Wild Alumnus Huson Finds No Shortage of Hats, Headsets to Wear in Colorado
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – There’s no doubt: Wenatchee Wild alumnus Kyle Huson comes from a sports family.
Younger brother Cody played Division I baseball at Abilene Christian University in Texas. Older sister Lindsay played volleyball at Division II Western Colorado University. His dad, Jeff, enjoyed a 12-year Major League Baseball career with seven teams, including four years with the Texas Rangers and a 1998 season in Washington state with the Seattle Mariners.
Kyle’s chosen sport was hockey, landing an NCAA Division I scholarship out of Wenatchee and eventually taking his game all the way to the broadcast booth in his home state of Colorado. He started following the sport in Texas when he was just a few years old, transfixed by a Dallas Stars game that he attended with his family. The timing for his family’s move to Colorado shortly after that game couldn’t be better – the National Hockey League also moved into the neighborhood, with the Nordiques’ relocation from Quebec City in the summer of 1995. Jeff soon found himself asking for high-level help in getting Kyle started in the sport.
“My dad actually met Patrick Roy’s wife at the gym, since we lived in the same neighborhood,” said Huson. “He said, ‘My son wants to get into hockey, but I’m a baseball guy. I’m from Arizona, and I know nothing about this. Can you help me get started?’ They got in touch with Littleton Hockey, and got me into skating lessons there, and I just got on the ice and started playing. I never took off the skates after that.”
The sport began taking off in the Denver area just as Huson first stepped onto the ice, aided by Colorado’s 1996 Stanley Cup championship and the Avs’ budding rivalry with the Detroit Red Wings, as well as their subsequent title run in 2001 led by legendary defenseman Ray Bourque.
“Growing up, I was entrenched in the perfect time in Colorado to get into hockey,” said Huson. “They’d just moved (from Quebec), and you’ve got (Joe) Sakic, (Patrick) Roy, (Peter) Forsberg, and then Rob Blake joins the team, and obviously Ray Bourque joined and had his amazing run. It was an incredible time to be a hockey fan in Colorado, and get started.”
The move to Colorado gave the family a firm “home base” while Jeff continued his baseball career, which wrapped up with the Chicago Cubs in 2000. His absence during the baseball season meant some heavy-duty coordination between Jeff’s wife Wendy and Kyle’s grandparents, who lived just up the road in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in order to keep the family’s busy school and activity schedule intact. During the offseason, however, Jeff could always be spotted at his kids’ activities and spending extra time with his family.
Having a dad on the major-league diamonds certainly did have its perks, though – nine-year-old Kyle got to serve as a bat boy for the Cubs during his dad’s final season and shag batting-practice balls from slugger Sammy Sosa and pitcher Kerry Wood, who was known for grabbing a bat and taking his hacks in between turns in the pitching rotation.
“I’m able to reflect back and think, that’s not normal,” said Huson. “Not every kid gets to do that, and I’m so appreciative of those times that I was able to do that. I think it helped me, and it helped my siblings too, to get that dugout experience and that clubhouse experience and understanding the professionalism that you have to carry yourself with, and the way that you have to compete in everything that you do. It gave us a cool, unique perspective that I think carried us a long way.”
Huson points to his path in hockey as proof that everyone’s path to success is different, and that playing different sports or being a late bloomer isn’t a hindrance to achieving goals. In his first two years of high school, he moved from midget minor A hockey to getting looks from college and junior scouts as a member of the Colorado Thunderbirds AAA program. Former Wild assistant coach Ryan McKelvie spotted him as the Thunderbirds played through their 2009-10 season, and he would earn a spot on the Wenatchee roster that fall.
The fit was a good one – Huson went on to play 111 North American Hockey League games with the Wild, netting 40 points over two seasons. It was good enough that after his first season with the Wild, Huson decided not to pursue a roster spot in the United States Hockey League, staying in north-central Washington for his 20-year-old season. The bonds he built with his teammates and the atmosphere at Town Toyota Center each night convinced him that becoming a leader in Wenatchee and the conversations he was already having with Division I coaches far outweighed the risks of moving on to an unknown situation elsewhere.
“I fell in love with the town, and had a great billet family in Pam and Rodney Arena,” said Huson. “The thing that I remember aside from the hockey portion of it, every home game day, I’d go to Smitty’s Pancake House and get the same meal. Lorrie Bradley was always there – I’d get the Farmers’ Breakfast with the Swedish crepes, and they’d bring me out hot chocolate with whipped cream. It just became my staple for each and every home game, and I miss being able to do that.”
Playing for the Wild did yield a Division I scholarship to the University of Connecticut, playing alongside former Wenatchee teammate Shawn Pauly. He immediately became a regular in the Huskies’ lineup, playing in all 73 games as a freshman and sophomore and picking up a dozen points in those two years. Though he was out of the lineup more often during his final two seasons with the Huskies, he got a chance to witness the growth of the UConn hockey program firsthand, as the program transitioned from Atlantic Hockey to Hockey East in 2014. Much of the coaching staff from the transition is still in place, though the program finally reached its first two NCAA tournaments in 2025 and 2026.
Being in the UConn program allowed Huson to not only get a good education and build friendships with his teammates, but it allowed him to get his feet wet in broadcasting, handling play-by-play for the school’s student station, WHUS-FM. Much of his radio work at UConn was with the school’s baseball team, but he was able to join the team for the 2016 Women’s Final Four in Indianapolis, as the Huskies earned an unprecedented fourth straight national championship.
Broadcasting became a family affair, too – coming out of college, Huson landed an internship with the former Root Sports television network in Denver. His dad Jeff had joined the Colorado Rockies as a color commentator on the team’s television broadcasts in 2006, giving the two the chance to once again go to the ballpark together each day, just as they had when Jeff was finishing his playing career with the Cubs. The Frederick Keys minor-league baseball team provided the next opportunity, where Kyle spent two seasons as the Class-A team’s Broadcasting, Public Relations & Community Relations Assistant.
He added hockey to the list shortly after, joining USA Hockey in its digital content department, as well as contributing to the NHL’s social media efforts. He got a front-row seat to several of the country’s biggest hockey moments of the early 2020s, providing features and content for three World Junior teams, as well as one trip to the World Championships and the 2022 Paralympic gold medal run, in which the Americans outscored their opponents 30-1.
2021 included a trip to Latvia with the World Championship team featuring former UConn teammate Tage Thompson, as well as the U.S. World Junior team’s title, with the entire tournament played in a “bubble” behind closed doors in Edmonton, Alberta.
“Being a part of the World Junior team that won gold with Cole Caufield, Trevor Zegras, Spencer Knight, Alex Turcotte, Brock Faber, that team was stacked,” said Huson. “It was so special, because we were sitting in a bubble for a month, and had to quarantine in the hotel for four days before we could even start anything.”
Today, he works a number of different sports for the University of Wyoming, where his dad was inducted into the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2015. A resume that featured mostly basketball and baseball a decade ago now includes sports such as soccer and lacrosse, as well as color commentary for Colorado College hockey television broadcasts. Much of the work that goes into calling Wyoming and Colorado College sporting events happens well beforehand, with several hours of preparation before the cameras and microphones are ever turned on.
“You prepare your A material through your Z material, if it’s going to be a blowout or not,” said Huson. “You have to read the game, too – you can’t just be saying something that you want to get in there because you’ve done this prep on it. You think it’s a cool stat, but it has nothing to do with the flow of the game, so I try to keep that in perspective too. Usually, I’ll put the kids to bed and I’ll just sit and watch TV with my wife and do some prep on the computer for a couple of hours, and pulse that out over a few nights.”
Huson is still putting his storytelling and digital skills to work, as the digital marketing manager for Cascade Maverik Lacrosse, a sister company to Bauer Hockey in a sport that is widely considered one of America’s fastest-growing. He and his wife also have grown their family, with two young children that keep them active.
“Among all the craziness, my dream has always been to be a dad, and so I’m living my dream right now, even when they’re fussy,” said Huson. “Being with them and watching them grow, the personality that my son is starting to get at three years old, everything is so special and I feel really blessed to be in the position in life where I’m at.”
