Smart, gritty Manitoban learns from setbacks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/10/2020 (1879 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If anyone knows the highs and lows that come with being an elite-level athlete, it’s Delaney Collins.

At the 2007 IIHF World Women’s Championship in Winnipeg, the defenceman from Pilot Mound played a crucial role in the Canadian women’s hockey team’s march to gold, capped off with a 5-1 victory over the United States in front of her family and friends.

Collins was named a tournament all-star and selected as Manitoba’s top female athlete that year.

“I can still see the people. I can still hear them. I can still remember floating in warm-up because (Bell MTS Place) was sold out, obviously,” says the 43-year-old Collins.

“The red, the white, a lot of people from Pilot Mound were at the game. I can still see where my parents were sitting. I feel it… I saw some highlights from it the other day. I made a nice pass to (Hayley Wickenheiser) and she went in and (scored). It was an all-around great day.”

After being cut from the 2002 and 2006 Olympic teams, Collins felt like she was in her prime and had a real shot at 2010 Vancouver. But a year after her epic homecoming, that all changed. She was sidelined with a concussion and her hockey career — never mind her Olympic dream — was in jeopardy. She would end up making it back on the ice in time to try out for the 2010 Olympics, but for a third time, was a final cut.

“I spent the next year-and-a-half roller-coastering up and down just trying to get out of bed and recover from that (concussion) and get a good quality of life. The fact that I was able to return to play and try out for the 2010 Olympics was a huge success because I contemplated retiring many times in that year that I was concussed,” says Collins, who had eight goals and 31 assists in 95 international appearances for Team Canada.

“So, it wasn’t just as simple as ‘I missed the Olympics.’ I think it’s a little more complex with the head injury, and it came at a really unfortunate time where I felt I was at the absolute peak of my hockey career. I believe I was a great hockey player. I truly do… It really is what it is.

“It’s sometimes tough to see those girls having won the gold medal, but at the same time, you have to find that inner strength to just know that you were either part of it or did the best that you (could) do.”

Collins, a national team member from 1999-2010 who was on three world championship winning squads (2000, 2004 and 2007), had to settle for watching her teammates win Olympic gold in all three Games she narrowly missed out on. She won’t lie, it was heartbreaking, and it took time to come to grips with, but she’s at a point now where she appreciates what she learned from the experience.

‘It was disappointing, borderline devastating,” she says. “I don’t remember being able to function in society for five or six months after… But here’s the thing: it absolutely makes me a better person, a better wife, a better daughter and it really makes me a better hockey coach, because you learn to deal with disappointment and you’re faced with a choice. The choice is the adversity will either make you better or you just crumble in the moment.”

After retiring from international competition in 2011, Collins became an assistant coach at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., before landing a gig with the Canadian national team, where she alternated as a coach between the under-18 and under-22 squads.

But one night in Las Vegas in April 2019 has led her life down a different path.

Collins was at a bar inside the MGM Grand, where she was attending a concert by a country music singer/songwriter Isaac Mathews. After the show, Collins introduced herself to Mathews.

Two months later they were married.

“I found him really intriguing, how he carried himself professionally, and I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with somebody who is a professional but not in my profession, not a coach,” Collins says from the family’s Nashville home. The couple became parents in March with the birth of daughter Gracie.

“He’s in the music world and I’m in the sporting world, and so I tried to talk to him to just draw on some of the parallels of being a pro and what it’s being like to have that product, whether it’s coaching and the product is hockey or if it’s singing and the product is music,” she says.

‘We had a lot of conversations like that but we instantly just found each other and it made a lot of sense. We were pretty much compatible and interested in spending our lives together.”

Collins manages her husband’s music career, but she’s still scratching her hockey itch. She informed the Nashville Predators she was moving to the country music capital and the team hired her as the ambassador for female hockey. She’s on the ice with kids at all levels between the ages of three and 19, in hopes of growing female hockey in the area. Sharing her story has become a valuable tool to help young players.

“If kids are struggling or not understanding the importance of adversity or how to navigate through challenges, I can instantly sit them down and say, ‘Hey, listen, here’s some perspective: I was released from three Olympic teams and every year in between I was there and I was playing,’” she says.

“But when I talk to young kids, I think I’ve been through enough, where as a coach they respect what I have to say. I have both sides. I have the adversity piece and I have the success piece, like in Winnipeg in 2007.”

She grew up on a farm in a small Manitoba town of 700 people, but Collins says life in the Music City isn’t so different.

“They’re both just a small country town,” she says with a laugh. “There it is. Small-town country. Nashville is a small city. It’s super country. It’s a city, but it’s got that personal feel. Everyone here kind of knows each other and the music industry is hopping. In Pilot Mound, everybody knows each other and the crops and the hockey are hopping.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31