Russell said he got into hockey when he was 4 years old after a neighbor asked his parents if they could use the frozen pond in the back of their home in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, for their son.
“And my mom and dad were, like, ‘Why do you need to do that?’” Russell said. “They were, like, ‘We’re going to go skating.’ Obviously, I wanted to do what my friends were doing. So I popped out there, was obviously really bad, my sister and I.”
The neighbors suggested Russell’s parents take their children to a local rink for skating lessons.
“I fell in love with that, and the rest is history,” he said.
Russell became a good enough skater and player to join the Boston Jr. Bruins program in the Empire Junior Hockey League and Eastern States Hockey League from 2008-13. He moved on to Norwich, where he was second in goals (13) as a junior in 2015-16 and had 60 points (37 goals, 23 assists) in 106 NCAA games from 2013-17.
He helped Norwich win East Coast Athletic Conference (ECAC) East championships in 2014 and 2015 and a New England Hockey Conference (NEHC) title in 2017.
Russell then had 18 points (10 goals, eight assists) in 52 games with Roanoke, Macon and Fayetteville of the Southern Professional Hockey League in 2017-18 before he decided to retire as a player.
“I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t one of my regrets that I stopped playing after a year,” he said. “Being from the Boston area, there’s a lot of opportunity up here. And I thought that I wasn’t that great of a player in the pro ranks. I wanted to explore what else I could do, come back home. I hadn’t been around my friends for almost 10 years at that point. I just wanted to get back to my normal life, I guess what you could call it.”
Russell soon found he still had a hockey itch that needed scratching. He sought advice from one of his mentors, Brett Peterson, a Northborough, Massachusetts, native and former Boston College defenseman who became the NHL’s first Black assistant general manager when he joined the Florida Panthers in November 2020.
“When I was working a regular 9-to-5, [Peterson] said, ‘You know, whatever you do, just find a way into hockey, whether that be coaching, anything like that,’” Russell said. “I kind of took that and took that to heart and just got into coaching.”
Taking Peterson’s advice, Russell worked two seasons as a skills coach and U16 head coach for the Crimson Hockey Club in Stoughton, Massachusetts, before becoming an assistant at Curry in Milton, Massachusetts, from 2022-24. The team went 43-12-2 during his two seasons there and advanced to the NCAA Division III men’s championship quarterfinals twice.
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