In their own words: Caley Chelios says goodbye

Throughout the season, tampabaylightning.com will periodically talk to Lightning players, coaches or staff to get their first-hand account of a critical moment from the season or just what's on their mind currently.
In this installment on In Their Own Words, we hear from Lightning digital reporter and road radio color commentator Caley Chelios, who is unplugging her headset and switching off her microphone for the final time after five seasons with Tampa Bay. Chelios, along with her husband Danny Vitale, a recently-retired NFL fullback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots, welcomed their first child to the world, daughter Bella, soon after the 2019-20 NHL season paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chelios is currently eight months pregnant with the couple's second child and has decided to step away from the Lightning to focus on her family.
As told to tampabaylightning.com beat writer Bryan Burns, Chelios discusses her time in the radio booth with Lightning play-by-play announcer Dave Mishkin, what it was like to work for the back-to-back Stanley Cup champions and why now was the perfect time to transition into being a full-time mom.

I'm about to embark on a new journey in my life, but, unfortunately, that means I will no longer be working for the Tampa Bay Lightning organization. I had a baby - our daughter Bella -- during the pandemic and that sort of changed everything. I was fortunate enough to be able to still work from home and be a part of the organization, cover the team and do what I love in a very unique circumstance. But that's no longer feasible. I'm starting a family. My husband and I have our second baby on the way, and we'd love to have more if we can. After having a year and a half with my husband and with my baby and being around my family during Covid, it just kind of solidified that this is going to be a time where I need to make my family my priority and be around my kids while they're young and be at home and be a mom. It felt like the only way to do that was to be with my husband full time. We were doing long distance before when I was living in Tampa. I loved my job with the Lightning and would love to keep doing it. But this is a new chapter in my life. We always wanted kids and a family. It was kind of something that I thought would happen later down the road but ended up happening sooner. We're excited for it, but obviously it's a little bittersweet because I would have loved to continue my time with Dave (Mishkin) on the radio and calling games and working as a digital reporter with everybody. But, ultimately, after Covid and everything and starting our family, I just can't continue to be in Tampa and work full time and be a full-time mom.
We recently bought a house in the Chicago suburbs and my parents live close by and it's been great to have them around to watch Bella grow and help out with raising her. Right now, they live an hour away in downtown Chicago, but they bought a house recently that's pretty much next door to us. They sold our childhood home in Michigan last May during the pandemic and then moved downtown. And so they were kind of waiting for one more move to their next house but didn't know where that was going to be, and now that Danny and I are starting a family in Barrington they are going to be down the road and plan to help out with kids and be full-time grandparents. They're relatively close now, but the traffic in Chicago is so bad they're always an hour, an hour and 15 minutes away. They make the trip up a lot now that they bought a house down the street. They've been meeting with the contractors and all that kind of stuff. They're around a lot and we try to go downtown when we can since it's the summer, so it's nice. It makes a difference. We had Bella for three months and they hadn't met her yet and it was weird and then ever since we came here it was hard to envision going back to Florida because we didn't even know until Danny retired this past June whether or not he was going to be playing football. So it's kind of been like three months now we know for sure we're going to be in Chicago.
My husband Danny had been beaten up pretty good from football and just came off a knee surgery and decided he was going to retire. Fortunately, unlike a lot of people, he was ready. He was going to the Patriots, and it was just going to be hard to physically keep up when he wasn't healthy. He just was ready mentally to move on and figure out what the next thing he wanted to do was. And I think that stability of being at home with me and kids and not having to move around everywhere and potentially bounce around from team to team with two kids when he didn't want to do it anymore was a big factor in his decision. He was ready. His body was pretty much done. It was good that he was able to come to terms with the decision on his own. For the first time in a long time, he's feeling excited and ambitious to go on to the next thing in his life and start the job hunt. He had kind of an unintentional retirement on LinkedIn, which garnered a lot of attention from employers looking to hopefully hire. He got pretty lucky that he has so many connections playing at Northwestern and being in Chicago.
For the last year-and-a-half, I've been working from home in Chicago. As the 2019-20 season was coming down the stretch, I came off the road because I was pregnant with Bella and my doctor decided it was best for me not to travel anymore. Then Covid hit and we started working remotely, so I went back to be with my family. I think the transition of getting to work from home was great for me mentally because it wasn't just an abrupt ending for me. It was awesome still being a part of it, still being a part of the camaraderie and the excitement with all my colleagues with the Lightning and then still getting to talk to the players and coaches over the phone and through Zoom. I didn't really feel like I was that far away. Even though Covid was unfortunate, it was still a very unique circumstance for me and kind of fortuitous that I got to work from home and be there to raise Bella at the same time. I'm a little sad to have to stop working for the Lightning because I was so ready to continue growing my career. But I feel like right now, even financially putting that aside, I just feel like I should be present for my family. Two kids under two years old is going to be a handful. My priority right now is being a mom and if I freelance and still stay in hockey as much as possible, I'm going to try to do both and do what I can. But it would have to be a pretty fortunate opportunity that comes up to be able to do both and not have to rely on full-time help at home in order to do that. So I want to be present while the kids are young and then I hope to definitely return once they're a little bit older and in school full time. That's my goal.
One of the most surreal experiences I had with the Lightning was the night they won the Stanley Cup for the second-straight season after beating Montreal in Game 5. I got to come back to the arena for the first time in a year and a half. Getting to see everybody and be back in an arena was such a strange situation, and it felt like I'd never left even though I was gone for so long. And then watching everybody celebrate and enjoy the win together after what was such a hard year was pretty surreal, and it was kind of bittersweet because I knew at the time it was probably the last time I'll see a lot of colleagues but also some of the players and coaches and staff that have been there since I got there. It was kind of cool but also a little sad at the same time. It was such a great group of people to be around and a great organization. Getting to do my job for the first time in person after a year and a half just reminded me how much I loved it. I've obviously learned so much from Dave over the last couple of years working with him in the booth. And it also was kind of a wake-up call that I have so many more years and so far to go, which is kind of exciting. I mean, he has 20-plus years of experience. Initially, when I started calling games with Dave, it was really intimidating. I lacked confidence. I was very self-conscious about being a female voice, but it was also something new and if it wasn't for Dave, I don't think I would have been able to do it because he was the biggest supporter and he was the one who really got my foot in the door by just being genuine and generous with his time in sharing a seat with him in the booth. It was really him and back in the day [former Lightning director of broadcasting] Matt Sammon who kind of helped me get there as far as starting color with the Lightning and then [former Lightning executive vice president of communications] Bill Wickett at the time allowing me to become a broadcaster and still do the digital reporting at the same time. I talked to Dave a couple days ago and I couldn't thank him enough for never treating me any differently or like I was a rookie or someone new and for all the advice and everything he gave me because I quickly learned once I started working with him that it's going to take 10-15 years to be able to get to where I want to go and be as eloquent and as good at the job as he is. It takes time. I saw hockey and watched it differently because of him, and I'm grateful for that. My time with Dave was unforgettable, and it was an incredible experience to be able to start in radio and especially alongside somebody so intelligent but that just sees the game on a different level that I've never watched it or evaluated it on. I'd always wanted to be an analyst, but there was just never a space I thought. Coming out of grad school, there were no women I saw really doing any analyst work. It made sense at the time, you want to talk to a former NHL player, not someone who just grew up playing and watching like so many other people. But working with Dave and watching the game and learning how to analyze it, break it down and condense it in an artful and eloquent way is such a skill and it's a unique skill that not everybody can do. So, it definitely made me want to just keep practicing and working. I hope it's like riding a bike when I come back, which is what he said it will be like. I told him I'll hopefully see him down the road in a booth one day together again whether it's alongside him or for another team or some other situation. He definitely gave me the drive and the hunger to want to get better and be a good leader, an example and a hard-working broadcaster.
I had never seen myself in Florida previously. I just had no idea what to expect and I was very pleasantly surprised by how much of a hockey town Tampa is -- not to sound cliché -- and just the work behind the scenes that's gone into the team with [Lightning vice president of game presentation] John Franzone and everybody who makes the game-day experience a production. I'd really never seen so much of the behind the scenes and what happens to put on a hockey game my whole life because I'd never worked or been around the people that make it all happen. I thought it was amazing. When I came to Tampa, ESPN had ranked the Lightning number one it its Ultimate Standings. That was like one of my first days in my building, and it was like, 'Well, Tampa's at the height of its success right now as an organization.' The ownership was talked about so highly. My first year the team didn't make the playoffs. The second year is when they went to the Conference Finals and lost to the Caps. So it was exciting going from my first year and getting to know the team and the area and just finding the little niches. It was great. There's a lot of great people, great food, culture, atmosphere. There's so much to love about living there and how easy it was living within walking distance to the arena. It makes me never want to live more than an eight-minute walk again from anywhere I work. It was pretty cool going along Bayshore Boulevard and Harbour Island to work at AMALIE Arena every day, and it was something I'm really grateful for and probably appreciate more now that I'm now there. I did love the city. I didn't really know what to expect and had never been there before and it was really, really nice. Being in Tampa was kind of a surreal experience just not having any idea what I was getting into moving down to Florida. I felt like I had a second family spending an 82-game season with my small circle of friends that I work with every single day and traveling and being around the team. As a former athlete, it was such an easy transition to being around arenas and everything, so I think I'll miss going to the rink every day and seeing my team in addition to watching the Lightning for a job. It was so easy for that to be fun.