Redefining an NHL Factory: Kristy McNeil Revolutionizes Social Media for Michigan Hockey
How Kristy McNeil and her team of interns brought new meaning to the idea of University of Michigan hockey as a collegiate powerhouse and NHL pipeline
Kristy McNeil, Michigan Athletics - Redefining an NHL Factory: Kristy McNeil Revolutionizes Social Media for Michigan HockeyIn late March of last year, the University of Michigan hockey team was in Allentown, Pennsylvania. One day earlier, the Wolverines walloped Colgate 11-1 to open their NCAA Tournament campaign. A day later, they would play Penn State, with the chance to secure a second successive trip to the Frozen Four at stake.
The idea of Michigan hockey as a pipeline to the NHL is hardly a novel one. That Wolverine team starred Adam Fantilli, who would wind up a top-three pick in the draft a few months later, and featured three players who’d already been selected in the first round of the NHL Draft in Luke Hughes, Mackie Samoskevich, Frank Nazar III, and Rutger McGroarty. But that regional weekend would bring new meaning to the idea of Michigan as an NHL factory.
On the off-day between the Colgate and Penn State games, Lauren Rodolitz—then a senior at U-M and in her second season interning on the social media side of the hockey program—received a phone call from an Ohio area code. When she answered, Rodolitz received the news any senior is looking for by springtime—a job offer for the coming year. It was to become digital media and content coordinator for the Columbus Blue Jackets. She called her parents. She told her boss, the program’s sports information director (SID) Kristy McNeil. Then, at lunch, she broke the news to Michigan’s then-interim coach Brandon Naurato.
Later that day, as Rodolitz recounted over the phone to The Hockey News last week, “Nar was like, ‘Lauren, come here for a second,’ and he took me into the locker room with all of the guys and told them that I got a job in the NHL, and their reaction too. That goes back to the care and the family—having all of them be so excited for me and whooping and hollering. You get so close when you spend that much time with people, and when you all have the same end goal in a sense, and that was really cool.”
Some 24 hours later, in the same locker room at the PPL Center, home to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms (the Flyers AHL affiliate), Michigan celebrated an overtime victory over the Nittany Lions. In compliance with NCAA rules for the tournament, the locker room was open to the media (not normally the case during the season), and McNeil sensed an opportunity. She asked if one of the players might want to go live on the team’s Instagram account, and Fantilli obliged. “We have trust in each other, and we’re all promoting Michigan hockey…so I let him take my phone and run around the locker room with it,” McNeil told THN. The result was the soon-to-be Hobey Baker winner providing fans with a backstage look at the celebration.
The weekend’s on-ice triumph came first, of course, but between Rodolitz’s job offer and Fantilli going live from McNeil’s phone in the victory’s afterglow, it also served as a showcase for a program within the program every bit as successful, of which McNeil was the architect.
Officially, McNeil is associate director for external communications within Michigan’s athletic department. It’s not the most intuitive job title, and she reveals to THN that she’s not sure even her parents understand exactly what it is she does, but in simplest form, it means she is responsible for—among a litany of other tasks—running the hockey team’s social media. As is the case for the team those channels cover, social media provides clear markers of success or failure. That might be stressful, but for McNeil and her team, it also makes plain the scope of her success.
To use Instagram as a barometer (though you could cite near identical statistics for any social platform of your choosing), Michigan hockey has more than double the following of the next closest NCAA program, and the team account's 7.0% interaction rate and 67.88% follower growth rate also set the pace for the sport at the collegiate level. In fact, the NHL provides better peers for Michigan’s social channels than do rest of the NCAA. The best interaction rate for the same period in the NHL is the Carolina Hurricanes’ at 3.4%, while Florida can claim the best growth rate at only 23%.
Those numbers help make clear the value in McNeil’s efforts. “To actually see it now with analytics, it’s helpful to be able to show the administration what we’re doing and how effective it is and the areas that we’re touching,” she points out. “Some old school administrators don’t really buy into social and how it helps sell tickets and gets you recruiting. Thankfully, analytics can help with that.”
When McNeil arrived in Ann Arbor five years ago, the Instagram account had 49,000 followers. Today, that number is just under 209,000, a 362% increase. There are two Wolverines with more followers than the next closest NCAA hockey team (McGroarty at 101,000 and defenseman Ethan Edwards at 95,000). “I don’t know how she doesn’t have an NHL job,” says Naurato. “We’re lucky to still have her.”
McNeil came to Michigan after starting in the industry as an intern at the ECAC, before taking a Division III SID job, then moving on to Colgate, and then Princeton. She arrived intent not in following anybody else’s model for how to navigate a rapidly evolving industry (Facebook was two years away from creation when she started at the ECAC; there was no social media for SIDs to run).
Instead, McNeil made her own.
“I’m not afraid to fail, and I’m always willing to try something new and different, and I will push boundaries,” says McNeil of her approach when she got to Ann Arbor. “That’s something Michigan knew when I was coming in…and I’m entrusted with this billion-dollar brand, and that’s incredibly humbling, but I wanna stand out, and how can we do it, and how can we push the envelope a little bit?” Giving her phone to an 18-year-old to go live from a locker room celebration is a perfect example—a willingness to take a risk, rewarded with a distinctive and memorable piece of content.
McNeil became part of the program at a critical moment. Entering her second season in Ann Arbor, Michigan would usher in a recruiting class of unprecedented talent, featuring Owen Power, Matty Beniers, Kent Johnson, Brendan Brisson, and Thomas Bordeleau. Brisson and Bordeleau had already been taken in the first and second rounds respectively of the 2020 NHL Draft, but the former three were all projected as top picks at the end of their freshman seasons. Once more, McNeil knew she was looking at a unique opportunity.
“I knew they were coming in, and it was gonna be a big deal,” she reflects. “It was their draft year, and it was really important for me to promote them as individual players. I knew I would have an impact on where they went, how high they went, and we just really wanted to get them ready for that. It was a lot of pressure, but looking back on that, no other SID can say they’ve done that or will ever do that because no team will be in that position again.”
To help make sure she would be doing the most she could to promote Power, Beniers, and Johnson in a pivotal year for their personal and professional futures, McNeil hired an intern. Her name was Gabrielle Healy, a student at U-M’s Stamps School of Art and Design, and she would become the team’s videographer.
Healy didn’t quite know what she was getting into at the time. To secure her internship she’d made a test video to show McNeil. “When Kristy reached out to me and gave me a date for the test video, I got my camera the day before the video, and I spent the entire night learning how to shoot on it and learning how to make a shot list and all this stuff, so I showed up and Kristy thought I knew what I was doing, but I learned it all the night before, and I think that’s what she liked about me,” Healy said over the phone. “I told her that like a year later, and she was like, ‘that’s what I like about you. You never tell me when you don’t know how to do something; you just figure out how to do it.’”
Today, Healy is social media producer for the Buffalo Sabres, another alumna McNeil has matriculated on from U-M to the NHL. “It definitely started out truly because it was fun, and I loved hockey, and I loved being around Yost,” Healy says. “Probably a month or two into my internship, I was like ‘wow, this is what I want to do’ because of how amazing that environment was, but if you’d asked me three years ago if I was gonna be working in the NHL right now, I would’ve laughed at you, so it’s definitely been a crazy ride.”
Healy had joined the Michigan hockey program heading into her senior year and took a full-time job with the athletic department upon graduating. There wasn’t exactly a surplus of opportunities at the NHL level, but last summer, she came across a listing on the site TeamWorkOnline that piqued her interest. At the time, she says, “I had never seen a job posting before that was exactly what I want to do. I’m kind of in the weird middle ground between creative and social media management, so I’d never seen a position like that before…and I had that job within the next week and a half.”
By Healy’s second year with the program, she’d be joined by Rodolitz and Maggie Pilibosian, a current U-M junior who’d begun interning with Michigan hockey as a freshman. To all three, what stood out about McNeil as a boss was the faith she showed in them to assume major responsibilities despite the title “intern”.
“I think the biggest thing overall…is she just trusted us,” assesses Healy. “We were three students who have never done this before, and she fully trusted us that we knew TikTok better than her. We knew some of the newer media better than her, and instead of trying to control that, she let us run with these ideas.”
“Kristy is not gonna hold your hand, and if she needs to, it’s honestly maybe not the place for you,” says Pilibosian. “Obviously, she’s very willing to teach you if you ask about something, but if you go through the role just going through the motions, you’re not gonna get as much out of it…She gives you a lot of responsibility, and she’s huge on trust and communication.”
Rodolitz’s first job within the program was to get the team’s TikTok account off the ground. McNeil had a username, but no followers or videos yet. “She was like, I don’t know anything about this app,” explains Rodolitz. “I was like, ‘Don’t worry! I scroll TikTok all day. I got you.’” Today, the account has over 190,000 followers, more than 11 NHL teams.
“I feel like when I was younger, that’s how I learned, so I put that back now that I’m teaching other people,” McNeil explains of that approach. “I feel like it really empowers them, and I feel like it’s really important to make them feel like they’re a part of this team. It’s not just the team, and it’s not just something you did, but together, look at what we did. I think that’s really important to stress to them…How do I make them feel special and a part of something? Just putting them out there and being like ‘show me what you can do,’ and it really allows them to be creative but also puts them on the spot. It’s sports. You’re going to be under pressure. Can you handle it? And we’re number one in social media, so you have to be willing to do that.”
As McNeil explains it, during Power, Beniers, and Johnson’s draft year, the coaching staff prior to Naurato’s had barriers and restraints put in place, whether intentionally or not, with respect to social media content, and she was “determined not to let them keep me from being successful.” Working in her favor was the fact that COVID-19 and a year without fans had made it impossible for any sort of ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ arguments to hold up. As Bordeleau, now in his second full season of pro hockey with the San Jose Sharks, pointed out, “There was no fans at the games, so they had to find a different way to engage with fans.”
“The whole thing was they’re being drafted, and I want them to go as high as possible,” McNeil recalls, before getting into the balance between promotion and protection. “What can I do? But also, we don’t want them to be inundated. We want them to still be kids. There’s certain interviews that you would decline for them, and I’ll look like the a**hole…If the player doesn’t want to do it, I’ll protect them, and I’ll look like the jerk. I don’t care. I’d rather them look good.”
While doing media might be tedious at times for the players, McNeil had their professional future and their personal wellbeing in mind with each interview request: “I knew they were doing all their NHL interviews with teams, so it was like yeah, do all these media things, and you might hate doing it, but you’re gonna be so prepared, and they were.” It was the same logic that led her to give her interns robust workloads that would offer an accurate picture as to what life is like day-to-day after college. “I don’t want them to get to the next level and be like ‘Kristy never told me this,’” McNeil says. “I just want to have them as prepared as they can be, and it’s the same with the players.”
Though COVID-19 would eventually force the Wolverines out of the NCAA Tournament before they had a chance to play a game, the season ended with Power being selected first, Beniers second, Hughes (who would be a freshman the following year) fourth, and Johnson fifth at the draft. For McNeil, it was a career highlight—both because of what it meant for the players she’d worked alongside all season and because it provided undeniable proof that all that work had been worthwhile and successful. As she says, “I think the way that I’ve proven it is seeing the success of the people that I’ve worked with.”
To that end, for McNeil, while the numbers might be a useful way to measure her achievements, personal and professional success would have to start with trust, not numbers on a spreadsheet. “Coming in here, I am big on building relationships with people, and I think that was the one thing that I’ve done here with the players,” she says. “It was my intention to come here and make them comfortable and at ease, before pushing them to do more content. Hockey’s always been really based around the team. It’s not a lot of individuals.”
“You’re around these people all the time, so they become family to you, whether it’s my interns or Evan [Hall, the team’s director of hockey operations] or Nar,” explains McNeil. “We’re always together. You see each other first thing in the morning and last thing at night when you’re exhausted. You’ve seen people at their highs and lows. You’re around everybody all the time, and that’s your family. I feel like everybody here is my family.”
Healy can attest first-hand to McNeil’s caring, family-style approach to her job. During Healy's first year with the team, “She texted me two days before Thanksgiving and asked if I had plans and said if I didn’t, she was gonna take me out to dinner, because she didn’t want me to be alone on Thanksgiving,” Healy recalls. “And then as her and I evolved into co-workers, as I worked full-time at Michigan and I struggled navigating post-grad, my first full-time job, not being exactly where I wanted to be, she was always the person I went to talk about all that. She’s just been such a great mentor to me the whole time.”
The same relationships McNeil built with her interns also helped her cultivate mutual trust with the players and create better content as a result.
“They just showcase what we do on the ice and off it too, and very thankful for people like Kristy and Lauren who are always working hard to make us look good,” said Nick Blankenburg, former Michigan captain and current Columbus Blue Jacket. “It’s always nice to have someone in your corner.”
“They just care, and I’m not saying other people in that role don’t care, but I feel like if you’re the social media person of a team, you should always be there and always try to capture little moments and pieces here and there,” says Bordeleau. “They were good at just capturing moments of the boys being together and giving the fans what they wanted.”
Bordeleau explained that at first he and his teammates might have been a bit uncertain around McNeil and her team’s cameras, but they came to see the value in that work and even enjoy participating. “At first, we were just making fun of it a little bit,” he told THN. “It kinda started all with the Monday Questions. We’d come off the ice, and there’d be a question we have to answer. We started having a little bit of fun with that, and then they started making little hype videos, little highlight clips here and there, and it’d be fun to have for the boys.”
Rodolitz points out that identifying players who were willing to engage in different kinds of content helped inspire others to do the same. “We did this day in the life with Luca Fantilli,” she observes. “And people absolutely loved seeing him go to lunch with the guys in between classes and talk about his day and tell us what classes he was going to, and then other guys wanted to do that. Once you get a few that are on board, you can build from there.”
Michigan hockey’s most recognizable social media feature is the “Monday Question” Bordeleau alluded to in which each member of the team offers their response to an inane question—something like ‘if you were a dog, what breed would you be?’
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPIWhrc0T0k[/embed]
It’s a format you see replicated on just about every team account around the NHL: Players walking on or off the rink for practice and responding to the same zany prompt. Per Rodolitz, they began as a joke: “They started because I posted a TikTok of the guys getting on the plane for an away game, and all the comments said that Philippe Lapointe looked like Timothée Chalamet. It blew up for some reason. It was not a special video. I posted videos like this often.”
Rodolitz shared the video (and fan reaction) with the rest of the social team, and they decided to shoot a video in which every player said what actor would play them in a movie when they got back from their road trip that Monday. The players immediately ran with the format, and the Monday question became a fixture.
“Even [current captain Jacob] Truscott was like ‘did we start that?’ and I’m like ‘I think we did,’ says McNeil, with a proud smile. “You’ll see people rip things off that we’ve been doing, and my interns will get upset about it, and I’m like ‘no, it’s flattering. They wanna be like us.’”
Though some of the best content they produce might be frivolous, Naurato has no doubt as to the importance of McNeil and her team to his program. “Huge added value,” he says of their work. “What Kristy’s done, I know for a fact other people from Michigan athletics are trying to emulate, if not around the country at different athletic departments.
“There’s nine-year-old or thirteen-year-old kids out there that are becoming Michigan fans because of the behind-the-scenes looks—whether it’s something funny or something serious that Kristy opens up,” he continues. “I think it’s a huge compliment to her to have Lauren and Gabrielle get NHL jobs in media…I think what she’s best at is she lets these girls be creative, lets them kind of do their thing and grow within her framework. It’s big time. The numbers and how Michigan hockey’s grown a social media following, it is 100% her, and she should get all that credit. I think the guys enjoy doing the stuff. It’s not a task, which makes it even better. And it’s her messaging or presentation to get them to enjoy it.”
As current sophomore and Big Ten player of the year finalist Gavin Brindley points out, McNeil’s work is a valuable recruiting tool. “Just for kids that are on social media now at a young age, there’s a lot of Michigan hockey stuff,” he says. “When I was coming up and trying to make a decision [on where to play in college], I saw Michigan hockey everywhere. I think they do a great job of showing what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis or just keeping the fans involved.”
Though he is now an NHL player, Bordeleau still gets recognized on the street for his cameos in U-M hockey’s social content. “They’re really good at keeping up with trends or even creating new trends and keeping the accounts fun and light and bringing out the personality out of the players,” he says. “Obviously the younger generation’s always on TikTok, that’s kinda the big thing, and they dove into that, and I see it blow up here and there. I see just random kids in the street, and they know who I am just because of this one Michigan TikTok—not even for Sharks stuff, just for Michigan stuff. It’s good publicity for sure.”
Meanwhile, McGroarty can testify first-hand to their value in personal brand-building: “I think I went from 7,000 Instagram followers to 100,000 within a year. They get you out there for sure…Kristy [and her team] I feel like they always want what’s best for you. They’re here to help you out and expand your brand and just help you with whatever you need.”
But again, while those numbers, the recognition for the value she’s added to the program, or the wins on the ice are all nice, it’s the relationships that sustain McNeil in the frenetic environment of high-level athletics. “It’s the people,” she says, when asked about her favorite part of the work. “If you’re not invested in these people, and you don’t want the best for them, and you’re not thinking of them and their best interests first, you’re not going to be successful.”
Both Rodolitz and Healy credit McNeil not just for helping them find NHL jobs but for helping them find success once they got there. “Part of the reason Lauren and I—we’ve been able to excel at these positions so young, because I know we’re both the youngest people who work for our teams, is probably that same trust Kristy gave us,” says Healy.
“Kristy is absolutely incredible,” says Rodolitz. “I tell her all the time I would not have a job in the NHL and be confident about having a job in the NHL if it wasn’t for her. I owe all of this to her, and I think Maggie and Gabby probably feel the same way. Kristy cares so, so much about the team and the players and Michigan as a whole. She does so much work behind the scenes that I think people don’t realize—the strategies behind posting and making sure we have the best graphics and all of that to live up to the standard of the Michigan hockey team. Because obviously the team itself on the ice is very good. We have a great hockey team; we have a great hockey program; Yost is an incredible place to play. And I think she just takes all of that and builds off of it.”
As Blankenburg points out, what makes content like the Monday Question work isn’t just the silliness; it’s also the sincerity of the connection between players that makes the videos resonate. “I always look forward to seeing the questions whenever they post them, and I always see Duker [his former teammate Dylan Duke, running away from the camera after he’s answered],” he says. “Little stuff like that’s funny, and I thought it was cool when they did ‘if you had a message to an old teammate,’ a little bit more heartfelt. I just think that stuff’s cool and a good opportunity for the guys, and I think and hope the fans like it too.” Meanwhile, Bordeleau credits McNeil and company for “showing the fans what they don’t know they wanted to see”—whether that’s a behind-the-scenes look at the locker room or a conversation between players about dog breeds.
For McNeil, the NHL Draft—whether it was the “Michigan draft” of 2021 or Fantilli being selected third overall last June—has provided some of her fondest memories, not just because of the pay-off at the end but more so because of the work that preceded it. Fantilli had arguably the best (freshman) season in the modern history of college hockey last year, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy.
“With Adam last year, he was in the spotlight, and all these people who don’t have what he has are trying to take him down, and I would talk to him all the time like ‘don’t let them do that,” recalls McNeil. "You have the world at your fingertips. Joe Shmoe and what he has to say—that means nothing.’” On his draft night, Fantilli wore a vest with the names of every person who’d helped him get to that moment in his career. “Kristy McNeil” was among them.
“That I had a place in helping him get there was probably one of the highlights of my career, just knowing I actually made an impact on these people and getting them ready,” says McNeil. “Having my name on Adam’s vest means more to me than I think he’ll ever know.”
Meanwhile, in this their first season in the pros, McNeil’s protégés in Rodolitz and Healy have already worked a handful of games together, when the Blue Jackets and Sabres played. “The first one that we worked together was a preseason game,” says Rodolitz. “She came here, and it was surreal. We were running down the hallway like little girls, just so excited that we’d both made it to the NHL. We’d always talked about this.” “It’s been really, really cool to have someone who’s going through all this for the first time at the same time as me,” adds Healy. “It’s been really comforting, because you have a tiring week or a crazy travel schedule, and it’s nice to be able to talk to one of your best friends.”
So, from now on, when you think about Michigan hockey as an NCAA power and NHL factory, be sure to remember that that dominance extends beyond the ice too, because of Kristy McNeil and the family she’s built along the way.
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