The Carpool Kids | FEATURE

When Jack Hughes, Kevin Bahl, and Michael McLeod each pull up to Prudential Center for a practice or game, they may arrive at different times, in different cars. They're young adults on their own schedules, with their own routines.

But they can all remember a time when that wasn't the case: The early 2000s.

Growing up just outside of Toronto, Canada, in the Greater Toronto Area, as it is called, there was always some combination of the Hughes brothers, McLeod brothers and Kevin Bahl hopping in and out of the backseat of Mom or Dad’s car, eager to rush into the rink as ‘pipsqueaks’, to use Kevin Bahl’s verbiage.

They all grew up a short distance from one another and with endless hockey practices and hours, sharing the driving does everyone a favor. Jack and Luke lived just ten minutes from the McLeods, while Bahl lived just a bit further, Jack recalls. And it was a rotation of their parents who would shuttle the boys to and from arenas all over. Jack would carpool most with Bahl, while Mike McLeod would at times hop in cars with Jack and Luke's older brother Quinn.

And Luke? Well, poor Luke was sadly left behind, not quite ready yet.

"He was like three years old," McLeod laughed.

"When I was younger, it was like, he's just Jack's baby brother running around," Bahl, who now sits next to Luke in the locker room, smirked.

It has been a long while now since the carpooling began, roughly from the time Jack was six years old. There's a whole rolodex of moments spent together as kids, well before NHL road trips. Now they travel together on team buses and planes, but they all got their start in carpools.

And there were many.

"There were hundreds of them," Jack said, "we played together for a bunch of years."

"We kind of all lived close to each other," Jack remembered, "A bunch of us lived in the same areas. I don't know how far I lived from Bahler but I lived like ten minutes from Mikey."

Now in their 20's, it's harder to recall specific moments of carpooling, but memory serves well how although grown up now, they're very much the same type of kids they once were.

"It's so long ago, but he's just the same," Jack said of Bahl, "He says a lot! Not in front of the camera, but he says a lot."

"Jack was, just himself," Bahl grinned.

In and out of cars, in and out of hockey rinks, they all have a long history together, which is probably why they're all so comfortable poking fun at each other. Hughes and Bahl in particular played against each other a lot, both played for their neighborhood teams in Mississauga, Ontario and in tournaments where they were representing their respective countries, Jack the USA, Bahl, Canada.

"I was with the Meadowvale Hawks and he was with Lorne Park," Bahl said of their youngest days in Mississauga., "Jack's crew was together so long, there's so many guys that were together for seven years, literally from five to like 16 years old. Not even joking, that long."

Asking each to recollect their car rides as kids meant they'd have to dig deep into the memory bank. Nothing sprang to mind immediately, perhaps because there were a lot of early-hour rides. It's not always easy to remember things on the spot, but they do all have a story or two to share about their very early days of playing hockey before the NHL was even close.

"My dad built a rink on top of our outdoor pool," Bahl shared of a time when he was just eight years old playing with the Hughes'. "The boards were a wooden fence pretty much, so we were out there and we would just be hitting each other. We'd have broken boards and we had to replace a whole bunch of fence panels. There were just shrubs on one side and we'd hit each other into them."

McLeod remembers specifically being in New Hampshire with the Hughes family, where his older brother was playing in a tournament. The Hughes' kept a home in New Hampshire, and competition grew fierce when the two hockey families were together. At 25 and 22 respectively, the age difference between seven and ten felt far bigger than their current age gap, especially with little brother Luke tagging along "he was just four or five," McLeod said.

"Whenever I see (McLeod's parents) Judy and Rich, I always give them a hug," Hughes said. "They were the same as us, they were three kids that were all the same age as us. They were just a really good family for us to follow. They were the same as us, they all played tons of sports, they were crazy athletic, we were crazy athletic. They were always on the go."

"Everyone loved it," Hughes said of their friendly competitions, "Luke was like Little Lukey, that's why it's just funny, how good of friends I am with Mike. When I'm like 11 and he was 14, it's almost like you're the little friend."

They each had big smiles and subtle laughs during their conversations about their childhood hockey together. It is quite remarkable that from those early days, they now share the same locker room at the National Hockey League level. Bahl in particular, has had a front-row seat for over 15 years of watching Jack rise to superstardom, something that was never in doubt. As Bahl answered a question about Jack's talents and a young kid, Jack happened to walk through the dressing room.

"He was unbelievable," Bahl said, which caught Jack's attention.

Jack jokingly mimicked Bahl's comment, before he found out the defenseman only had nice things to say about him. That's when he stopped in his tracks, turned around, and offered this little tidbit:

"I remember playing against Bahler. I'll tell you this, we used to pre-scout Bahler a lot," he quipped. "He was better, by a mile."

Both laughed and launched chirps at each other, just as kids would do.

For McLeod, he is older than Jack by three years, and they didn't cross paths as much on the ice, or in the carpool rotation, but that didn't mean he didn't hear the hockey circles talking about the middle Hughes brother.

"Growing up in the same area, you always heard about Jack," McLeod said, "Jack was always a superstar growing up. You'd always hear about him."

But now they're all teammates at the NHL level, each rolling up to the same arena in their respective cars, gone are the days of Mom and Dad's carpools. It's all pretty remarkable.

How fortuitous that everything would come full circle, from their days as little kids, six and seven years old, dreaming big. No one could have imagined, that in one way or another, they'd be sharing the same NHL locker room.

"It's crazy what a small world, I mean, we were six, seven years old playing backyard hockey together," Bahl said, "And then for five years later I don't see him again and then back in the same dressing room."

"It's definitely pretty crazy," Hughes said, "Mike is with the Devils, I happened to get drafted by the Devils and then we're trading (Taylor Hall) and the missing piece was Kevin Bahl. You all go different ways and then you all end up in the same spot. It's crazy."