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Two months ago, Rachel Doerrie was spending her time fulfilling a dream of working in the NHL and planning out a way to use her position to help others.

One month ago, Doerrie’s rocket-fueled rise to future front office superstar changed course, and will continue somewhere other than New Jersey.

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Tuesday, Doerrie will be on a plane to Europe when an idea of hers comes to fruition at Prudential Center. Sure, Devils coach John Hynes might deploy some of the tactics Doerrie suggested or helped cultivate during her time in the Player Information/Video department when New Jersey plays the Los Angeles Kings.

But it is also going to be the Devils’ first Mental Health Awareness night at The Rock. For Doerrie, it’s a cause with deep personal connections. Both she and her younger sister battle mental illnesses.

Regardless of what happens with the team on the ice in the future, if this franchise initiative becomes an annual event, as expected, it will in some ways be part of Doerrie’s lasting legacy in New Jersey despite her relatively brief tenure with the club.

Doerrie and a friend in the Devils’ sales department, Chris Frezza, came up with the idea together, before she addressed the topic in a larger group.

“(Devils CEO) Scott O’Neil had a meeting where he got together with coordinator-level people in the office. It was just sort of an informal ‘let’s talk’ thing,” Doerrie said. “He asked if we had any questions for him. I said, ‘I want to know why this organization doesn’t do anything in the mental health space because it’s something that is really important, especially given the fact that athletes have come out and said they’ve suffered from mental health issues and felt like they didn’t get enough support.'”

“Soon after that, (Frezza) presented the idea for the game and said, ‘I got this idea from Rachel. I think this is a very good idea.’ The organization decided it was a good idea and decided to get involved.”

Doerrie and Frezza began to work with various departments — ticket sales, marketing, community initiatives — and researched the best practices of other NHL clubs who have hosted similar events. Frezza eventually left the franchise to work for the 76ers, the Devils’ NBA sibling in the Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment empire.

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Then, on the morning of Jan. 4 she received word from human relations that her position as an assistant in the player information/video department, was being eliminated because of a new direction, which includes the addition of a vice president of analytics.

“It’s sort of the one thing that I’m really disappointed that I didn’t get to see through,” Doerrie said. “Because, do I love hockey? Yes, but I also believe if you have a platform, you’d better do something good with it. This (mental health awareness) is the thing I’d really like to use my platform. I’m disappointed I won’t be there, but I’m really happy the organization is open-minded enough to say you know what, this is a very good thing and we need to be involved.”

Doerrie, while growing up in Newmarket, Ont., started skating when she was four years old and was playing organized hockey with the boys by the time she was six. Her father, Michael, is a massive hockey fan and his oldest daughter followed suit.

There were some inclinations that her passion for the game and particular set of skills might evolve into something special even when she was young.

“Her father was in a pretty big hockey pool,” Karen Doerrie, Rachel’s mother, said. “They go to a hotel for the draft and it’s a big deal. She would do all the homework for him, all the research to help him pick the players and they would split the winnings. So when you’re 10, 11 years old and your dad comes home with a couple thousand dollars for you because of your hockey homework, life’s pretty good. She’s just always been enthralled.

“She would tell me when she spent hours sitting on the couch watching the draft and studying things, I’d say, ‘Why are you filling your brain with all of this information? When is this ever going to be useful?’ And ever since she was 11 or 12 years old, it was always, ‘Mom, I’m going to be in hockey.’ When she was 15 or 16, that was when she first said she wanted to be the first female general manager in hockey and break the old boys’ school. I thought ‘Wow, that’s pretty lofty. OK, let’s go!'”

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While she was at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Doerrie spent two seasons working for Dave Matsos, then the coach of the Sudbury Wolves in the OHL. She also had an internship with Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment and was invited to a Hockey Canada women’s development camp.

She wrote a story for the The Bloggers’ Tribune in 2016 entitled “Why I’ll be the first Female NHL GM.” It certainly caught some peoples’ attention.

“I always like people who put things out in the universe about themselves and gamble on themselves,” said Jeff Marek, a host of Sportsnet’s NHL coverage and the “31 Thoughts” podcast alongside Elliotte Friedman. “That’s a bold thing to say. It’s one thing to say that privately, but it’s quite another to put it out there and try to create a self-fulling prophecy for yourself. I was startled by it because who says that? But here’s this young, confident, smart woman who is comfortable enough to say this is my goal and this is what I want to achieve. I reached out to her to say, ‘Hey, that’s a bold thing to do. Good for you.'”

A friendship grew out of that first message to Doerrie. Soon Marek, who regularly canvasses different groups in the hockey community about potential news or discussion topics of the day, began reaching out to her about junior hockey items. Then she became a part of his women’s hockey group. And then his NHL discussions, too.

“At one point I was like, ‘Hang on, Rachel is on a million of my lists. How did that happen?'” Marek said. “She doesn’t just look at something and say ‘OK that’s what it is, so let’s move on.’ She’ll challenge me on tons of things and she’ll challenge herself.

“She’s in a male-dominated field. Here’s someone that almost has that Amelia Earhart vibe about her. I think Amelia Earhart is one of the great feminists of all time. It’s me and the plane. Screw everybody else. For Rachel, it’s her, her brain and the game. That’s it. She’s going to sink or swim based on her work ethic and her brain.”

Doerrie was invited to the Maple Leafs’ development camp in the summer of 2017, and spent time working on and off the ice with various members of the organization. A photo of her ran in one of the Toronto newspapers. It wasn’t exactly a “you have arrived” kind of moment, though.

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“There’s Kyle Dubas and a couple other guys and they’re all identified by name,” Marek said. “Then there’s Rachel. The caption says ‘Kyle Dubas, Sheldon Keefe, so and so, so and so and a female staffer.’ She’s the only female on the ice and no one is curious to find out who she is. When she calls me, it shows up on my phone as female staffer. No matter what she does in this industry and the heights that she reaches, I will always refer to her as female staffer.” 

Doerrie started contributing to The Athletic in September 2017, including this story about the success of the Devils’ top line. More people started to take notice, including New Jersey general manager Ray Shero. When the Devils hired Doerrie in December 2017, she became the youngest member of an NHL analytics department.

Not the youngest woman. The youngest, period.

She quickly became a valued member of the Devils’ hockey operations department. Earlier this season, Devils coach John Hynes lauded the club’s analytics department to an assembled group of media, emphasizing how well his staff and the department worked together and the impact the sharing of information and ideas had on the organization.

MSG’s Steve Cangelosi asked Hynes when he felt like “the really good system” they had in place came together. Hynes responded, “around the middle of last season.” That certainly lines up with Doerrie’s hire.

When Hynes talked about how the Devils were focused on being more successful at even strength this season, he detailed the process of how the club tackled offseason projects and how intel flows between departments. It did not take long for Doerrie and Hynes to develop a bond.

Earlier this season, Hynes was an in-studio guest for Sportsnet’s coverage the night before the Devils played the Maple Leafs in Toronto. Marek got to spend the night watching hockey with him.

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“Doug MacLean wanted to talk about short-side goals and the conversation turned into scoring chance percentages and you have a six percent of scoring when you’re below the dot here on the right side as left-handed shot versus a right-handed shot and John started to get really into the conversation,” Marek said. “He was like, ‘Oh yeah, we track all of this info on this is a low-percentage shot or this is a high-percentage shot and if you add a pass to it, it jumps from six percent to 33 percent on this.’ And he’s just coming at us like this waterfall of information. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Where have I had this conversation before?’

“Oh yeah, I know. It’s Rachel, and the work that she’s done. When you hear a high-level coach like John Hynes who is in the NHL and has been behind the bench at a World Cup and the fact that he’s recognized the value in the work she’s doing, that’s a real tip of the cap to someone like Rachel.”

Doerrie talked about some of what she did while working for the Devils when she was a guest on the Hockey PDOCast with Dimitri Filipovic. The news of her no longer working for the organization was a surprise throughout the hockey community.

“I really enjoyed working with the coaching staff,” Doerrie said. “I learned a lot from John and the rest of the coaching staff and how you can use old-school things and new-school things. It’s really the importance of how you use all of the information available to you for what you believe the is the best way for your team to succeed. I also learned the importance of having a clear-cut vision. If you don’t have something you’re striving towards and you don’t have a direction, it is very hard to respect your line of thinking. If you have a clear vision and you stick to it, it’s cut and dry — you’re either part of the vision or not. John does a very job of sticking to the things that he believes makes a successful hockey team.”

Doerrie has had plenty of people she looks up to as mentors, whether it’s her mother or Matsos, who is now the coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs in the OHL, or Marek. Her grandfather, Wolfgang Schulze, was more than that.

“He was her rock,” Karen Doerrie said. “When there was trouble at home with mom and dad, fighting before the divorce, Opa was there to come and get her and go for an ice cream to get her out of the house. If there was a school play, Opa was there. He went to every hockey game.

“Rachel was the only grandchild that he ever held, and he has eight or nine grandchildren. The only one he ever changed a diaper for, given a bottle too, gone on vacation with. Their relationship, I mean it is beautiful, but there was probably other than myself nobody more important to Rachel than Opa. One hundred precent. He made no bones about it. Rachel was his favorite.”

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“The sun would rise and set on both of their shoulders,” added Matt Richard, Rachel’s stepfather. 

They were on a family vacation together in Mexico in June 2016 when Rachel walked into a room and found her grandfather in the midst of a heart attack. He passed away a few days later in a hospital.

“That absolutely rocked her world,” Karen said. 

“The one thing I remember from that day besides the CPR was him getting wheeled out (out of the hotel room) and looking at me and telling me he loved me,” Rachel said. “I think I knew at that point that it wasn’t good. There was a bottle of rum in the room and I just drank straight from the bottle. I knew I was going to be in for a tough experience.

“One of the things that people look for is closure, and I never got that. I never got to say goodbye. He never had a funeral and to this day that is a very sore subject. 

“I went into a spiral and didn’t realize it. It was only after I got hired by the Devils and moved to New Jersey that I realized how deep in I was. When I moved here, I was alone. I had no family here, I was the youngest person in the business and I was a female so I felt alone.”

For the first six months of Doerrie’s time with the Devils, she was living out her dream of working in the NHL. It should have been the greatest time of her life. It wasn’t.

“I was smiling to hide the pain,” she said. “I was spiraling. I wasn’t abusing drugs or drinking heavily, but I wasn’t eating. I had lost a lot of weight. The worst thing you can do is hide it behind a smile, because then you’re fucked.”

Doerrie buried herself in the work because it was what she always loved to do. At times, she struggled to eat anything but McDonald’s — she used to make weekly trips there with her grandfather.

She was making new friends and forging new work relationships in New Jersey. But when Doerrie went home in late July of last year, those who knew her best sensed something was wrong.

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“I was hanging out with my best friend,” Rachel said. “This was a turning point for me, because he looked at me and said ‘What happened to you?’ I didn’t know what he meant, but he said, ‘You are not the person that I know.’ That was sort of the trigger for me that you know what, something is going on and I need to get this sorted out.

“I went to a psychiatrist and said, ‘Listen, something’s wrong but I don’t know what it is.’ That’s when I was diagnosed with PTSD. It is PTSD with anxious and depressive symptoms. It’s obviously not as severe as like wartime PTSD, but it’s a different type. It’s triggered by different things. The way your brain works is there’s pathways that cause you to react to certain things. When something happens, your brain goes through these pathways and you make decisions or react to that. Because of what I’d gone through as a child and continued to go through in my adolescent years, and then with my grandfather passing away, my pathways didn’t develop in the same way. I didn’t have the ability to react in a ‘normal’ way because those pathways just weren’t there. It’s like learning to walk. If your brain doesn’t know how to walk, you ain’t walking. That pathway isn’t there.”

Doerrie’s own battle with mental illness is not the biggest reason she wanted to use her position with the Devils to try to help others. Before her grandfather passed away and before her hockey career began to blossom, her younger sister, Katarina, was battling issues of her own.

“I’m not sure it really all hit me until I realized that I was also going through something. I just asked her, ‘What do you need? Because I don’t know how to help you.’ She was like, ‘Sometimes I just need you to listen,'” Rachel said. “For me it’s about three words: accept, understand, listen. Accept that they have something and they have it. End of story. Understand that you aren’t going to understand what’s going on. And listen. They might say, ‘I need this today.’ Sometimes that might be ‘I think we need some time apart, because I have stuff to figure out and you have stuff to figure out.’ As hard as that is to hear as a sister, if that’s what she needs today, then so be it.

“My sister felt alone for a really along time, and I don’t want anyone to go through that. She was a young teenager, like 13, and I don’t want anyone to have to go through things like that.”

Some of the features of the Devils’ Mental Health Awareness night include a portion of the ticket sales going to various mental health organization in New Jersey. The Devils will host a “Hockey Talks” panel before the game that will include Aimee Kimball, who is the club’s director of player and team development, and Lacey Mark, a Devils fan who has appeared on “The Bachelor” and “Bachelor In Paradise.”

They’ll also host a number of organizations, each set up with a table in the concourse to offer information about mental illnesses and support for anyone seeking it for themselves or someone they know. The Devils are one of more than 10 teams in the NHL holding a night dedicated to mental health awareness.

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Like Hockey Fights Cancer and Hockey Is For Everyone, the Hockey Talks partnership between the NHL and the NHLPA is another critically important initiative for the league and the future of the sport.

“My thing is we can’t just care about people when it is convenient for you,” Doerrie said. “People have to understand that you have no problem sending someone home if they’re coughing up a lung, but if someone can barely focus because something is a trigger point, it’s not taken the same. The response is, ‘Aw, it’s hockey. You’ve got to tough it out.’

“We don’t ask someone with a broken leg to go run steps. It’s not going to go very well. So ask someone with a broken brain to react the way you want them to react or think the way you want, sometimes they don’t have that capability. Patience is really important. You’re willing to wait if someone has a torn ACL or a concussion. Why would you not be willing to wait for this?”

The first NHL team reached out to Doerrie about two hours after the news of her departure from the Devils landed on social media. Several others have followed suit, in addition to a few soccer clubs, but she is not in a hurry to take the next step in her career.

“I owe it to myself to take a break,” she said. “I went from high school to university a year early. I finished university in three years, and I went right into working. Considering everything that has happened, I’m due for a reset. I’m really fortunate because I feel like this whole experience has broken me down to a point where I now get to choose the person I want to build to be. I like that. Am I happy that I’ve been broken down to this point? No. But I get to rebuild the person I want to be. I’m going to focus on that for the next couple months.”

That means a trip to Germany to see family and her beloved Bayern Munich in action. It’s going to mean some time at home with Peanut, the attention-seeking pup of the family. It’s also going to mean more heated hockey debates with her stepfather.

“I played in juniors and had a fledgling NCAA career, but I’m 43 years old and I haven’t studied this stuff,” Richard said. “We’re still in the world of plus-minus and save percentage and wins and losses. I’d come home from like a men’s league game and she’d be like, ‘Do you know that so and so’s Corsi rating is …’ and I know that Corsi is almost out the window now, but I didn’t know what that was at the time. She started talking about Corsi and shot suppression and these other things and I’d be like, ‘I scored two goals today. Is that still good?’

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“We got into it about Morgan Rielly versus Jake Gardiner and why Rielly gets a different type of hall pass because I played kind of like Gardiner does. I was more of a risk-taker. I said, ‘Well, he was a plus-24 last year’ and she looked at me like I should be on a rotary phone in a black-and-white sitcom. Plus-minus eh, grandpa?”

Her father and stepfather bring a hockey-based perspective to their mentorship. Her mother, who is a National Channel Manager for Nutanix, has plenty of experience with some of the situations Rachel could encounter.

“For me, I’m in an industry that’s an old boys’ club,” Karen Doerrie said. “I’m in IT. There are a handful of women at the top. It’s changing, but 20 years ago when I started we were secretaries and mailroom people. We weren’t executives. I have a lot of experience from climbing the corporate ladder and breaking into the old boys’ club.

“All of my children know there is a saying mom always says: ‘There are a lot of things you can recover from, but when you sacrifice your integrity, it is very difficult. I can fix stupid. I can fix ugly. I can’t fix it if you’re no longer trusted.’ I told her you don’t have to wear a short skirt, but if you’re the smartest person in the room, that might get you noticed.”

Doerrie is also going to continue to be an advocate for people with mental illness, including for herself and her younger sister. 

Her personal battle with mental illness continues. She’s seen significant progress, and her desire to continue breaking down barriers in the sport of hockey remains.

“We’ve talked about this a number of times. The reality is she’s only got 32 opportunities, with Seattle getting a team,” Richard said. “Is it mathematically probable that she’ll be a GM? No, but it’s possible. If not, there are thousands of little girls who look up to the Hayley Wickenheisers of the world and say, ‘I want to be the next Hayley Wickenheiser.’ Maybe the first girl who becomes a GM is not Rachel, but maybe the first one says, ‘Well, I met Rachel Doerrie when I was at Laurentian doing my internship and she really inspired me.'”

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https://twitter.com/racheldoerrie/status/983927207956484096

— Reported from Newmarket, Ont., Toronto and New York

(Top photo of Doerrie and her grandfather courtesy of Rachel Doerrie)

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