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From an early age, record-setting University of New Brunswick (UNB) REDS hockey player Lily George was getting feedback from family and friends that she was something special on the ice.

“I think I was always one of the faster kids on this ice. I just had a lot of people telling me I’d played great,” she said of her early days picking up a stick to have a go at the game she loved.

With all the positive feedback, George began to realize she was on to something good.

“I was like, okay, I think I’ve got the hang of this!” she laughed.

As the first UNB REDS women’s hockey player to record 100 points in her Atlantic University Sport (AUS) career, George is ending her five-season career at the school with 130 regular season games played, 47 goals and 54 assists – all club records. George was named AUS MVP for the 2023-24 season.

A naturally talented athlete, George put in years of hard work, building herself up from back yard pick-up and pee-wee to the top- tier university level, and possibly beyond.

“I did a lot of self-teaching,” George said of her early years as a young player in the community of Garden Village on the Nipissing First Nation in Ontario, east of Sudbury. “I shot pucks in my backyard.”

Her exposure to the sport started at an early age, with family members playing hockey as she was growing up.

“I always loved it right from the start,” she said. “I think it always brought family and friends together.”

It was that same spirit of community that made UNB the natural choice for George when she was deciding where to take her university hockey career.

“Fredericton’s kind of similar to where I come from, so I felt it was very familiar,” she said. “I saw it as a really great opportunity coming into a brand -new team, being able to help develop the program and the culture associated with that.”

“I really saw it as an exciting challenge.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by REDS interim head coach Kyle MacDonald. He said George’s years of experience were instrumental in making this season come together for the team.

“This year we had a very young team with nine first- year players, and to see someone with [George’s] level of work ethic and someone with that level of intensity I think was huge for us, setting a very high standard.”

“She’s very, very hardworking and someone who very much leads by example but is by no means someone who isn’t approachable. She’s someone that everyone feels comfortable around,” he said.

“You really notice that level of competitiveness and fierceness that she has, and I think that’s contagious too, especially with younger players.”

George has also made significant contributions to the New Brunswick hockey community in other ways, – helping to inspire a new generation of girls to lace up their skates through an introduction to hockey camp at UNB.

The five-week camp was focused on local Indigenous girls, and George offered hands- on training and advice to the aspiring players – passing on some of the lessons she learned through her own self-taught efforts, as well as the advice she’s acquired through years of high-level coaching.

“I was fortunate enough to go out on the ice with her [during the camp] and see how much it meant for those young girls to have somebody in the community that they can look up to and really have as a great role model,” MacDonald says.

“When you see them at the games and afterwards hanging around and asking, ‘Is Lily coming? Can she come chat with us?’ that’s really special. So, I think her legacy is going to continue for a long time.”

Now that her university career has come to a close, George is looking at other possibilities including the brand-new Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) that has teams in Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa and Toronto.

“That would be a goal of mine to eventually end up playing in the PWHL,” she said. “My teammate Kendra Woodland and I are going to enter the draft this year – just to see. And if not, I will probably end up playing somewhere in Europe.”

No matter what the hockey future holds for George, the game has provided memories that will last a lifetime.

“I still have a lot of friends that I made when I was younger playing hockey,” she said of the culture of the game. With her accomplishments at UNB and the relationships she’s built here, those connections have grown even more.

“It just brings everyone together, like a community.”