BOSTON — Aaron Huglen felt something slip in his back. It was as if a piece of it had dropped, ever so slightly scraping and then pinching.
It hurt. Badly. But he tried not to let himself think too much of it. He couldn’t afford to.
He was a month removed from his senior year in high school and a month away from the biggest day of his young life: the 2019 NHL Draft in Vancouver. He’d started and finished his season with a pair of impressive stints as a rookie with the Fargo Force in the USHL. In between them, he’d captained Roseau High as one of the stars of Minnesota’s high school hockey circuit, posting 52 points in 24 games and living out his dream of playing alongside his little brother, Paul.
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It was just a tweak during a standard deadlift, he told himself.
Not knowing the severity of it, he assured NHL clubs when they called that he was fine — that he’d be fine.
“Yeah, I’ve just got a minor back injury but it’s nothing more than that,’” he told them.
Three years later, standing inside a corridor in the bowels of TD Garden on the eve of the next biggest moment of his young life, the 2022 Frozen Four semifinal, Aaron Huglen sighs as he relives the moment his world changed forever as he prepared for the NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo.
“Little did I know that it was going to stretch out for almost two years,” he says.
During the lowest points of the road back, he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to the ice.
Now he has, but the pain still persists.
It’s never going away.
There are some days when it doesn’t bother him. There are others where it still “really hurts.” He has learned, through diligence, to arrive early at the rink, stay loose, and do his back stretches, to manage it.
When he describes the pain, he runs his hand down his left leg to explain how it shoots from the bottom of his spine and out.
“It can get bad but for the most part I’ve been able to handle it and it hasn’t gotten worse,” he says.
After the draft, when the Sabres selected Huglen with the 102nd pick and he attended their development camp, he got in touch with their doctors to fill them in on the pain in his lower back. They gave him some suggestions, sent him home to Minnesota meet with his doctors again, and he began on a path of trying to rehab it on his own.
The diagnosis was a disc bulge of the L4-L5 vertebrae, the lowest vertebrae of the spine and the area of the back most susceptible to damage and deterioration.
No matter what Huglen tried, though, he couldn’t nurse it back to health. Visits to multiple chiropractors. Anti-inflammatory drugs. A failed rhizotomy, a procedure meant to zap damaged nerves along the spine. Cortisone shots … and then more cortisone shots. Rehab sessions three times a week.
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Nothing worked. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and months into a year. And before he knew it, he’d lost the entirety of his post-draft season. Throughout, the pain was too much to skate or run through the workouts he’d need to get back into shape, let alone practice or play.
“I was doing nothing pretty much,” he said. “I was honestly more concerned that I’m 18, 19 years old and I’ve got a bad back injury and I didn’t want to hurt it anymore. So I was trying everything to get it fixed”
Finally, in May of 2020, a full year after he felt his back slip, Huglen decided to get the surgery, a microdiscectomy spinal surgery, designed to help relieve some of the pain, particularly in his leg.
“And then COVID came,” he said, laughing sickly.
Immediately after the surgery, Huglen was bedridden for “more than a week.”
“After you have a back surgery, you never know what’s going to happen either,” he said. “So, it was kind of like waiting for a few months and seeing how it’s going to go.”
Once he was back on his feet, he returned to Fargo to begin working with their staff to get back.
He skated for the first time in August of 2020, 15 months after the initial injury. But when the USHL returned from the pandemic for its 2020-21 season at the beginning of November, he still wasn’t fully practicing with the team.
“My coaches in Fargo didn’t want me to rush back into it. I’d been out for so long that they wanted to make sure I was ready to go. We had some backs and forth, the coaches and I. I wanted to play and they wanted me to be safe, which I respect in hindsight,” Huglen said.
After beginning full practices at the end of November, Huglen played his first game of hockey in 627 days on Jan. 2, 2021.
Midway through the second period, he scored the game-winner, breaking a tie game to help the Force to a 4-1 win over the Sioux Falls Stampede.
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“I was a little nervous. I’d been out for so long so I wasn’t sure how it would go but once I scored that was a big morale boost,” Huglen said. “I was like ‘Al lright!’ And the guys were so fired up.”
From there, he didn’t look back, learning to play with the pain. After posting 35 points in 39 regular-season games down the stretch, he added another eight in nine playoff games in Fargo’s run to a Clark Cup final appearance.
The hits kept coming though. Hoping to finally have his first full summer of training in years, Huglen suffered another, different lower-body injury in a summer training session.
A few months later, when the 6-foot, 170-pound forward showed up on the University of Minnesota’s campus to begin his belated freshman year, almost exactly four years to the day since he’d committed to the school, he was a skinny, underdeveloped 20-year-old.
Once the season began, he started slowly, registering just one point in his first nine games.
In time, though, as he started to get comfortable, he climbed up the lineup, eventually taking Jets first-rounder Chaz Lucius’ spot on the team’s first line when Lucius went down with a foot injury.
Sliding between free-agent star Ben Meyers and Leafs prospect Matthew Knies, Huglen took off down the stretch, posting nine points in the final eight games of the season.
That spilled into the playoffs, too, capped off by the play that set up Meyers’ overtime winner in the Worcester Regional semifinal and a third period power-play one-timer that gave the Golden Gophers the 2-0 lead in their 3-0 win over Western Michigan in the final — for a spot in the Frozen Four.
Although he didn’t have another moment in him in the Frozen Four, and his freshman season finished with a 5-1 loss to the Minnesota State Mavericks, his season could only be considered a personal triumph.
Aaron Huglen. (Courtesy of University of Minnesota Athletics)Garrett Raboin, the team’s assistant coach, called Huglen’s comeback a “monumental mental challenge.”
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“I think it just speaks to the character of the kid. Having been through the adversity that he’s had to deal with, I mean it was really bad and he just continued to fight through it and work through it,” Raboin said. “And now for us, he has just been such a valuable player really all year and now you’re seeing him really take off since Christmas.”
Raboin refers to Huglen as a Swiss Army knife.
“You can put him on any line and he can help contribute. (And) you look at him and you think he’s lean and long and has so much more he can do with his body but right now, he’s able to protect pucks and play a strong, physical game, and he really is strong with the puck on his stick,” Raboin said.
Head coach Bob Motzko knew he was ready when he returned from his 20-month layoff and was immediately one of the top players in the USHL. Then when Huglen arrived, Motzko was impressed by his versatility from Day 1, using him on the wing and at center — and often against the opposition’s best players — even when the points weren’t coming.
“He went through an enormous amount. And he has just been a steady, ‘just-keeps-getting-better, nothing-fazes-him,’ kid,” Motzko said. “He’s going to be a terrific college player. And right now we’re getting it in doses and more confidence as he goes. But it has been a remarkable recovery for him.”
Today, when Huglen looks back on everything he has overcome since that day in May of 2019, he doesn’t dwell on the negative.
When he hit rock bottom, he turned to religion. He continues to lean on his faith to guide him through this next chapter, as he learns to live with the pain.
“It was obviously a really challenging time but it grew me so much as a person and finding faith in God. That was a time when I think it has helped me so much now that it was such a blessing in disguise,” he said. “It was hard to have something I’d had my whole life stripped from me, but I found so much more in God and it has changed my life, so it has been worth it.”
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He’s thankful, too. Thankful for the help and support the staff in Fargo gave him. Thankful that he feels like himself on the ice again.
Asked to describe what that looks like, he smiled.
“I’ve just been building confidence and getting more confident with the puck and realizing like ‘All right, I can keep up with it.’ And then once I got the confidence, the brain started going, ” Huglen said. “I’d say my hockey IQ is my greatest strength and I try to rely on my brain more than anything. I’ve got pretty good speed but I like to think the game, think fast, and distribute the puck.”
He is excited about what’s ahead, hopefully after a summer of full, uninterrupted training.
“The biggest thing for me is just getting into the gym and putting on some muscle, so I’m looking forward to that,” Huglen said.
Motzko and Raboin are excited to see what a proper summer can do for him as well.
“This is going to be a great offseason for him. He’s going to be a terrific player. We’re just seeing the beginning stages of what he can do,” Motzko said.
Added Raboin: “We’re having so much fun just watching him grow. He has really been cheated out of some of that time in the weight room. He’s in critical developmental years of his life physically and we’re really looking forward to having him on campus working out.”
Most of all, though, Huglen is just relieved — relieved that he’s through the worst of it.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d get here,” he finished.
(Top photo: Courtesy of University of Minnesota Athletics)
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