Claire Thompson Has Pursued Her Dreams From Med School To the Hockey Arena

Playing hockey was all in the family. It’s a tale not uncommon in athletic circles.

Claire Thompson grew up lacing up skates and picking up a hockey stick in Toronto. She followed the lead of her dad, Ian, and older sister, Jennifer, who each played hockey growing up. The girls started skating at a young age. It was just the thing to do, Claire said.

“Just go out to the outdoor rinks and learn to skate as a family,” Thompson said. “And then my older sister started playing organized hockey, and I wanted to do everything just like she did. That’s how I kind of got started playing hockey.”

That start blossomed into a successful hockey career. Thompson, 27, is flourishing in her rookie season as a Minnesota Frost defenseman. The third overall pick in the 2024 PWHL Draft has 14 points in 16 games and is one of the top scorers in the league.

She played high school hockey for Martingrove Collegiate Institute and two seasons for the Toronto Junior Aeros, which won the Provincial Women’s Hockey League (also PWHL) and Provincial Championship in 2015-16.

Looking at Thompson’s production from the blue line, it’s easy to refer to her as an offensive defenseman. She leads the Frost with 11 assists and is tied with forward Taylor Heise for second in points with 14. There’s a good reason for that: She started as a center and didn’t switch to defense until later in high school.

She was a defensive, play-making center, and her dad wanted to see if she could switch to playing on the blue line.

“My dad just thought that my skillset would translate into being a skilled, efficient defenseman,” Thompson said. “He brought it up to me to see if it was something that I was interested in considering, and I said that I was.”

They talked to her coach, and by the next season, she fully switched over to defense. She said they didn’t know exactly how it would turn out or if it would be a good decision.

“It’s obviously panned out pretty well,” said Thompson, adding that she has no regrets about the position swap.  

But hockey isn’t Thompson’s only passion. She wanted to become a doctor ever since she could remember.

Thompson always liked math and science. She also had another family tie; her grandfather was a doctor. He died when she was young, and “I think that was always kind of in the back of my mind.”

That career aspiration – of becoming a doctor – was realistic and attainable while Thompson was growing up. Playing professional hockey was not. She always saw hockey as a way to help her get admitted into the best university she could “because, unfortunately, at that time there wasn’t a big pro women’s league to aspire to be a part of, despite there being the Olympics and that always being a dream.”

Hockey on the collegiate, international stage

Thompson played hockey at Princeton from 2016 to 2020 and was a captain her senior season. She scored 31 goals and 87 points in 128 career games while being named a four-time ECAC All-Academic selection, three-time AHCA All-American Scholar, and two-time Academic All-Ivy honoree. As a junior, she finished third on her team in scoring and led defensemen with nine goals and 28 points.

While the Olympics was ultimately her dream, Thompson didn’t make the Canadian national team until her senior year. So, from her high years and most of college, she didn’t think professional ice hockey was a viable career option. She hadn’t made the national team until then, and there wasn’t another hockey league worth putting her medical school dreams on hold.

She graduated from college with her undergraduate degree in 2020. After making the national team, she took two years off of academics to chase her Olympic dream for the 2022 Games, where she won a gold medal with Canada in Beijing. In the process, she broke the Olympic record for the most points scored by a defenseman in a single tournament with 13 points (two goals, 11 assists) in seven games.

Thompson also won International Ice Hockey Federation World Championship gold in 2021 and silver in 2023 with Team Canada.

Following the 2022 Olympic cycle, Thompson started her medical school journey in August 2022 for the fall semester at NYU. She wants to pursue orthopedic surgery. The summer following her first year of med school, the PWHL presented an opportunity. However, Thompson was already committed to another year of school.

When the puck dropped on the PWHL inaugural season in January 2024, Thompson took a year off from competitive hockey and was busy studying and working toward her medical degree.

“I had never really planned to take a whole year off hockey,” Thompson said. “The year prior to that, I had played in the PWHPA and with the national team and was able to do both with school. And then the league (PWHL) kind of came together late last summer, early in the fall.”

With everything so new, it wasn’t clear how she could pursue hockey and education simultaneously as she’d done previously. But once she found out the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, weighing the hockey requirements versus her med school requirements, she focused on school but also how she could continue to play hockey.

Drafted by the champs

When Minnesota celebrated its Walter Cup Championship, Thompson had completed two years of school and entered the 2024 PWHL Draft.

Thompson, like other players, was not at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul, attending the PWHL Draft on June 10, 2024. Instead, she watched the proceedings from her med school apartment. She and her roommates and friends had a draft party. There were a few Minnesotans in the room who were excited when Thompson’s name was called in the first round by the defending PWHL champion.

That night, she told the media via virtual video press conference that entering the draft was a “really difficult decision” because she loves med school. Still, her “sights have been set on continuing to play professional hockey during this period of my life.”

Thompson expressed her excitement at being drafted to Minnesota that night.

“I’m just so excited to be a part of such a successful team coming off the most recent championship,” she said on draft night. “I couldn’t think of a better place to start my professional ice hockey career.

“They always say ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ So not being able to play this year has really reinvigorated my love for hockey.”