Around 10 a.m. on Sep. 24, just a week before the start of the regular season, the Northeastern women’s hockey team went from a full squad of 26 players to 25.
An hour and a half later, an email from Brigitte Aube, a sophomore on Northeastern’s women’s club hockey team, graced the inboxes of the Huskies’ coaching staff. Oblivious to the team’s sudden roster shortage, Aube was merely inquiring about a spot as a practice player with the Division I team.
Within minutes, Aube’s phone lit up from an unknown number.
“Hey Brigitte,” the text read. “Coach Carpenito from women’s hockey here. What are the odds you can swing by the rink today?”
It took Aube eight minutes to respond. She met with the coaching staff later that afternoon to discuss matters far greater than practice player status — she immediately filed paperwork to register for NCAA eligibility.
Within six hours of her cold email about becoming a practice player, Aube was a full member of Northeastern’s women’s hockey team, bringing the roster back to a squad of 26.
The only word to describe the serendipity of that day is unprecedented. The last — and only — other time that a club player has made her way onto the varsity roster was Zoe Zisis, the third-string goaltender for the 2012-2013 version of the team.
But following freshman Hannah Christenson’s unexpected resignation from the team due to personal reasons, the Northeastern coaching staff turned to Aube to fill the open spot on the roster. She was coming off a season where she ranked second on the club team with 19 points.
Up until that day, Division I hockey was nothing more than a pipe dream for Aube after a high school career derailed by three knee surgeries and constant recovery setbacks. The events of Sep. 24 were the culmination of years of persistence to reach a goal that once seemed insurmountable.
“It was a situation of tremendous timing on all fronts,” Northeastern associate head coach Nick Carpenito said. “The ‘why her’ was her enthusiasm. We knew she was driven. We knew after talking to her coaches, she was a tremendous person… The most important thing for us is that she’s just a grateful person that we knew would bring a ton of value to the culture of the locker room.”
Aube comes from a family of hockey players; her father, Rene Aube, played for Brown in 1987, and both her brothers played youth hockey. The Avon, Connecticut, native had been surrounded by the sport her whole life and began herself at the age of four. Playing in college had “never not been on [her] mind.”
Hockey was the love of her life.
Aube set out on the right path towards Division I dreams by attending the Loomis Chaffee School, a hockey program that has regularly found itself in contention for NEPSAC championships across recent history. Loomis has produced many significant Northeastern alumni, notably including goaltender Brittany Bugalski, a three-year starter for the Huskies who currently ranks fifth all-time in career wins, and defender Paige Capistran, Northeastern’s captain for the 2019-20 season, who went on to play for the Boston Pride in the NWHL.
But Aube hit a roadblock when she suffered a torn ACL before the start of her freshman year of high school. Loomis girls varsity hockey head coach Liz Leyden had years of background with Aube, the latter having attended Leyden’s hockey clinics since the fifth grade. Aube’s character was more than enough for Leyden to know that she was the type of person she wanted on her team, regardless of injury.
But the first ACL surgery was only the beginning of Aube’s health struggles.
Due to the improper healing of her knee after her initial surgery, Aube ended up getting two more surgeries on the same knee, taking her total to three in the span of four years. She only ended up playing two games in her Loomis career.
“Every time she got healthy, something else happened,” Leyden said. “It was just like these weird and bizarre things. Watching that, your heart goes out to her… It’s hard to be a teenager and be hurt all the time, much less a kid who loves sports and that’s where their identity comes from.”
It was deflating for Aube, who spent each school year on the mend, her summers filled with training to return to the ice. But once the next season came around, all of her progress came undone due to circumstances out of her control.
“Am I really gonna let timing be the reason why this isn’t gonna come true?” Aube said. “That was my whole high school experience, summed up. You constantly have that regret about timing, and it eats you up.”
Determined not to let her time in high school pass her by, Aube decided to become a student of the game and work with the coaching staff. Armed with a clipboard adorned with her name, she continued to show up for practices and games and held her teammates accountable.
“In her later years at Loomis, she understood what I wanted, understood the team, and was able to provide positive feedback,” Leyden said. “For that to be who she was as a high school student is pretty remarkable… I’ve been at Loomis for 17 years, and she is in the top three of most authentically positive people I’ve ever worked with and met.”
But warming the bench and playing two total high school games doesn’t get you scouted by colleges, and eventually, the time came for Aube to face the harsh reality that was fast approaching: Division I hockey just wasn’t in her future.
So she pivoted.
Instead of harping on what could have been, Aube decided she would draw from her own injury experiences and pursue a path of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. She shifted not her priorities, but her approach, choosing to follow an academic avenue with which she could maintain her connection with the sport.
“I told her, ‘You will always be able to figure out where hockey can fit in your life,’” Leyden said. “It doesn’t have to be the Division I level. There’s going to be multiple ways. Find the program that seems like the one that you will thrive in.”
It was a hard pill to swallow, though. Even as she was applying to Northeastern, she had that lingering thought that maybe, just maybe, there could be a shot at continuing her hockey ambitions.
Immediately after arriving in Boston, her first course of action was to email Northeastern’s varsity coaching staff to inquire about any sort of potential to even just be a practice player with the team.
In the back of her mind, she knew it was more than a long shot. But it was a shot worth taking for Aube; after all, she’d be no worse off if the answer was no.
And the answer was, in fact, no.
That did not stop her, though. Aube committed to finding ways to get on the ice, and naturally, the club hockey team became her pathway back to playing.
“The first time I saw Brigitte on the ice, the thing that stuck in my head was that she just has such a good sense of the game,” said Ryan Schneider, head coach of the Northeastern women’s club hockey team. “You can tell that she was, and is, the type of player that can be recruited from a power hockey school, and just something got in the way.”
Aube immediately launched herself into playing, aiming to make up for all the ice time she lost over the years. She committed herself to training as if she were a varsity athlete, taking the ice every moment she possibly could, even going so far as to befriend the rink staff at Matthews Arena to find out when there was free time to get some extra skating in.
On weekdays, as early as 6 a.m., it would not be out of the ordinary for an onlooker at Matthews to see Aube on the ice, going over power skating drills, bringing bumpers and cones out, and working on one-timers. When she couldn’t get on the ice, she’d simply put her headphones on and run stairs.
“The only way I could kind of reconcile with the fact that I was on club and not really living out the dream that I wanted was to pretend that I was like a D1 player,” Aube said. “I trained like I was one. I pretended like I was one. I was in the rinks early, like I was one. That was my entire mentality. Like, that was the most delusional thing you could ever possibly imagine.”
But even with her mind chasing a fantasy, Aube remained focused on enjoying her experience on the club team. In her lone year on the club roster, she played in 15 games and racked up nine assists and 10 goals, the latter of which tied for first on the team.
It was exactly what she needed. She hadn’t seen any legitimate game action for nearly four years, and club hockey offered her a chance to get genuine competitive gameplay back under her belt. Division I dreams don’t go away overnight, though. And even though the what-ifs were always in Aube’s mind, not even she was fully convinced that making the varsity roster was in the cards for her.
Still, at the start of the semester, she opted to try again, sending that fated email on the afternoon of Sep. 24.
“Before any of the stuff happened that freed that spot up, we were coming in for preseason, like coming in the office, and we’d see a kid out there,” Carpenito said. “Out on the ice with a Loomis helmet, doing skills by herself, it was impressive. We were like, ‘Oh my God, who was that kid? We should probably figure out who it is.’ So that was in the back of our mind before we even had the situation that we had.”
Carpenito reached out to the staff at Matthews Arena, who confirmed that it was, in fact, Aube whom they had seen. His next call was to Leyden, someone with whom he and Northeastern head coach Dave Flint maintained a strong rapport after years of recruiting from her team and throughout the NEPSAC.
With Northeastern looking to be able to run five full offensive lines in practices, filling the final roster spot was a priority with just days until the season got underway. They did not want to offer the spot up to just anyone, though; the right culture fit was a crucial part of the decision.
“The questions they asked me were about her character, who she is,” Leyden said. “And I’m like, ‘Brigitte can do this, she will be the biggest cheerleader, the biggest supporter of everyone on the team… [she] is going to be the person that supports and works hard because that’s the right thing to do, works hard because that betters others.’”
Leyden’s words affirmed everything Northeastern’s staff needed to know about Aube to offer her the remaining spot.
It cannot be stressed enough how fortuitous and coincidental the events of that day were. Sure, had Aube sent an email a few days prior, she may have been on the minds of the Northeastern coaching staff once they had a roster spot open up. Had that email been sent a couple of days later, there’d be a chance that the Huskies hadn’t filled their roster back to 26, and Aube could still have her shot.
But for the entire event to happen over the course of six hours was truly nothing short of destiny.
With club hockey in her past and Division I now her present, Aube has fit seamlessly into the daily operations of the team. Missing the first few weeks of preseason practice required some catch-up to learn the team’s plays and structure, but Aube was more than willing to go the extra mile to make sure she got up to speed quickly.
“She’s one of the hardest working people on the team,” Northeastern captain Lily Shannon said. “She’s out there grinding and she’s competing right with us… She’s made it so easy, and she’s asked questions, not just to me, but the other captains too.”
From scheduling extra video sessions with Carpenito to working with assistant captain Kristina Allard on weight room techniques, Aube is committed to honing her craft at the magnitude that Division I requires, both metaphorically and literally.
“She’ll go up against Tristan Thompson,” Shannon said (Aube stands at 5-foot-2. Thompson, a sophomore defender, is the tallest member of the team at 6-foot-2). “We were playing a two-on-two game, and Tristan was on one team and she was defending Brigitte, and the height difference is crazy, but she would push right back at her, and I think that just shows a lot. Even though she’s small, she’s mighty and she’s willing to dig deep and battle right with us.”
Aube’s next hurdle is to make her way onto a linesheet and record her first minutes of NCAA hockey. The idea of one day dressing for a game, wearing the Northeastern emblem across her chest, wakes her up each morning and pushes her to keep improving.
No walk-on has ever achieved this feat at Northeastern (Zisis did not record any ice time in her lone season in 2012-2013). But Aube now has a proven track record of making the impossible a reality and is improving quickly with her heavy training load and a clean bill of health.
For now, though, she is enjoying living out her lifelong ambition.
“I still pinch myself to this day because I can’t believe that this is really happening to me,” Aube said. “Even your craziest possible dreams can possibly come true.”
Daisy Roberts is a hockey, basketball, and baseball broadcaster and writer for WRBB Sports. She has been covering Northeastern Athletics for five years. You can read her content here and follow her on X here.