The former Capitals star started his own travel company, World Playground, in 2020.
Washington Capitals alum Brooks Laich isn't the kind of person who can sit still.
After 13 years in the NHL, Laich had all the time in the world, and all the energy to go with it. Now, it was just a matter of finding out what to do with it.
So, when he got a message from influencer Garrett Gee of The Bucket List Family asking if he wanted to swim with the humpback whales in Tonga, Laich immediately responded with a yes.
"I wasn't playing hockey anymore. I didn't have a schedule. I didn't have to be at practice or games or meetings... all of this energy isn't just dedicated into practice and games and physicality and like, I'm like, 'What do I do with all of this energy?' I'm like, 'I gotta go. I gotta go do something,'" Laich said. "So I fly to Tonga. I meet Garrett and Jess. We swim to the humpback whales. It's absolutely amazing. Then, I had the means and I had the time and I had the energy. So the world is now open to me. I'm like, 'What else do I want to do?'"
From there, Laich went just about everywhere, from summiting Kilomanjaro with his mom to going on a safari in Tanzania to hiking with gorillas in Rwanda.
Something in Laich clicked then, and he realized that his calling was to take the world by storm, and as he says, "ride the lightning."
"I never had the time for these opportunities when playing professional sports. And then I was like, 'Okay, I had two years of this.' I'm like, 'What do I want to do in life? What's my impact? What I want to do?'"
When he was with Washington, Laich had signed his autographs with a saying: "The world is your playground." In 2016, Laich adopted social media handles for the phrase "world playground," not knowing what he wanted to do with it.
At that point, all he knew is that he was looking for the next chapter after hockey, loved to travel and didn't want to go broke doing it.
Four years later, he used them for the first time as he founded World Playground, his own travel company that aims to take travelers on the ultimate adventures and putting a stop to hiked up pricing through commissions and markups.
"I love to travel. I have traveled to some destinations I'm pretty sure other people would want to go to, and I love the team collective, or the team component. I love being on a team. I love the power of a collective. I love a group," Laich said. "How can I apply some intelligence to figure out what this could be for from a business standpoint, and that's how I came up with World Playground.
"We want to take people on the ultimate bucket list, list adventures around the world to the best place for the best thing at the best time of year," Laich said. "It took off."
Since then, Laich has traveled the world and helped others accomplish the same. But, beyond travel, he wants to use his platform to also cut travel costs associated with hockey to help more players play the game and have the opportunity to play at different levels.
"(People) spend so much money on hotels, everything outside of the sport. Youth sports and playing hockey is so expensive, off the ice as well as on the ice with equipment and ice rentals," Laich said. "Our platform makes hockey more affordable for people, not just travel and adventure and safaris and bucket list stuff, but just the every day person that's trying to get their kid to a tournament for the weekend."
Ultimately, for Laich, It's his way of helping give back after being given everything through professional sports and world adventures, and this is just the start.