Wickenheiser is a celebrity in her own right, of course, but “doing her part” has been considerably more involved than making a cameo on a saccharine Youtube cover of “Imagine” or extending the obligatory warm and fuzzies to healthcare workers. For someone like Wickenheiser, that wouldn’t be enough. The combination of her platform as an athlete and her experience as a doctor-in-training has led her into a role where she can do much, much more.  

Wickenheiser retired from professional hockey in 2017 after a 23-year career that included 379 points (the most in the history of women’s hockey), 13 world championship medals, and five Olympic medals, four of which were gold. All while finishing a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology and a masters degree during which there was a brief stint in Finland where she made history as the first woman to play professional hockey in a non-goaltending role on a men's team. Often overlooked is the fact that until 2000, she was a two-sport athlete. She even competed in the 2000 Olympics as a softball player where she led the Candian team in batting average, which sort of makes her the Canadian Bo Jackson, if Bo Jackson decided that after he retired he would go to medical school.

“(When) I started med school I thought I was done with hockey,” Wickenheiser told GLORY. “But a couple months in, I got a call from (Toronto Maple Leafs GM) Kyle Dubas who asked me, ‘What about working for the Leafs?’ And I said, ‘Well, I've already started medicine and I'd like to finish it.’ So we made a deal that I could continue to go to med school and work for the Leafs at the same time.”

She is now the assistant director of player development for the team. Social distancing has presented new roadblocks, but, as with most other challenges, they haven’t stopped her. “We're still doing hockey. We're doing development and we're looking at video and we're doing all sorts of things to keep helping the players even though we're not with the players full time,” she said.

“Medicine is far more unforgiving than the Leafs have been”

Juggling hockey and medicine hasn’t been easy. Prior to the pandemic, it meant trips between Calgary where she’s doing her medical training and Toronto four to six times every month. Mornings in Toronto were often spent heading to the rink, either with the Marlies or the Leafs. Her and other staff would construct a game plan for the day and then get on the ice with the players to work on those areas of improvement. Leaving the rink, she’d head to the hospital to start her shift in the emergency room. Hockey by day, hospital by night. (This is to say nothing of her ordinary personal commitments. She has a son in university, and, somewhere in between all the rest of this, she still finds time to workout everyday in her home gym.) 

“Medicine is far more unforgiving than the Leafs have been,” she said, a statement that is bound to trigger a flicker of recognition in those who have run the gauntlet of medical training. 

It seems difficult to believe she would want it any other way. “I just have always loved medicine. I've always loved helping people,” she said. She has been thinking about her next step after hockey from a very early point in her career. Part of it was practical. Professional female athletes don’t make millions of dollars a year, she pointed out. Her parents, who were both teachers, also emphasized the importance of education. But there was also a deeper force animating her. Medicine is often viewed less as a job than a calling and for Wickenheiser it was no different.

In a piece for NHL.com, she told writer Mike Zeisberger that when she was nine years old, a friend of hers in their hometown of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan ended up in the hospital after being hit by a car. She and her friends would go to visit, and Wickenheiser remembers watching the doctors and nurses and feeling like it was something she really wanted to do. “I had a Harvard med school sweatshirt and an Edmonton Oilers jersey. Those are the two things I wore the most,” she told Zeisberger. “That tells you what I wanted to do with my life, right?”

“I've always felt like medicine is as close to hockey as I could get,” Wickenheiser told GLORY.  “In terms of the teamwork that you have to have in the emergency room, make decisions quickly. You're all in it together. You have to think on your feet, you have to be smart. Every skill that I've had in hockey, I've used it in medicine.”

You’ve probably heard someone say that professional athletes are simply wired differently. The focus, determination, the pressure cooker-type situations under which they either thrive or fold. The personality traits that make a great athlete are comparable to those that make a great doctor. Yet, it still seems extraordinary that one person can be capable of doing both. You not only have to operate on a different level, you have to do it on two different frequencies.

As a kid, maybe you told your parents that you weren’t just going to be a hockey player, you were going to be a hockey player and a doctor (or some other equally prestigious and rarified combination, like an astronaut and a movie star). But then you probably got a little older and reality revealed your childhood fantasy for what it was. For all Wickenheiser’s talk about the similarity of skill sets, the fact is: if you’ve got what it takes to be a doctor, you’re probably not going to cut it as a pro athlete; and if you’re that kind of athlete, you’re probably not going to cut it as a doctor. Once you frame it that way, Wickenheiser’s career begins to look even more exceptional. 

Through it all, she maintains a remarkable and evident sense of humility. “You focus so much on yourself so much as an athlete,” she said. “I get a little bored focusing on myself all the time. It’s nice to focus on someone else, I guess.”

When Canada’s COVID-19 cases began to climb, Wickenheiser along with the rest of Canada’s medical students were pulled out of acute care settings and deployed elsewhere. “It makes sense because as a trainee you need supervision and the people who are there to supervise you are needed to do acute care and focus completely on what they are doing,” Wickenheiser said. Medical students are being assigned to tasks such as contact tracing, a resource intensive process in which people who’ve tested positive for the virus must be interviewed in order to trace the origin of their infection and find out who else they may have passed it on to. “As much as we’d love to be in there and feel helpful, we just have to look at the other areas of medicine where we can be of use right now, which is wherever they ask us to be,” she added.

Her experience as a medical trainee has made her a uniquely powerful voice among Canadian celebrities. While on the frontlines in January and February, she saw the first COVID-19 patients in emergency, and the doctors she was working with were visibly shaken. “It was becoming intense,” she remembered. “When I saw the first COVID-19 patient being intubated, I knew this thing was for real and it was coming here.”

Around this time the International Olympics Committee (IOC), a committee on which Wickenheiser was a member, had announced that the Summer Olympics were going ahead in July, doing their best to mitigate the impact of the virus. She knew better. As an athlete herself, she understood that cancelling the games would be devastating for the athletes. Some had been training their whole lives for a moment of competition that was now threatened, and without the games, some of their careers could be cut short or derailed. But as someone who has worked in ERs, she also understood what was at stake. Without vaccines or validated treatments of any kind, there’d be no safe way for thousands of people to gather. The athletes themselves could be at risk.

“I couldn’t sit by and not say anything,” she said, of her tweet seemingly heard around the world. “I think I pulled 50 of my friends who are either ICU intensivists or emergency room doctors across the country and not one of them said that they felt like an Olympics could happen in July given what was going on. I was worried about the athlete's health and about what the message that the IOC was sending to the world. I didn't want to be a part of that message.” The games were eventually postponed indefinitely.

The problems didn’t stop. Doctors and healthcare workers everywhere were facing shortages of masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment they needed to safely deliver care. Realizing this, she put out a call soliciting donations. It was picked up by fellow Canadian and actor Ryan Reynolds who retweeted it to 15 million followers and soon after, she partnered with “Conquer COVID-19,” a grassroots volunteer organization of doctors and business leaders helping to address the PPE shortage. Within one week of her call out, the group had delivered equipment to 180 sites—hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, homeless shelters—to 54 communities in five provinces. Ontario premier Doug Ford was there to help unload trucks personally. Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, Leafs defenceman Morgan Riley, Calgary’s Mark Giordano, and Leafs legend Wendel Clark all got involved at the request of Wickenheiser.

“Who wouldn’t, especially when it’s Hayley doing the asking?” Clark later told Zeisberger. “She was a leader during her playing days and she is again now. She was the spark plug.”  Ford said “Hayley has shown leadership her whole life. I want to thank (her) from the bottom of my heart.” Reynolds, who plays Marvel’s Deadpool, called her “a superhero.” Jeff O’Neill, former Carolina Hurricane forward and current TSN commentator, said they should put her face on Canadian currency.

When Wayne Gretzky joined dozens of other athletes in the “Real Heroes Project” to dedicate their jerseys to people helping their communities during the pandemic, Gretzky chose to dedicate his to Wickenheiser. “She's the greatest women's player ever,” he said. “She was a hero before she became a doctor for so many kids. She gave people a sense of hope of having the same dream that she had as a kid. And now she's obviously a hero to so many families who are battling whatever they're battling whenever they walk into a hospital.”

In response to this high praise Wickenheiser has been characteristically modest (“Me? I just shot pucks for a long time,” she said at one point) but she remains unrelenting in her advocacy. After leading teams to Olympic medals, and returning to training as a humble rookie, she has now stepped into a role that only she can play. This crisis will cement her legacy as an athlete that transcended her sport.

Meantime, just one year out from graduation, she’s “still trying to stay up to date on all of what’s happening in medicine,” she told GLORY. She’s still doing videos for the Leafs, keeping in touch with players who haven’t been able to meet up. “So”— perhaps with occasional exception of the odd Netflix episode—“hockey and medicine basically fill my days,” she said. Much of the country has so-far managed to flatten the curve of the infection, but Wickenheiser remains ready to go back to the ER; ready in case “God forbid they have to call us in like they did in Italy.” But if she has to, then she will. Great leaders are always ready, willing to do whatever they have to.

For Wickenheiser, this is just the beginning.