Manchester Storm forward Tim McGauley has revealed how a walk in the park changed his life.

 

The Canadian forward, who will be 32 on Thursday 23rd, was set to quit ice hockey after a frustrating time in his career.

 

But he spoke of how that walk opened his eyes to other possibilities in his career that has given him a renewed love of the game, which has led him to Manchester.

 

“I was getting pretty frustrated,”

 

he said in the latest interview on StormCast.

 

“I was signed to an NHL contract with Washington and had a shoulder injury which took me over six months to recover from, plus a lot of things didn’t seem to align for me since I turned pro.

 

It had been a bumpy road and I think in my third year, when was with Colorado Eagles in the AHL then sent down to Utah Grizzlies in the East Coast League, I remembered thinking I was so fed up that I was considering of quitting hockey.

 

You work so hard in the off season only for them to tell you you weren’t good enough and you were sent back down again.

 

I was really down on myself and decided I wasn’t going to do it any more. But I was in the park one day and remembered my family are all very well travelled.  I was always so envious of that and  I wanted to travel too.

 

So I came to the realisation that I wanted to do that. Instead of quitting hockey, I’m going to make hockey basically pay for my vacation.  I’m going to go to Europe, play hockey and have fun.

 

From there, I fell in love with the sport again.  I’d put a lot of pressure on myself when I was younger to make it to the NHL, but I didn’t have that pressure anymore.

 

When you have fun doing anything, life is a little bit better and it reignited that fire for me again.”

 

Since that epiphany, McGauley has been to Norway, Germany, Austria and Hungary before arriving in England, ticking another country off his list.

 

And he said the offer to come to the Storm was one that was appealing from the off, admitting it was on his list of places to go.

 

He added:

“When I first came to Europe six years ago, I really wanted to explore the world and while I’ve been to a few different ones now, England is one I’d never seen.

 

It’s always been on the list and I’ve heard a lot of cool things about it, especially places like London, Manchester and Liverpool which have so much history, which I love.

 

It was always somewhere I wanted to go, so when Manchester came calling, it was hard to turn it down. It’s one of the staple cities in the world and a cool place to go.”