Shumway Uses Hockey to Power Into Post-Hockey Career in Iowa

SPIRIT LAKE, Iowa – Hockey and golf provided the spark…now, the fastest sport on ice has powered Brad Shumway to a career with Alliant Energy in northwest Iowa. With his spare time, he still hits the links, while helping to build the hockey scene in one of the Hawkeye State’s vacation capitals.

He grew up in Lafayette, Colorado, between Denver and the nearby city of Boulder, and his upbringing came at the perfect time and place: near a YMCA with an ice rink, as the newly-minted Colorado Avalanche were becoming a force on the sports scene in the Front Range. The Avs moved to downtown Denver when Shumway was just three years old, and all it took was one year for the club to bring Colorado its first Stanley Cup.

“They built the YMCA a year or two after they won the Cup, and it had the ice rink in there right away,” said Shumway. “The Y said, ‘You know, hockey is a good sport, maybe we should invest in that.’ All the rinks I played at growing up, they got built around that late ’90s, early 2000s time. My group of ’90 to ’94 birth years was the first to start getting really good in Colorado, and then you’d see a lot more people on the radar in Colorado.”

Shumway started with other sports at the YMCA, but soon heard the suggestion that he give it a whirl on the facility’s ice rink. One thing quickly led to another, and another, and another – house-league hockey gave way to travel hockey, which gave way to a spell with the Team Rocky Mountain AAA program, and even a trip to Quebec City to play in the annual Quebec International Peewee Hockey Tournament.

Hockey wasn’t the only sport that helped him stay in the swing of things – both of Shumway’s parents helped introduce him to golf, and he became one of the state’s top high school golfers during his career at Peak to Peak High School. After a top-13 finish at the state meet as an individual in 2008 and a seventh-place finish as a team, he helped the Pumas rise to third in the 3A team race in 2009.

After a brief call-up to Wenatchee during the 2009-10 season, he came to the Wild full-time in the fall of 2010, and picked up 15 assists in his debut junior season on the way to 34 wins and a second-place finish in the North American Hockey League’s West Division. As he settled into his brief junior hockey career, he came to an area that was still eagerly getting acquainted with the sport, in only the third year for both the club and the arena.

“The biggest thing to me was, we had the best fan base,” said Shumway. “Our arena was always packed, and these other places that we’d go on the road would sometimes have an empty barn. The community was so supportive of us, and they would do anything for us. My billets were amazing people as well – they made my experience awesome. In general, the community support was amazing for such a small town in the middle of Washington state.”

Wild head coach Paul Baxter became Wichita Falls Wildcats head coach Paul Baxter shortly after the 2011 playoff run wrapped up, and Shumway quickly joined his bench boss in the move to Texas. Midway through the season, he was on the move again, joining the United States Hockey League’s Chicago Steel in a trade and helping them make a late-season run before falling just three points shy of the Clark Cup playoffs.

Early in his final year of junior hockey, Shumway also made his college choice, selecting the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. RIT proved to be a good selection, and a well-timed one at that – the Tigers had just climbed to the Division I ranks in 2005 and won their first Atlantic Hockey tournament title in 2010, roaring all the way to the Frozen Four in their first Division I tournament.

After winning 15 games in Shumway’s freshman season and just 12 during his sophomore campaign, RIT returned to the top of the Atlantic Hockey leaderboard in 2015, winning the conference tournament and upending top national seed Minnesota State in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. The Tigers made it back to the tourney again in 2016, with Shumway making 102 appearances over a four-year college career.

“My first year, we had a really good underclass come and help us,” said Shumway. “It was definitely my kind of class – after a year or two, we just needed to put more work into the offseason, and we were all just very committed, and our underclassmen bought in with us from that. You could just tell our work ethic helped propel us my last two years at RIT.”

While in New York, he played under a legendary coaching duo, with Wayne Wilson at the helm and Brian Hills serving as his top assistant. Wilson won 471 games over 26 years at RIT, and helped shepherd the program from Division III to Division I. 349 of those wins came with Hills as his top assistant, beginning with the move to Division I in 2005. The two both announced their retirements following the Tigers’ most recent season.

“They were very relaxed and made it very fun,” said Shumway. “As you get older, sometimes it becomes too much of a business and you take it too seriously, but they always kept it loose and light. They made it fun for us, but they knew when to turn the knob to say, ‘Hey, we need more from you guys.’ They had a positive culture that we all bought into, and they would do anything for us – if we needed more film or whatever we needed, they were there. They were very good at preparing for games – we scouted teams really well, and we always knew what the other team was going to do.”

RIT was a good fit for Shumway academically as well – thanks to a deep interest in math, he graduated in the spring of 2016 with a degree in electrical engineering, and landed his first job out of college with Alliant Energy. As he arrived in town, he found a hockey culture just taking off – the first sheet of ice in the area was an outdoor rink built in 2002, and the current Lakes Ice Arena was completed a decade later.

Today, Shumway spends some of his free time as the Lakes Area Hockey Association’s hockey director, overseeing a program with more than 120 participants and the Boji Mammoths co-op high school program in the Midwest High School Hockey League.

“When I got here, I saw that they had a rink here, so I inquired what was going on, and I met the guy who was running the program. He gave me the lowdown and said they were always in need of coaches. I just got a passion for coaching,” said Shumway. “We’re definitely more established, especially with the teams we play in Iowa and southwest Minnesota. They know who we are now. They’re coming to our tournaments, so we keep growing every year. With my job, it’s very busy from spring to fall, and then once winter hits, it slows down, so this is something for me to do in the winter.”

As for golf, Shumway still counts himself a two-sport athlete.

“We have three 18-hole courses and a nine-hole course right here (in the region), and they’re always full in the summer,” said Shumway. “We get great turnouts – our league is really good for a small town. We do two-man teams, and we have 36 teams that fill the whole course that I play at. People are fighting for spots, just because it’s a resort town, and people love to golf.”