Kristen Bowness making big impact on family business with Mammoth

In recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8, the NHL and NHLPA are celebrating women in hockey. NHL.com is telling the story of Kristen Bowness, youth program director of the Utah Mammoth, who is also the daughter of Columbus Blue Jackets coach, Rick Bowness.

Kristen Bowness grew up hating hockey.

“It was hard for me as a kid, being dragged to the rink all the time at 6 a.m. for practices for my brothers, and I really struggled with it,” she said. “Then, when we moved to Ottawa, I wasn’t allowed to play hockey because of that man in the corner.”

At this, Kristen gestures to a box on the Zoom screen, one filled with the image of her father, Columbus Blue Jackets coach Rick Bowness, a hockey lifer whose career behind the bench in the NHL stretches back to 1984-85, the entirety of Kristen’s life. 

He sits in front of a hockey-rink shaped white board, the Blue Jackets logo at its center. But despite that early hatred for the game, despite any frustration that may have built over the years, Kristen, too, has an NHL name behind her, the giant blue letters spelling out Mammoth. 

It wasn’t until the family landed in Arizona, where Rick became an assistant coach with the Phoenix Coyotes in 1999 that, as Kristen said, “I started to really fall in love with the sport.” She has since made it her life, with stints at the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Nashville Predators and now, as the youth program director with the Utah Mammoth. 

“She got dragged to the rink an awful lot,” Rick Bowness said. “She went to an awful lot of NHL games. Eventually you had to figure that it would kick in. And it’s like her older brother Ricky, who never played hockey, didn’t like hockey, but eventually he started to work [in hockey], so I guess the bloodlines run thick and eventually it caught up to them all.”

For Kristen, that has come in a position where she’s on the front lines of introducing players to hockey in one of the hottest hockey markets in the country, in Utah. It was when the Mammoth were announced as the newest team in the NHL that Nate Martinez, who built the Junior Jazz program into the largest youth program in the NBA, started reaching out across the League to find a hockey-specific person to bring on board to do the same on the hockey side.

He kept hearing one name, over and over: Kristen Bowness. 

She got the call. She called Rick, right away. The fit was right. 

“It’s been really fun because it definitely is building from the ground up, which has always been a dream of mine, marking the mark and creating it how I think it should be run,” Kristen said. “[Being] given that freedom and that trust has been really huge.”

So are her hopes for the program. 

“We’re looking to emulate the Junior Jazz on the street hockey side,” she continued. “There’s 90,000 kids throughout Utah playing Junior Jazz, so we want 90,000 kids playing street hockey -- granted they had a 40-year head start, but we’ll get there.”

That starts with a lot of Learn to Play, a lot of Learn to Skate, and rec leagues, amongst other avenues to get kids playing and keep kids playing. It starts with building off the excitement generated by the Mammoth and trying to, as Kristen put it, “invite as many people as we can to be part of it,” from girls’ programs and adaptive programs, open-to-everyone clinics and tournaments to partnering with physical education classes, a space Kristen knows well after teaching P.E. for six years.

It’s an all-inclusive approach, something that Kristen has wholeheartedly embraced.

“I truly love where I’m at and I truly love what I get to do,” she said. “Especially seeing the smiles on faces. I love the tutus at Learn to Play, when the girls come in with their bedazzled helmets, I love that, and I think that that’s where the personality and character really comes through and being able to provide those first steps is my passion.”

That all-inclusive approach even applies to Rick, who in his brief retirement between finishing his tenure as coach of the Winnipeg Jets after 2023-24 and coming back as a midseason hire for the Blue Jackets this season, ran a coaching clinic in Utah with his daughter. 

He got to see firsthand the impact she’s making. 

“The fact that the League was recommending her, people around the League were recommending her, I was very proud of that,” Rick said. “That shows that she’s a hard, hard worker and I give her full credit for that. Probably one of the bad things I passed on to her is she works very, very hard. She puts in long hours. So any recognition she gets right now she’s earned it on her own. And she’s going to continue to do that. She’s a very driven young woman and we’re very, very proud of her.”

It was not a straight-line path to get here, with Kristen transitioning from physical education teacher to community hockey manager with the Lightning, where she also coached sled hockey, all the way to Utah, where she is also part of the grassroots level of the NHL & NHLPA Women’s Hockey Advancement Committee, which is in its sixth season of supporting the growth and expansion of girls and women in hockey.

It appears to be the perfect fit, and one that isn’t exactly out of place in the Bowness family. 

In addition to Rick and Kristen, Ricky’s son Ricky worked in media relations for the Detroit Red Wings, Ricky’s wife, Jodee, is the vice president of ticket sales and service for the Colorado Avalanche, and Rick’s other son, Ryan, is an assistant general manager for the New York Islanders. Though, as Kristen made sure to say, “Especially in our family, I have the fun job.”

It makes for lively conversation at family gatherings.

“Eventually it’ll get back to hockey,” Rick said. “We’re all connected to the NHL, so it’s unavoidable. We’re always wanting to know, how’s your organization doing? So we can talk family a lot, and eventually it’s going to go right back to hockey because that’s all of our true passion.”

For Kristen, though, it wasn’t a straight line to this point. When she was 6 and her father was coaching the Ottawa Senators, she issued a challenge: “I dared my family to not talk about hockey at the kitchen table, and that has yet to happen.”

“It’s who we are, it’s our lives,” Rick said, in answer. “It’s as simple as that.”

“It is our passion, for sure,” Kristen said. “And I think the best part, too, is we all just cheer each other on. Like we all want each other to succeed and especially since we’re all in different avenues and different departments within each organization, we just want each other to succeed and we’re all each other’s biggest cheerleaders.”

It’s clear that’s true. 

As the call was signing off, as Kristen and Rick Bowness were going their separate ways, back to their daily tasks for the Blue Jackets and the Mammoth, Rick left Kristen with three last words. 

“Call you later,” he said.