The Hockey Guys

A Founder's Story

College Hockey

This is a story about The Hockey Guys on TikTok. My name is Lawson McDonald I am one of the 10 founders of this group. We don’t do official titles in our business but sometimes the guys call me “boss man” so we will go with that for today. If you’re reading this and don’t know who the hockey guys are I will give you an explanation. We are a group of 10 friends that started a TikTok page while playing college hockey. To us, it’s about showing our friendship, lifestyle, & bond while using hockey as the glue that brought us together.

For the first year the group's friendship was just based on the fact that they were playing college hockey & living together (I wasn’t a part of this). On a hockey team, everyone is friends but sometimes you spend more time with others outside the rink and that’s what this group truly was, great friends. Meanwhile, I was off playing in Nebraska Omaha not having a clue who these guys even are besides two of them which whom I previously played Junior Hockey with. When I say everything happens for a reason I do truly mean that because after getting cut from my College team in Omaha I ended up going to play on their college team. Like usual in the sport of hockey, it didn’t take long for me to become great friends with all of them.

A Single Video

After being teammates for a year we were supposed to be starting another season In the fall of 2020. Since covid came around this did not happen. If you didn’t know, a group of college athletes gets bored pretty quickly when you can’t show up to the rink every day for a couple of months. Thankfully I had been messing around with social media for a year so my lack of hockey got filled with being more creative.

One day I came to the rink with a plan to film a TikTok that I saw someone else do and thought it could be fun to do it with the guys. Will Blake, Cuddy, & Yelle had previously been in a couple of my videos so I asked if they wanted to be in this one and they said yes. The video we made that day ended up getting millions of views and interactions as I have never seen before on TikTok. so much where I felt like we had to do it again! This one did the same thing, so we made another one. Same thing. Another one. It blew up! To me, this was insane and obvious that there was a unique opportunity in front of us. It was something about having a group of College Hockey players making videos that people loved, except there was only one problem…it was all on my account and I was mostly behind the camera.

I vaguely remember thinking about what to call this new account, I knew it needed to be simple, to the point, and understandable right off the bat. The Hockey Guys are what I came up with… to be fair you don’t think about a year down the road and it having millions of followers associated with it when picking a name on day 1. Regardless, the success from my account carried over to The Hockey Guy's accounts like a forest fire.

Riding The wave

In the first month we had 100K followers, the 2nd month we had 200K followers, the third we had 300K, and so on pretty much for the first year. I think a big reason for this fast growth came from being early to this new platform but mainly to how unique we were. People have never seen hockey players create content that’s not very hockey related and that’s exactly the path we went down. Not to say hockey content is bad, it’s just not what we found fun, exciting, and interesting. we wanted to make content to be authentic, to show our personalities outside the arena, to make people laugh, and yes we wanted to do the occasional dance video because we believe nobody is too cool not to dance on TikTok. This is what the game of hockey needed anyway and it was clear that many many people enjoyed it since we currently still have the biggest following out of any team in the NHL.

Hockey players are typically known for being more reserved, and not being too fancy on social media, it’s just the way hockey culture is. We knew this brand was going against that grain and we expected to hear the chirps more and more as other teams caught wind of what we were doing. I remember seeing signs at games that said “stick TikTok” and fans feeding off of us putting ourselves online. I’m proud to say none of that affected anyone and that we could face it and just laugh about it. One thing is for sure it was all worthwhile when we could talk to fans that traveled from all over the country just to watch us play hockey

Changing The Game

It was a lot of fun building a TikTok following on social media with your best friends. We all had our share of laughs as everyone worked through the awkward stages of being on camera. It was such a new and unexpected experience for us but we all just continued riding the wave no matter what. As a group of friends, we love making content because we can bring joy to people as well as introduce them or bring them closer to the game of hockey. Hockey is the origin of what brought us together and will continue to be the center of what keeps us together. Most of us are retired but we don’t need to play to keep doing what we do. We find satisfaction in having the ability to reach a “Gen Z” audience and grow the game through social media. Even though hockey might be a little behind in the times regarding its online presence, we believe we can be the ones to start paving that path. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the fun social media era and hockey so that the sport can be enjoyed by everyone

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