From Huntsville to Hockey History: Nic Dowd’s TPH Roots

Alabama’s only NHL player on USA hockey’s first gold medal since 1980: ‘It was pretty special.’
Published: Feb. 28, 2026 by Greg Garrison on Advance Local Media LLC

The only National Hockey League player born in Alabama, Nic Dowd of the Washington Capitals, was watching on Sunday morning with most of his teammates as the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team beat Canada 2-1 to win the gold medal for the first time since 1980.

“We hadn’t won a gold medal in hockey since 1980 and I think it’s incredible to see how far USA hockey has come,” Dowd said in a phone interview after the Capitals finished Tuesday morning practice. “We’re obviously always comparing ourselves to Canadian hockey. They’ve been the best at it for a long time on the world stage. With the women as well, Team USA winning gold and the men winning gold, I think it was a great day for the United States as a country and great for USA hockey. It was pretty special.”

Two of Dowd’s teammates from the Washington Capitals were on the Canadian team that had to settle for a silver medal: Tom Wilson and Logan Thompson.

“I wasn’t conflicted by any means,” Dowd said. “I wanted Team USA to come out on top. I wanted Wilson and Thompson to play great and have a great experience.”

All 25 of the USA players and all 25 of the Canadian players on the roster were active NHL players.

“There can only be one winner and they only hand out gold medals to the best team or best individual, but it’s an incredibly special accomplishment for Logan and Tom to make that team,” Dowd said. “People don’t realize the amount of work that goes into that over the course of a lifetime and the course of a career to make that team and it was really special to them and their families. I wanted them to have the most success possible, but obviously I’m an American and you want to see red, white and blue come out on top.”

Team USA joined the State of the Union speech by President Donald Trump Tuesday night. On Wednesday, Wilson and Thompson rejoined the Capitals as they resumed play at home and defeated the Philadelphia Flyers, 3-1.

“Tom especially, I thought he was one of the best players in that gold medal game,” Dowd said. “I texted him and told him I was really proud of how well he played.”

Dowd, 35, was born in Huntsville on May 27, 1990. He plays center and is now in his tenth NHL season. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings in 2009, made his NHL debut for the Kings in 2016, played for the Vancouver Canucks briefly after a trade in 2017 and signed with the Capitals as a free agent in 2018.

Last year, he signed a two-year contract with the Capitals worth $6 million.

When he was a child growing up in Huntsville, Dowd’s NHL dreams might have seemed far-fetched, since it can be hard to find ice to skate on in some parts of Alabama.

“Not hard at all,” Dowd said of Huntsville. “We had the Huntsville Municipal Complex on Leeman Ferry, which is still a staple of Huntsville hockey and where the Huntsville Hockey Association still plays out of. My brothers were 10 and 12 years older than me at the time, so my parents were pretty well versed in getting around to Atlanta, Knoxville, Memphis, all these other youth organizations that had hockey and play travel hockey.”

The Huntsville Ice Sports Center is undergoing a major $44.6 million renovation to double its size by next year. So maybe it will train more future NHL players.

Dowd is only the third Alabama native to play in the NHL. Jared Ross, a Huntsville native, played briefly for the Philadelphia Flyers in 2009-2010. Jared’s father, Doug Ross, was a member of the 1976 U.S. Olympic team and coach of the University of Alabama-Huntsville hockey team from 1982-2007 before his death in Huntsville in 2022 at age 70. The only other Alabama player to reach the NHL was Aud Tuten, who was born in Enterprise and played for the Chicago Blackhawks during two seasons from 1941-43.

Dowd’s parents, Alan and Liz, helped make his NHL career possible. His dad was a family doctor and his mother a nurse who met in England and moved to Huntsville in 1974. Dowd’s two older brothers, Matt and Josh, were travel hockey players who helped him fall in love with the sport. His mother and brothers still live in Huntsville. His father, his biggest fan who helped teach him the sport by building him a concrete rink at home and serving as his goaltender, died in September, at age 86.

“We deal with that every day,” Dowd said. “That hurts. My dad was always a teacher at heart, as well as a doctor. He taught at the University of Alabama-Huntsville as well as practicing medicine.”

Huntsville built its first AAA team when Dowd was 14 and he played on that first Total Package Hockey team.

After his ninth-grade year, playing a full schedule of travel baseball, hockey and soccer, Dowd decided to focus on hockey and his parents sent him to play at Culver Military Prep School in Indiana in 2007-2008.

Eventually, he played college hockey from 2010-2014 at St. Cloud State in Minnesota, where he met his wife, Paige. They now have two children, Louie, 6, and Ruby, 3, and are expecting another boy in July.

“Louie already knows how to skate and how to play,” Dowd said. “It’ll be up to them whether or not they find a love of the game, and we’ll be there to foster it and encourage it, but it’s really up to them. We watched a lot of women’s Olympic sports that my girl really enjoyed. We had a lot of fun. We’re pretty bummed that it’s over.”

Dowd has been a model citizen in the NHL, creating Dowd’s Crowd, which invites autistic children with sensory issues to Capitals games, and working with So Kids Soar on adaptive sports opportunities. He also sponsors America’s Vetdogs, which provides guide dogs to veterans.

“You just get a lot of perspective with your children and how fortunate we are that we have healthy kids,” Dowd said. “As you get older, you want to be the person that your kids would look up to. That’s something that I try to live by every day. We have a lot of responsibility as pro athletes. We’re in the public eye a lot. We have a lot of kids that look up to us. It’s our responsibility to not only lead good lives, but to try and give back to the community.”

Paige graduated from St. Cloud with a degree in speech pathology and worked with a lot of autistic children, Dowd said.

She came up with the idea of starting the Dowd’s Crowd Foundation that would focus on those needs.

“We started kind of tailoring our experience to children that had autism or had some type of sensory need,” Dowd said.

Dowd received the 2024-25 Caps Care Community Award for community service.

That coincided with his best year in the NHL, when he played in all 82 regular-season games, scored 14 goals with 13 assists for 27 points.

“Without my mom and dad, I would have never played hockey at a high level and would have never been given that opportunity,” Dowd said.

“Both of them worked intense jobs, but they’d take Friday off to travel, travel back on Sunday and start work again on Monday morning. I’ll be forever indebted to both of them for the amount of effort and work that went into getting me to my sports.”

Even in Alabama, a child can grow up to be a professional hockey player. Dowd is proof of that.

“I tell kids all the time, it doesn’t matter where you’re from,” he said. “People’s jobs within organizations are to go out there and find diamonds in the rough and find kids that haven’t been scouted.”

Learn more about TPH Academy Huntsville HERE.