HOCKEY—AND A GREAT BIG HEART!By Laurie Treuhaft
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Meet Tera Hofmann, Class of 2020, a member of YACOL’s Recent Alumni Advisory Council and a former professional hockey player, depicted here playing goalie for the Buffalo Beauts during a 2022–23 season game against the Connecticut Whale.
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Tera Hofmann is not your ordinary 2020 grad: she has already enjoyed a career as a professional hockey player with the Metropolitan Riveters, the Toronto Six, and the Buffalo Beauts and is now “happily retired.” In this new phase of her life, Tera is the director of operations and girls programming for a nonprofit hockey organization called Hockey in New Jersey that provides hockey and educational resources to underserved youth in Newark and surrounding communities.
Tera is also an avid Yale Alumni College (YACOL) student and serves on its newly formed Recent Alumni Advisory Council. Having graduated so recently, she welcomes the chance to look beyond the four-year range of campus life and interact with classmates of all ages. “Bringing together so many thinkers in one space with a broad range of life experiences is a powerful thing,” she says.
Tera oversees all Hockey in New Jersey programs for girls, including Learn to Skate, Learn to Play, Travel Hockey Teams, Academics & Enrichment, event planning and collaborations, including clinics and programming conducted in collaboration with the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). She makes the rounds of local public schools with a hockey stick in one hand and a flyer in the other, shows students how to hold the hockey stick, and encourages them to join the Learn to Skate program. “Hockey in New Jersey brings more diversity to hockey and makes it a safe space for girls,” she says. “For some of them, high school is the first time they are getting on the ice.”
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Tera Hofmann, playing hockey for Yale University
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| The sport is a huge part of the culture in Tera’s native Toronto. She began skating at age five and, by the time she turned six, was on a hockey team playing all different positions in rotation. When she was ten, her friend Carmen’s travel hockey team needed another goalie in a hurry. Tera had never been goalie before but she took lessons from a goalie coach and discovered that she absolutely loved it.
Yale was watching and “got me right from the start,” she says. She was a mere ninth grader when she piqued the interest of a Yale hockey scout. Since she was too young to be contacted directly by the scout (per regulations of the National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA]), all correspondence had to go through her coach. Next came an official campus visit; Tera still remembers how much fun it was to stay in a dorm and experience a day in the life of the women on the hockey team. By her junior year in high school, she had committed to Yale.
Those early recruitment interviews with coaches were “great experiences” that catapulted Tera to self-awareness at a young age. “You have to know yourself and be able to communicate that to others—how to frame yourself as a player, the kind of teammate and leader you’ll be, what you’ll bring to the team. You’re learning how to advocate for yourself by the time you’re in tenth grade!,” she says. Later on, job interviews seemed like nothing by comparison.
Now she tries to teach those same skills to the girls in her program. While not all of them will go on to become professional players, she believes that “all these kids can still learn huge life lessons through hockey—and sports is a low-stakes environment in which to do that.” They learn to cope with failure, to know themselves, to grow and communicate, to ask questions, to think critically. Tera says she learned all those things through hockey and through Yale.
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Tera (center) with her Class of 2020 hockey teammates. Tera was Player No. 31.
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| During her first year on campus, she had to wake up no later than 5:36 a.m. every morning; otherwise, she would have been late for hockey practice. After a year in Morse College, she transferred to Benjamin Franklin, Yale’s newest residential college. “It was gorgeous and had great facilities—and it was right across the street from Ingalls Rink,” she explains. Through the rink’s beautiful glass doors, she had witnessed the residential college going up the year before. “I would watch the sun rise every morning. And as the sun was rising, the college was also rising. I got to watch it being built and transfer into it.”
What was it like for hockey player No. 31 to experience four years of Yale with her team? “When you have teammates around you throughout your Yale journey, you have a chance to watch them grow—and they get to watch you grow too.” Now they all reconnect at reunions. Beyond the excitement on the ice, there were “all those little in-between moments”—sharing pizza, playing guitar together when the team stayed on campus over winter break, hiking to G-Heav (affectionate nickname for Gourmet Heaven, now called Good Nature Market) to get ice cream, having breakfast and taking morning classes together after practice—and yes, the thrill of watching Benjamin Franklin under construction and then living there.
Tera initially chose economics as a way of meeting distribution requirements while steering clear of calculus. But she soon realized how much she was enjoying economics. By the end of sophomore year, she had already fulfilled more than half the requirements for a major. She also took full advantage of opportunities to explore her many other, and varied, interests: history, art history, literature, and creative writing. Tera remembers how excited the hockey team, “with its disproportionate number of Canadians,” was to find out that Professor Jay Gitlin would be giving a course called Quebec and Canada; she and a few teammates jumped at the chance to attend. Tera went on to take Professor Gitlin’s “highly coveted” seminar on Yale and America. And then there were the courses on television, Alfred Hitchcock films, and creative writing with renowned poet Louise Glück shortly before she won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She even lined up at 6 a.m. to get into a glass-blowing course (for which she earned credits in Chemistry).
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Tera makes her professional debut at the historic Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, NY, earning her first pro win in a 4–3 victory over the Connecticut Whale.
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| Tera’s professional hockey career began right out of college when she was drafted by the Metropolitan Riveters. But in that COVID-shortened 2020/2021 season, she had a chance to play in one game only. She was traded to the Toronto Six for the 2021/2022 season but didn’t get much ice time and in Fall 2022, began working for an insurance consulting company in Toronto. Soon after, she was signed as a practice player in Buffalo—a two-hour commute from Toronto—and then on a temporary playing contract to fill in for an injured goalie . . . and landed the Beauts their first win of the season! Needless to say, that earned her a spot on their roster as a full-time player. She ended up playing much more in Buffalo than she had on either of the other teams. Tera notes the irony of this, “as initially I was not even on Buffalo's roster!”
While the Toronto insurance company where she worked was “a wonderful company” and a time of professional growth for her as an economics major, Tera realized it was not what she wanted in life. She was far away from her girlfriend Rebecca, now her wife, who was working for a youth hockey organization in New Jersey. Rebecca is also a retired professional hockey player. Now they both call New Jersey home.
Sensitivity and understanding toward beginners are nothing new for Tera. As a first-year counselor at Yale, she urged a new student struggling with a writing assignment to take advantage of the support that Yale offers its students, pointing out how much he had already done on his own just to get there and reassuring him that it was OK to ask for help. Her devotion to her Hockey in New Jersey girls is a natural progression to the work she has done her whole life in hockey and academic spaces. Some hockey coaches yell negative feedback from the bench, but Tera never does. Instead, she works closely with each girl from the start, building self-confidence and decision-making abilities under pressure.
Once they’re on the ice, her team’s preparation is done and it’s time to put it to the test. “There are so many beautiful stories,” she says. One girl in her Middle School Girls Learn to Skate program always arrived in tears and kept refusing to go on the ice. Still, she showed up every Wednesday, leading Tera to believe that “maybe she didn’t hate it that much” and that something about the weekly program was healing for her. That same girl recently graduated from the Learn to Skate program and, thanks to Hockey in New Jersey, is now all set with the gear she needs to move on to the next level. In four months, she went from crying and refusing even to say her name to requesting her favorite game and yelling things to her teammates. “Our program is a space where she could find her voice,” Tera says.
Not only does Hockey in New Jersey equip the girls with what would otherwise be expensive gear; it also schedules enrichment activities like birdwatching, visiting Newark’s Branch Brook Park at cherry blossom season and taking scientific notes, or enjoying a sail along the Hudson and learning about the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater with Joan Gaylord (Class of ’96), who serves on the Clearwater Board of Directors. All of this “gives them a portal into another world—or ten other worlds!” Tera says. “And maybe it brightens the world for them.”
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Why was she drawn to Yale Alumni College so soon after graduating? Tera’s parents had always encouraged her to question the world around her and to see it through many different lenses. Her mother is a high school English and drama teacher and her father is a physicist. Emerging from Yale at the height of the pandemic, she felt she had been “thrust into the real world” and was thirsting for more spaces where her assumptions would be challenged. “Yale was the only place I ever found that,” she says. She is surprised that more Yalies don’t head straight for Yale Alumni College once they graduate.
To date, she has taken Great Expectations with Priscilla Gilman, The Great American Jewish Novel with Emily Kopley, More Madness at the Movies with James Charney, HERstory of Art with Noah Charney, and “a fantastic course” on Materials and Materiality taught by art historian Kerr Houston. The lively discussions in that course and everything she learned have stayed with her. “The more ways I can see the world, the broader my picture is as a human and the more I can grow as a person. With YACOL, I can tap into that again.”
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