Kash Patel is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but to other members of his club hockey team, he’s just another one of the guys.
Patel, a lawyer and former high-ranking intelligence official in the first Trump administration, has spent more than a decade as a defenseman on a bonafide Northern Virginia men’s hockey league dynasty.
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Patel, 44, is making the rounds on Capitol Hill ahead of the confirmation process, meeting Tuesday with Sens. Roger Marshall (R-KS), Steve Daines (R-MT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Rick Scott (R-FL), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), according to the Trump transition team.
And despite the obvious rigors associated with serving as a member of the president’s Cabinet, Patel told the Washington Examiner he has no plans to shelve his pastime if confirmed.
“I’ve been playing hockey ever since I was a kid and I’m not going to stop playing if confirmed to be the next FBI Director,” he said in a statement. “I love this sport and decided to give back and had a rewarding experience as a youth hockey coach when I last lived and worked in the D.C. area.”
Patel’s league plays out of the Medstar Iceplex in Northern Virginia, the Washington Capitals’s official practice facility, and boasts significant talent. The bulk of the league is made up of former college players and there’s a lengthy waitlist to join a roster. Former Caps defenseman Karl Alzner has even been known to lace up his skates and play in games.
Patel, a gritty defenseman in his own right, won’t wow you with his stick skills, according to his own teammates, but is the exact type of “scrappy” player you want on your line.
Jordan Shahin and Tommy Szabo joined Patel on “The Dons” around 2015 and have grown close to the Trump official in the ensuing years. Teams in the MCIAHL play 46 games a season on Sunday nights, and The Dons have won four league championships over the past 10 years. The team also traveled to New York and took home gold in the 2019 Lake Placid CAN/AM Challenge Cup, played annually in the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” Olympic arena.
“The hustle factor is always there,” Shahin said of Patel in an interview. “He’s a tough kid and, definitely, he always wants to be out there.”
Shahin recalled how during the 2023 league championship, Patel tore his bicep but didn’t tell his teammates at the time and just kept playing.
“He just celebrated the win like normal,” he explained. “But Kash then had to get surgery and do rehab, so it was a pretty serious injury.”
“He’s a team guy. He’ll block a shot, he’ll take a hit,” added Szabo. “He’ll get in the dirty areas and grind and work really hard. Doesn’t expect a thank you or anything. He just goes out and basically does his job, and he fits in well.”
Zach Gilhuly, who played as a winger and center alongside Patel, Shahin, and Szabo for three years before moving to New York, said that “Kash holds his own” with the former college players on The Dons.
“He’s in great shape. He shows up excited to play. I mean, some of the times he’s hopping off a plane and going right to the rink, and you can’t tell that he was just on a six-hour flight from Vegas,” Gilhuly, who still returns to the DC-area to occasionally lace it up with his old squad, explained.
“The thing about Kash’s game that does stick out is that he’s very smart. You can tell he’s watched a lot of hockey until he loves the game, and he knows he’s not the most skilled guy out there, but he knows the right plays to make, to not expose himself.”
Gilhuly told the Washington Examiner that Patel facilitates off-the ice too, taking a hand in planning team activities away from the rink that have helped build camaraderie and team chemistry.
All three of Patel’s teammates mentioned humorously that, though he’s a defenseman, Patel loves to shoot when in the offensive zone, despite not having the most reliable slapshot.
“Sometimes it comes in head high. Sometimes it’s good and flat on the ice,” Shahin mentioned. “We usually joke with him about keeping the shots down.”
It’s virtually impossible to discuss Patel without mentioning the string of negative media coverage he’s garnered over the past five years.
Patel earned a reputation as one of Trump’s most loyal advisors during his first term. A stint running the National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Directorate was followed by senior postings at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and at the Pentagon.
And in the Biden years, Patel has grown only more famous, or infamous, depending on who you ask.
Trump’s FBI director nominee has vowed to prosecute political opponents of the president-elect if they are found to have engaged in interfering in the 2020 election. He identified 60 “government gangsters” in the appendix of his 2023 book, all of whom could be prosecuted during the second Trump administration. That list included outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and even President Joe Biden himself.
But Patel’s hockey teammates say that media coverage hasn’t re-colored their perceptions of their friend, and, if anything, has given them more opportunity to make fun of him in the locker room.
“Recently, it’s obviously gotten to the point where it’s not that you can ignore it, but we all have fun. We’re all friends, so we might be giving him a hard time about a picture of him that maybe he doesn’t look his best in or something like that,” Shahin stated. “… It’s usually just funny to see our buddy in the news. It’s definitely never anything that’s been seen to be any sort of issue, and everybody loves playing with him.”
“I have been with other guys in this league, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re on the team with Kash,’ and then they’ll ask questions about Kash, but it’s not, ‘Oh, he’s associated with this party’ and comments going in that direction,” Gilhuly told the Washington Examiner. “They’re more asking, ‘how is he as a guy? Yeah, he seems like a cool dude.’ The politics stop there.”
“Nothing has ever changed, with Kash working at the White House or taking this new gig up,” Szabo added. “He walks in the door, and is like, ‘oh, what’s up, man? How’s your week?’”
Ultimately, Patel’s teammates say that he, like virtually every other member of the team, treats hockey as an outlet to decompress from work or an alternative form of “therapy,” and they weren’t surprised at all to discover he plans to continue playing on The Dons if confirmed.
“We’re all a little bit crazy in the fact that we go and do it and deal with the bumps and bruises and, you know, having to go back to reality after it’s over, but it’s such a zen experience,” Shahin said.
“It’s like the best fraternity in the world, basically. Everyone who’s willing to do it has clearly made some sort of effort. It’s a tough thing to try to balance with work, life, and social things and everybody’s travel.”
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“That’s just Kash,” Szabo said simply.
