PHOTO: Louis-Adrien Le blay

“I wanted to experience a different part of the world and a different culture,”
says Crozier of taking his pro hockey career to Europe. He was calling from a Paris café a week after the Jokers were knocked out in the semifinals of the playoffs for France’s Ligue Magnus.

“The baguettes are phenomenal here,” he adds. “I will miss the bakeries when I come back to North America.”

Crozier played forward for the Bears, lighting up Meehan Auditorium with 40 points over an abridged three-season career shortened by the Covid pandemic. After graduating, Crozier took his extra year of NCAA eligibility to Merrimack College, where he helped lead the team to the Hockey East championship game, then inked a deal with the minor-league Tulsa Oilers before moving to Cergy-Pontoise, a community of just over 200,000 people north of Paris.

Photo: Louis-Adrien Le blay

“One of my goals was to end my career overseas in Europe,” says Crozier, 26, who grew up in Calgary.

European hockey is different, he says; the ice sheet is larger and players are more eager to take risks as they shoot up and down the rink. The team is a mix of French and international players that includes Americans, Latvians, and a few other Canadians.

French people are not nearly as familiar with ice hockey as they are with soccer, so Crozier’s job included community outreach. “A few days ago I was at some elementary schools answering questions about what ice hockey is and what it’s like to play with a bunch of 8, 9, and 10 year olds,” he says. “It’s not nearly as mainstream as football is here, so it’s really fun to be a part of progress and expansion.”

Crozier says being able to play in France amounted to a kind of “delayed study abroad,” giving him a cultural and linguistic experience that he craved as a student. “There is a church from the 12th century that is twenty meters from the door to my apartment,” he says. “Something like that just can’t happen in North America, and it’s not lost on me.”