Brij Singh touched down in Beijing Feb. 4 to support Team USA and represent his hometown of Los Altos.
Singh is serving as team leader for the 2022 Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team.“Anything the team needs runs through me,” he said. “Anything besides hockey.” That can mean handling matters ranging from immigration to emigration paperwork and scheduling.
Singh’s hockey journey began in the Bay Area – he played field hockey, which his parents enrolled him to honor his Indian Sikh heritage. (Field hockey is the national sport of India.) In high school, he played roller inline hockey for Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, but he confesses, “I wasn’t any good.” He also played ice hockey briefly but said he wasn’t a good skater.
Still, Singh loved hockey and recounted checking the newspaper for the San Jose Sharks schedule as soon as it was released.
“The first thing I would do was look for my birthday and find the closest (game) to my birthday,” he said.
As he continued playing hockey, Singh said he “took more of a liking to the management side of things.”
Singh secured USA Hockey’s Brendan Burke Internship, which enabled him to work with the national team’s development programs for 16 and 17 year olds in 2019. He said he came in “fresh faced” and looking to do anything and everything. He supported the team in any way possible, from selling programs to serving as a mascot. He has continued working with the national team since then and traveled to Riga, Latvia, last year for the world championship.
Although Singh has lived in Ann Arbor, Mich., for the past seven years, he still chose Los Altos as his official hometown for his Team USA bio. He attended Oak Avenue and Blach Intermediate schools before switching to private school. His parents live in Los Altos Hills.
“I loved growing up in Los Altos,” Singh said. “I wanted to represent the area as much as possible.”
Being at the Olympics has felt like being part of history, he said. He remembers staying up late as a child to watch the opening ceremony for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics.
“I was so excited just to see our country on TV,” he recalled. “I had that same feeling watching here in Beijing.”
