Abby Lin founded the Auburn University women's hockey team in Alabama, and on her way out of the program, received an unforgettable thanks from the club.

Auburn Women’s Club Ice Hockey player and founder Abby Lin received the honor of a lifetime when the Auburn hockey team retired her number on her senior night.

Lin founded the women’s hockey club at Auburn after noticing the school lacked one. She worked with other schools and leagues to grow the team, and her dedication paid off when the program announced that no one would wear number 14 again. On her senior night, a banner bearing her name and number was raised to the rafters, permanently honoring her contributions to women’s ice hockey in the South.

Growing up in Tennessee, Lin started playing ice hockey at eight years old and quickly fell in love with the sport. She played in men’s leagues until high school, but by the time she discovered women’s ice hockey, it was too late for her to be recruited.

She decided to focus on her major and “put hockey aside for a bit." Lin is an Exercise Science major on a Pre-Med track. She thought she wanted to be an aerospace engineer, and finding a school that had that specific major was not easy.

After graduating high school in 2020, Lin decided to go to Auburn University to focus on her studies. Hockey still remained in the back of her mind, and when Lin realized Auburn didn’t have a women’s hockey team, she quickly got to work.

“I enjoyed women's hockey in high school, [and thought] what if there was a women's team? I was like ‘I'll just try and start a team. How hard could it be?’” Lin asked.

She then decided to reached out to the club sports department at Auburn.

She got a response quickly, she explained, “they sent me just a checklist of things to get done, to be a student organization. So that's how I started and just went through all the checklist items."

The summer heading into her first year at Auburn, Lin began working on creating a women’s team. She needed to find a club advisor, start a bank account, find players, coaches, a rink, and equipment.

Finding players was at the top of the list for Lin. She posted in a Facebook group, trying to recruit other girls to play.

She sent out the message, “Hey, I'm trying to make a team. Does anybody want to join?” As Lin said, “within the first week, I had the 10. Now, it fluctuated like people would leave and people would join, but it always remained around 10 people. That wasn't really the hard part.”

What was the hard part? For Lin, it was finding an advisor. The university was still online for COVID-19 regulations, and finding a Auburn faculty member who was willing to be the advisor for the team took time.

Eventually Lin found an advisor and once she had completed every step on the checklist, she was ready for the next question: Who do they play?

Once again Lin took to Facebook. She sent a message to surrounding schools asking if they had any interest in either starting a team or had an existing team that was willing to play the newly formed Auburn Women’s Club Ice Hockey team.

Lin was eager to start facing other teams and she even offered to help other schools set up their own program. She sent out many posts asking if there were teams who were interested in playing, and finally she had some luck.

“I had posted in Georgia's group, and a girl named Hannah Knight, DM’d me, and was like, ‘hey, I've actually already made a team here.’ I was like, ‘perfect, let's play each other’,” she said.

Knight and Lin worked together in the Auburn inaugural season to schedule five games against one another.

“Everybody knows Auburn-Georgia, big rivalry, but not with us. We were all friends, and picking each other up off the ice. It was just a ton of fun,” said Lin.

The teams eventually teamed up to create a women’s division in the CHS [College Hockey South]. It began with just six schools; Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, Tampa, Miami and South Florida.

Now the league has ten teams and is looking to expand further in the coming years.

Not only is the league growing, Auburn’s team is growing as well. In the inaugural year, there were ten players. Now, there are 18.

“It's definitely developing. This year has been a lot of fun. This group is, at least for me, like family,” said Lin.

Lin’s “family” of Auburn hockey players worked up a huge surprise for Lin’s senior night. The team decided to retire Lin’s number (14), and created a banner to hang in the rafters forever. Her family and teammates gathered on Senior Night to see the banner go up, but Lin was clueless.

“We were doing all the senior night stuff, and I was like, ‘okay, cool, that's it.’” said Lin, however there was another surprise in store for her.

“Caitlin, our president, was like, ‘no, no, stay right here’. [I thought] ‘okay, well, what's going on?’ And she started talking about how number 14 will ever be worn again. I was like, ‘what's going on?’ And then they unveiled a banner,” Lin explained.

Lin was emotional retelling the story of how the team decided to honor her. She said she is still overwhelmed with “positive emotions." She worked for four years to get Auburn a women’s hockey program, and now her legacy will remain at the school.

One week after senior night she still is wrapping her head around the honor," she said, “now that I've been able to process it a little longer, I'm just so very grateful."

As for the future, the team is headed to playoffs this weekend. Lin hopes to stay around ice hockey as she continues her career in medical school. For her, the dream would be playing in a beer league or coaching. However the season isn’t done yet and as the team heads to playoffs, they can look up and see Lin’s banner hanging from the rafters.

Lin said she is still overwhelmed with positive emotion, but the banner has a deeper meaning for her.

“When I look at the banner, I don't think that's for me," says Lin. "That's for this little girls out there, for the little Columbus girls who you know are playing hockey. They're eight year eight years old, and that's for them to look up to and be like, hey I can go play college hockey one day."