pay for a really good college education.
Woll’s life changed dramatically in 2014 when, after two years of high school at Westminster Christian Academy in the St. Louis, Mo., area, he moved on his own to Ann Arbor, Mich. Just a month after his 16th birthday, Woll had a new home with a new family, a new school and was a new driver trying to navigate an unfamiliar city.
He was joining USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program, where Auston Matthews and many of the top American players in the game today refined their craft before being drafted to the NHL.
With school a focal point in the Woll household, taking him out of Westminster wasn’t a decision made lightly. But the NTDP offered a unique opportunity to chase his NHL dream while keeping education as a priority.
In Michigan, 44 of the country’s elite hockey players in the under-17
and under-18 age groups were integrated with 1,800 other students at Pioneer High School. They also provided daily group study sessions and taught life skills like safe driving and mental health awareness.
While everything in Woll’s life was rapidly changing, his studies never suffered.
“I pulled out his records and he was a straight-As kid the whole time he was with us, and he had all As the whole time he was at Westminster,” says Lisa Vollmers, director of student-athlete services with the national program. “He was spot on with regard to his academics, never shied away from taking the more difficult classes; he’s got honours classes on his transcripts, accelerated classes. He took AP calculus as a senior, straight As, and that’s in addition to (playing in) three European tournaments and missing roughly nine weeks of school.”
It all sounds so daunting. Woll pauses when that idea is presented to him, then gives a shy smile. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” he says.
Through it all, Woll had two families supporting him. Parents Shelley and Bob, sister Emma and brother Michael were always a phone call away in Missouri. And his billet family — Christine and Jim and sons Aidan and Conleth — valued education as much as the Wolls. They valued Joseph, too. “He’s that kind of person who makes it easy to just be family with him,” Christine says.
Months after he finished high school, and before his Boston College debut, the Leafs selected Woll in the third round of the 2016 draft in Buffalo. Both families were there to see it.
In all the chaos of his studies and burgeoning hockey career, Woll found peace when seated in front of a piano. “One of my favourite things about music is you can express emotion and feel something deeper,” he says. “I feel like the piano has that ability.”
When Woll was 13 years old, Shelley welcomed a music teacher into their home to provide weekly lessons on the family’s grand piano. They didn’t go according to plan.
“She said, ‘Um, he plays by ear. I’m not kidding. He doesn’t read music.’ ” Shelley says. It was a skill his great-grandmother used to play music in silent films. “Joseph learns the song after hearing it.”
The lessons didn’t last long. Instead, Woll learned songs by memorizing how they sound. In the early days he played “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, a slew of Coldplay hits and “Canon in D,” the famous composition by Johann Pachelbel which he played at his first recital not long after those lessons began.
Woll’s relationship with music has grown with him. In Ann Arbor, his hockey coach made a personal plea to the Stead family that they had the perfect billet home for Woll, in part because they had a piano. Christine would often find him quietly playing before games.
“Having a piano was important to him, I think it was how he would calm himself and focus,” she says.
As a member of the Leafs, Woll’s piano skills have shone on a number of occasions. He performed “Interstellar” by Hans Zimmer at a team gala in the NHL Bubble in 2020 and last summer he teamed up with a student and teacher at Holland Bloorview, a children’s rehabilitation hospital in Toronto, to perform in his first piano recital since he was younger.
“I’d say piano and hockey are two very different things in my life,” Woll says. “Hockey is about battling, fighting. Music is a whole different avenue of pure creative expression. I feel very deeply when I make music. I feel my heart. It’s special.”
When a high-ankle sprain in December kept him out of game action for 85 long days, Woll turned to the safety blanket he has always had away from the game: reading, meditating, making music.
He’s still learning, though, about mindfulness, music production and how they can be a part of his long-term future after what he hopes is a long and successful hockey career.
When that day eventually comes, he’ll have to update his active LinkedIn page which highlights his leadership skills, his college education and his full-time job as a professional athlete for MLSE.
“I forgot that account is still up, to be honest,” Woll says with a laugh. “But I do think it’s a useful platform, so maybe I should get it back up and running, make some connections.”
Nobody said his memory was perfect.