Hughes Sisters Q&A: Rivalry On Ice

The No. 3 Harvard men’s hockey team will face No. 19 Yale at Madison Square Garden next Saturday in the second edition of the Rivalry On Ice. On Dec. 26, a brief ECAC Hockey press release promoting the match-up stated the following:

“This year’s game also features a unique intermission skating performance with Olympic gold medalist Sarah Hughes (Yale alum) and her Olympian sister Emily Hughes (Harvard alum).”

In the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, Sarah Hughes stunned the skating world by capturing gold in the ladies’ singles event. The next year, Sarah declined her early admittance to Harvard and enrolled at Yale. In 2006, Sarah’s younger sister took the Olympic stage. Emily Hughes ’11 placed seventh in Torino before her freshman year in Cambridge.

Surprised by the press release, I used Twitter to reach out to the Hughes sisters, who kindly granted a video chat interview from their New York home. While I quickly learned that Sarah and Emily would not, in fact, be lacing up between periods on Jan. 10, they are planning to take the ice for the ceremonial first face-off alongside former New York Governor George Pataki (Yale ’67) and New York Rangers greats Mike Richter (Yale ’08) and Mark Messier (Rivalry On Ice brand ambassador and uncle of Harvard sophomore forward Luke Esposito).

In the following conversation, the Hughes sisters talk about their connection to college hockey, their previous performances at the Garden, and the Ivy League’s rich tradition of Olympic figure skating.

Michael Ledecky: Your dad was the captain of the undefeated 1970 Cornell team, and your brothers played hockey. What has college hockey meant to you in your upbringing?

Sarah Hughes: It has actually been a thread throughout our lives. We are all very, very proud of our dad. One of our brothers also played hockey at Cornell. So we feel we’ve had a big hockey connection, and every single year that they’ve had the Cornell game at the Garden [the Frozen Apple] we’ve gone to the game. One year our dad dropped the puck. It’s been a lot of fun, and because of that, I’m excited to have my school be part of a college hockey game at the Garden.

Emily Hughes: The Big Red hockey game atmosphere is just electric, so I’m looking forward to experiencing that with Harvard and Yale.

ML: Mark Messier is the Rivalry On Ice’s brand ambassador and the CEO of the Kingsbridge National Ice Center [a $350 million ice skating facility planned to open in the Bronx in 2017]. Sarah, you’re a senior vice president on the Kingsbridge project yourself. How’s it been coming along?

SH: The project is really exciting…. We’re building a 5,000-seat arena and then eight rinks around it. It’s going to house nine rinks under one roof, which is going to make it the largest ice center in the entire world. Mark and I have been involved for almost four years, and we’re finally in the design phase…. It’s a pretty small team, but we’re excited about the college hockey game because it’s exactly the type of event that we want to have in the city. We want to redefine the ice sports experience, and that’s how we view the Harvard-Yale game as doing as well. It’s giving these college hockey players a professional experience to play in the Garden like NHL players and have all of crazy alumni going nuts.

ML: Emily, I understand you’re moving out to California to work in Google’s business division. Catch us up on your last few years out of Harvard.

EH: I started with Google a couple of weeks ago, and I’m moving out to San Francisco tomorrow. So it’s a big move, but I really want to come back for the game. Our history with the Garden and college hockey has played such a big part in our lives.

I was working at Deloitte Consulting a little bit, and then last year I was living in Switzerland working for the International Olympic Committee, so that was really an awesome experience being an Olympian working for the IOC. And then I moved back to the U.S. and started my job at Google, which has been awesome so far.

ML: You two have some experience performing at the Garden. Tell us more about that.

SH: Emily and I used to do the intermissions of Ranger games together.

EH: Yeah, and I did one when I was like 12 or 13. It was this program where I was doing different Olympic sports. For hockey, I had a Rangers jersey on and I shot the puck, and it was really funny because they left the goals on the ice, and I shot the puck across the rink [without aiming for the goal]. I start skating around, and all of a sudden everyone’s cheering for me, and I’m thinking, “What did I just do?” I look back, and the puck went in the net. So I scored a goal on Rangers ice.

ML: How did you get to do those performances?

SH: In ’94 when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, my dad, who’s a lawyer, had been representing Neil Smith for many years, who was GM and president of the Rangers, and many of the players, so that’s how we first got invited to skate in between periods of the games. So we started when we were pretty young. I started when I was six or seven years old, and Emily came and we performed once or twice together, and then Emily started doing it….

ML: That’s crazy that you started so young like that. It was just you out there?

SH: Just us and 19,000 screaming hockey fans.

EH: It was an awesome experience.

SH: When I look back at it, I think, “What kind of father would have his seven-year-old daughter skate in front of 19,000 rowdy fans?”

EH: A proud father. [Laughing]

SH: Well, you never knew how it was going to go, but it went well…. I remember when [Wayne] Gretzky was traded to the Rangers, and he was there for a little bit, so that was fun. We got to meet a lot of players backstage. Once when they were playing the Penguins, we met [Mario] Lemieux. We’re big hockey fans, but that all stemmed from our dad’s passion for the game.

ML: Did you ever try playing?

SH: Emily used to play a little bit because she had hockey skates, but I never did.

EH: My younger sister didn’t want to figure skate, so my mom put her in hockey with me; she said, “You go skate with her!” [Laughing] So I played hockey for a little bit when I was younger.

ML: Both of you were in Sochi last February. What were your perspectives on the Games?

SH: I was working for a daily show for NBC called “Olympic Ice” with Russ Thaler. We did a show every single day, which is a lot of work. It was a lot of figure skating…. It was great. The new team event this year was cool because it added a different aspect, but I’m really into synchronized skating, because I think it’s really the future of the sport for us, and it’s big in colleges. A lot of skaters go to college and can’t compete the same way, but synchronized skating provides a better atmosphere to compete against other schools and train as teams, so I’m hoping that the team event can soon become the synchronized skating event.

EH: With the IOC, I got to go to more events than at any other Olympics I’d been to. I got to watch the skating event, which is always exciting, a lot of energy. For all the media attention that Sochi got, I had a great time there.

ML: The Ivy League has a legacy of Olympic figure skaters. Sarah, I know that you’ve cited Tenley Albright as an inspiration. What does that legacy mean to you?

SH: It’s a little bit ironic, because there are 13 American Olympic champions, and three of them have degrees from Harvard, and only I have a degree from Yale....

EH: Wait, who’s the third?

SH: Tenley has Harvard Medical; Dick Button[’52] has Harvard and Harvard Medical; and then a guy named Hayes Jenkins has Harvard Law. So I’m proud to be the sole representative from Yale. [Laughing] I’m trying to build a bit of a skating community a little bit at Yale. I’m going back there in two weeks to do a women’s leadership conference….

EH: For me, seeing all these accomplished skaters get their degree was inspirational to me, and then seeing Sarah go to Yale and graduate from Yale pushed me to want to do the same—or go to Harvard. [Laughing]

SH: If you want to get better at what you do or have more of a life of purpose, the number one thing you can do is surround yourself by like-minded people and surround yourself with a supportive environment, and that’s exactly what these schools do. That’s what Yale does, that’s what Harvard does, and the great part of this Yale-Harvard game is that it brings together so many generations of people coming from the same background and from the same ties.

Even though it’s a friendly rivalry, it’s fun to see how passionate these alumni are. All these presidents, Rhodes scholars, and other accomplished people who come back to their 20-year-old selves and relive something that seems, probably, in their lives, so inconsequential, but they hold it to such a high standard. I guess that’s the funny part, that it isn’t inconsequential. They have a Nobel Prize, but they say, “Oh, we beat Yale!” or “We beat Harvard!”

….

SH: You know, Yale won last year, 5-1.

EH: That was last year.