Making Herself Heard 

Piper Shaw spent a good part of her childhood banging away noisily and incessantly on drums gifted by her father.

The pounding in many ways offered an outlet for inner turmoil, as did Shaw’s stage acting in children’s theater and winning competitive speech contests in and beyond her native Minnesota starting at age 8. There was something about the precocious child from hockey-loving St. Cloud refusing to be silenced.

These days, Shaw, 28, has her biggest audience yet as Kraken Hockey Network rink reporter and co-host of the Signals From the Deep podcast with JT Brown. But her blossoming career, spawning three Pacific Northwest Emmy Awards, was forged largely by mettle-testing experiences prior to age 18 and escaping a tumultuous post-divorce upbringing inside her mother’s home.

“I decided when I was 15 or 16 that I wanted to be a broadcaster because that was my way out,” said Shaw, 28, who joined KHN last summer after three seasons with ROOT Sports. “I viewed it as my path to freedom.”

Her parents’ weekly shared custody of Shaw and her brothers, Krossland and Bingham, did have happier moments. Their data scientist father, Jesse, also a hobbyist electro-punk musician, started taking them to punk rock shows when she was 6.

“We were raised on punk morals and values,” Shaw said. “With bigger ones being: You always question authority and dare to be different.”

That’s helped Shaw in a career spent asking questions of others, particularly in podcast interviews and KHN player profiles where she digs into lives beyond goal-scoring ability. Shaw can personally relate to hockey themes of grit, stoicism, resilience and drive that permeate her stories.

“We are all human and stories have incredible power to connect people,” she said. “I think most people are far more interesting if you actually take time to get to know them.”

She then added: “I think that applies to me as well.”

Her parents divorced when she was 6. Shaw attributes “expert packing ability” on Kraken trips to previously living out of a suitcase shuffling between her mother and father.

But while her father took them to concerts, skateparks and theater, life with her mother and eventually, a stepfather, half-brother and half-sister, descended into something much darker.

Shaw said her mother was “highly abusive in obscene ways” leaving the siblings grasping for control. Shaw was constantly told she was crazy. As a young girl, her mother bleached her hair in a short pixie-cut she wasn’t allowed to grow out. At 13, Shaw was bathed in paint thinner.

No explanation for it was given.

“I had to get really comfortable with pain and discomfort and get comfortable with myself,” Shaw said. “These days, I at least feel sane. But back then, I often had to fight to keep a grip on reality. Because my brothers and I were being gaslit into insanity.”

Shaw described her mother and stepfather’s house as a “bunker people” life with guns, safes, surveillance cameras, stockpiled emergency food and strict rules verging on cruelty.

“I wasn’t allowed to laugh,” Shaw said. “There was no laughing. My brothers and I were not allowed to physically play with each other. We were held in our rooms and could only talk via intercom in our house.

“We would just play video games on our computers. That’s how we had socialization -- through the phone.”

Shaw and her siblings became increasingly withdrawn; incorrectly attributed by her dad and others to struggling with the divorce. It wasn’t until her father took her to a community theater production his new wife, Deb, was performing in, that something within Shaw clicked.

“The minute the show was over, the curtain dropped and Piper just freaked out,” her father said. “She’s like ‘I want to do that.’”

Jesse Shaw said his daughter was always precocious, crawling from her crib at age 2 to steal ice cream from a spare refrigerator. And showy: By age 7 asking him to squirt an entire container of mustard into her mouth.

But theater brought out more.

“She could be a little socially awkward in a group of people,” her father said. “But put a microphone in her hand, she became a different person.”

Shaw performed in children’s productions before hundreds of people. She also played piano and the drums from her dad.

“She was pretty good, she had rhythm,” her father said. “To take it to the next level, we bought an electric drum set so she could practice and play. She was a real acoustic kid.”

Shaw’s father also bought her a guitar and enrolled her in voice lessons.

“Her biological mother was very resistant for Piper to take part in any of those things – it was always a battle,” her dad said. “Maybe that barrier to entry is why Piper tried so hard to be better at things. She had to make sure the performance was good.”

Shaw met a friend, Hannah Sims, who also performed children’s plays and whose dad ran maintenance for a St. Cloud theater. They’d dress in professional costumes and race around in a make-believe world.

“We were Spy Kids pretending to be on missions where we had to avoid my dad and other workers,” Sims said. “We would save different characters. There was one where it was animals, and we were protecting animals being held captive.”

In sixth grade, Shaw entered her first public speech competition – speaking about her father being her role model. She’d secretly phoned to invite him to watch during a week he didn’t have custody.

But Shaw’s mother, eavesdropping, confronted her in a rage. Shaw ran crying outside and waited until Sims’ mother drove both girls to the competition. There, her voice and throat raw from sobbing, Shaw beat about 20 others for the gold medal with her dad watching.

“When she built out her speeches, there was a passion behind it,” Sims said. “I also see it now as an adult when I watch her on television.”

Shaw spent weekends with Sims’ family whenever allowed. Sims later realized: “She was looking for a family that she could make hers and what she wanted it to be.”

Sims said it was hard seeing Shaw struggle; too young to realize her home life wasn’t her fault.

“But for Piper, she never let it weigh her down,” Sims said. “She always knew she was going to get what she wanted by putting herself first.”

By junior high, Shaw was forbidden from partaking in after school activities; her mother wanted her home to cook and care for her younger half-siblings.

Her mother falsely told her father and neighbors Shaw was deeply depressed and might harm herself. It kept her father convinced Shaw’s unhappiness stemmed from the divorce rather than her home situation.

By age 15, her father was traveling for work, so Shaw spent the summer living at her mother’s house. Shaw says her mother locked her in “solitary confinement” for three months in her bedroom, mounting cameras to spy on her while forbidding her from seeing or speaking with family members.

“I had no technology,” Shaw said. “I didn’t even have a clock, so I couldn’t know the time of day. The only thing I was given was books – like, teenage girl books – and my curling iron, a straightener, a bagful of makeup and a mirror.”

The mother of Shaw’s high school best friend, Maddy Erickson, saw what was happening. Her daughter and Shaw had bonded over love of hockey in a town where many friends had backyard rinks. The pair attended St. Cloud State home games on weekend nights throughout junior high and high school and occasional Minnesota Wild games with Erickson’s family.

Erickson’s mother began advocating for Shaw – driving her to speech competitions or choir practices her own mother wouldn’t. Speech and choir practiced infrequently, so Shaw managed to stick with both despite her mother’s ban on after school activities.

Shaw became a competitive speech star at St. Cloud Tech High School, placing 14th in the country in her junior year. She returned to nationals her 2014 senior year, performing a dramatic interpretation of rocker Courtney Love’s book Dirty Blonde in a 10-minute speech that personally resonated.

“I was pretty messed up as a child…That’s definitely how I got here,” Shaw told the judges, performing in-character as Love with words from her book.

Given her speech background, Shaw felt pulled towards broadcasting and nearby St. Cloud State’s top program. But she knew escaping her mother’s home would mean paying for college herself and initially living a “broke journalist’s” life. So, she jumped at a chance, due to stellar grades, to spend her high school senior year taking early college classes for free.

But the day before her college ACT test, Shaw was informed her mother hadn’t registered her as promised. Shaw was sobbing in a school hallway when her speech team coach teacher found her, registered Shaw and paid for the test.

Shaw while in college would later repay that teacher, Karmin Schraw, by becoming her assistant coach on the speech team for three years – once guiding it to the final round of the national tournament.

Shortly after high school graduation, on her 18th birthday, Shaw was told her mother had tossed her belongings into the front yard. Shaw’s boyfriend, Jake, a high school hockey player whose first date with her had been to a St. Cloud State game, drove her to gather her stuff. She said they later headed to a Chipotle by a riverbank “with the pennies we had as teenagers” to discuss their future.

Shaw’s subsequent years were spent effectively living at St. Cloud State’s television station UTVS, which broadcast campus, city and state news to about 30,000 households. She’d done her first TV live shot at age 17, then became UTVS’s Marketing Director, then News Director and did stories on the powerhouse St. Cloud State team featuring former Kraken defenseman Will Borgen and recently acquired forward Mikey Eyssimont. She survived on broadcast scholarships, student loans and worked as a clothing store manager.

Shaw won national and regional awards for stories and anchoring, graduating with a double major in broadcast journalism and interpersonal communication and minoring in marketing.

She later landed a nighttime news reporter gig for NBC 15 WMTV in Madison, Wisc., filming and editing her own footage at age 21. Her stories included interviewing the family of former House Speaker Paul Ryan the day he suspended his political career and being first on the scene of a massive gas line explosion in Sun Prairie, Wisc.

She soon after joined a Fox Sports affiliate, spending three seasons covering a University of Wisconsin team coached by Tony Granato and featuring current NHL players Cole Caufield, K’Andre Miller, Alex Turcotte, Dylan Holloway and Ty Emberson. She did sideline duties on live broadcasts, between-games content and additional national work for FS1on Big East basketball and championship volleyball.

When she and Jake married in January 2020, Shaw was already networking furiously with NHL teams to land a dream hockey job -- including the NHL Seattle expansion group. The couple followed every Seattle update and watched the July 2020 livestream of the “Kraken” name reveal from their Wisconsin couch.

“I told everybody that would listen: ‘I’m going to work for that team.’ ”

Shaw flew to Seattle for in-person Kraken interviews and one-on-one with ROOT Sports honcho Jon Bradford – who initially blew her off before placing a 10-minute call to her hotel room. Bradford texted immediately after wanting to talk more.

The second call lasted four hours. She and Jake soon packed for Seattle.

Shaw was onstage at Gas Works Park for the July 2021 Expansion Draft. Beyond her Kraken role, Shaw was also the ROOT Sports sideline reporter for Seattle Storm WNBA games.

“She’s a tireless worker,” said podcast co-host and KHN colleague Brown, 34, also from Minnesota. “She works extremely hard. And a lot goes on behind the scenes that people don’t see when it comes to features she does and how much she prepares to get those done.”

Shaw and Brown toured Disneyland together last November during a Kraken visit to Anaheim. Brown has seen his colleague’s lighter side and they “both get to have fun” whether on-air podcasting or goofing on theme park rides.

Shaw maintains an upbeat attitude, as it got her through her home life. Paying her professional dues, she said, was nothing compared to what she endured before leaving home at 18.

“I truly am afraid of very little in this life,” she said.

After gathering her belongings from her family’s yard that final day, Shaw never saw her mother, stepfather or half-siblings again. They left Minnesota shortly after, moved to an isolated, fenced-in Texas ranch and cut off contact.

Shaw keeps in touch long distance with her biological brothers, now adults out on their own. She also recently released song singles on Spotify, something she’d started doing on Twitter at age 15.

One song titled “Bold” has lyrics stating: “The rules suck, so change the game. Stay quiet, they won’t know your name.”

Upon moving to Seattle, she discovered her childhood friend, Sims, had also moved there and the two reconnected. Sims’ parents had moved there as well, but didn’t yet know about Shaw so her friend suggested she surprise them by attending a 2021 Thanksgiving dinner they were hosting.

Sims’ mother gasped and broke down upon seeing Shaw. The little girl she’d once driven in tears to her first speech competition was all grown up in more ways than one.

Such moments keep Shaw determined to keep pushing forward.

“The idea of being free and doing what I wanted no matter the cost is what I was committed to,” Shaw said. “And now, I truly believe I am capable of accomplishing anything I set out to do.”