How Hockey Mom Life Inspired Me to Write The Wolfpack

There was no single moment when I looked around an ice rink and thought, Someone should be murdered here.

It was more of a gradual realization.

I spent enough time immersed in elite youth hockey to understand one essential truth: these people take this really seriously.

Not “we hope the kids have fun” seriously. Not even “we’d love to win the tournament” seriously. I mean year-round schedules, eighty-game seasons, private lessons, showcases, scouts, academies, prep schools, and tens—and tens and tens—of thousands of dollars seriously.

Once you spend enough time in that world, setting a murder mystery there begins to feel less like an act of imagination and more like the natural next step.

No one was actually murdered during my son’s hockey season. But I’m also not prepared to say that no one wanted to murder someone.

Last season, my son played for a team based in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, more than an hour from our home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Three nights a week, for six months, I made the drive south.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I left at five. On Wednesdays, I left at six. We usually got home around 11:30 at night, provided the coach was kind enough to end practice on time, which was never something anyone could safely assume.

Every dinner became a crock-pot dinner. My son ate his portion in the car, while the rest of the family ate whenever they got home. I was also working a full-time job, because apparently no one was willing to pay me for driving a teenager around New England and standing in cold buildings.

As winter dragged on and the days got shorter, getting out of bed for my usual morning dog walks became increasingly difficult. I developed two main coping strategies.

The first was spending hours on the treadmill at Planet Fitness reading murder mysteries.

The second was spending hours at a local bar eating killer wings and pizza.

In retrospect, the book was probably inevitable.

The Glamour of the Hockey Rink

The Tyngsborough rink has three ice surfaces and the unmistakable smell of a urinal cake—like someone is desperately trying to cover the scent of decades of locker rooms with the cheapest air freshener money can buy.

There’s a small lobby and a restaurant that doesn’t look especially promising but contains a legitimate pizza oven. The pizza is inexplicably excellent. Better, even, than the pizza at my emotional-support bar.

Upstairs are offices and a workout room for the players. The entire building is shabby in the way only an old hockey rink can be shabby. It doesn’t appear to have been meaningfully updated in decades.

The main rink, where the games are played, has rickety wooden bleachers that create the thrilling sense that you may fall to your death while watching fifteen-year-olds argue with a referee.

Naturally, it was the perfect setting for a novel.

When I created the fictional Merrimack Valley Wolfpack, I borrowed the parts of hockey life that felt most authentic: the late-night practices, the endless driving, the questionable rink bathrooms, the restaurant where parents gather after games, and the strange intimacy that develops among people who spend hundreds of hours together in freezing buildings.

Then I added a body.

Hockey Parents Are Their Own Literary Genre

The social world of elite youth hockey contains friendship, rivalry, group therapy, mutual surveillance, and an extraordinary amount of humble-bragging.

Although, to be fair, some of the bragging is not especially humble.

Parents are always discussing the latest showcase their child was invited to, which coach has expressed interest, what academy called, what team wants them, and which scout may or may not have been standing near the glass during the second period.

The conversation might begin casually:

“Did I tell you that Connor was invited to a showcase?”

Yes. You did. Yesterday. And Tuesday. And during warmups.

Some families treat youth hockey like a small business they expect to take public. Their children play eighty or more games a year. They skate during every season. They attend camps, clinics, lessons, combines, and showcases. Their parents invest enormous amounts of money into careers that, statistically speaking, are most likely to culminate in adult recreational hockey.

There’s a saying in youth hockey: all paths lead to beer league.

Some paths are simply much more expensive.

Of course, many hockey parents are wonderful—generous, funny, salt-of-the-earth people who will help your kid carry his bag, lend him equipment, drive him to practice, or feed him for an entire weekend.

Others are so intensely focused on their child’s hockey career that they appear to have forgotten how to discuss anything else.

And Massachusetts hockey parents are truly in a category of their own.

Picture heavy Boston accents. Tailgating before games. Detailed opinions about every line combination. Fathers who know all the rules and are prepared to explain them loudly to the referee. Occasional fights in the stands.

Every murder mystery needs suspects. Hockey gave me an entire parking lot full of them.

I knew immediately that The Wolfpack needed the mother who would do absolutely anything for her son’s career. It needed the father who corrects every call from the stands. It needed the rich parents, the connected parents, the political parents, and the parents who know everyone’s business before everyone else does.

None of the characters are portraits of specific people. I didn’t tell anyone that I was quietly turning our shared hockey world into a murder mystery.

This was partly because I didn’t want anyone asking whether they were in the book.

It was also because I didn’t want anyone asking to be the victim.

The Travel Is Completely Normal, Except That It Isn’t

Last year, I put more than 25,000 miles on my car driving to practices and games everywhere from Providence to Utica to Newark.

Thankfully, I drive a Tesla, which saved me thousands of dollars in gas and, as it turned out, may also have saved us in a much more important way.

But before we get to that, we should discuss tournament hotels.

Tournament hotels are their own branch of chaos. You take several dozen teenage hockey players, add their siblings, exhausted parents, forbidden hallway activities, and long gaps between games, then release them into a hotel that would strongly prefer not to have them there.

At one tournament in upstate New York, we unknowingly booked a hotel that contained the hottest nightclub in town.

We walked in and were physically assaulted by music. The lobby was packed with late-middle-aged people wearing Versace and displaying what appeared to be very expensive cosmetic surgery.

It was magnificent.

At another tournament, in Nashville, the hotel called the police because our team was playing knee hockey in the hallways.

That incident made it into the book.

I changed many things while fictionalizing the hockey world, but the police being called over knee hockey required no embellishment.

Hockey parents also spend an incredible amount of time waiting. You arrive an hour before every game. Sometimes you have four hours between games, two hours from home, without a hotel room. You wait in restaurants, parking lots, coffee shops, and your car.

You learn which grocery stores have seating areas. You become emotionally attached to certain highway rest stops. You understand that “a quick weekend tournament” means surrendering your entire weekend and possibly your will to live.

The siblings, meanwhile, adapt beautifully. There is always at least one younger child camped out on the rink floor with a blanket and an iPad, living a peaceful little life amid the chaos.

The Part That Wasn’t Funny

On the final night of practice, it snowed.

We were five miles from home when the car lost traction and spun 180 degrees into oncoming traffic. A semi-truck hit us head-on.

Thankfully, neither of us was injured.

The car did its job, and we walked away. But the accident forced me to confront something I had been trying not to examine too closely: I had given too much of myself to the sport.

I had spent six months driving late at night, exhausted, in every kind of New England weather. I had organized my work, meals, sleep, exercise, and family life around hockey. I had accepted all of it because that was what the season required.

That conflict became central to my protagonist, Jack Jones.

Jack and I have very different lives. She is a single mother whose son’s father died in a tragic accident. She loses her job and is scrambling to keep her son in an expensive sport she can barely afford. I am happily married, have two children, and have a stable job.

But the hockey experience is the same.

Jack understands the irrational, overwhelming dedication involved in watching your child excel at something he loves. She knows that hockey can take too much from you. She also knows how difficult it is to walk away.

Because despite everything—the mileage, the money, the late nights, the bad food, the cold rinks, the tournament hotels, the aggressive parents, and the occasional encounter with an oncoming semi—hockey is the greatest sport.

It is fast and intense and unbelievably fun to watch.

My son is amazing at it, and he loves it. There is nothing quite like watching your child joyfully excel at something so specialized, something relatively few people on the planet can do.

They’re playing a complicated team sport while balancing on thin metal blades attached to their feet.

On ice.

It’s objectively incredible.

That joy is what keeps parents making the drive. It’s also what makes the pressure so powerful. The sacrifices feel worthwhile because you can see how much the sport means to your child. It becomes easy to give a little more, spend a little more, drive a little farther, and stay for one more season.

Until, sometimes, you realize you’ve gone too far.

Murder Made Hockey More Fun

Writing The Wolfpack actually made the season more entertaining.

Ordinary rink details became potential clues. Parking-lot arguments became motives. Hallways became hiding places. Every strange parent interaction felt like material. I could sit in the bleachers, look around, and imagine which fictional character might be lying to the police.

The hardest part came after I completed the first draft.

One of the book’s core plot elements—one of my earliest ideas—simply wasn’t working. I tried to save it because I had been attached to it for so long. I rearranged other parts of the story around it. I kept insisting it belonged.

It didn’t.

Once I finally let it go and restructured the book around its absence, the writing became fun again. The characters had more room to breathe, the mystery became stronger, and the story began to feel like the book I had originally imagined.

Writing a novel, it turns out, is a little like being a hockey parent. You can invest so much in one path that it becomes difficult to admit it may not be the right one.

Sometimes you have to stop, reassess, and find a safer way home.

The Wolfpack grew out of six months of late nights, crock-pot meals, terrible weather, excellent pizza, questionable bleachers, murder mysteries on the treadmill, and thousands upon thousands of miles behind the wheel.

No hockey coaches were harmed in the making of this novel.

But now that the book is written, I would advise everyone at the rink to remain polite to me—just in case I need material for the sequel.