Welcome to the NHL Chat Room, NHL.com's weekly Q&A with key figures in the game, gaining insight into their lives on and off the ice. This week, we feature former NHL goalie Mike Condon, who played 129 games during four seasons with the Ottawa Senators, Pittsburgh Penguins and Montreal Canadiens from 2015-19. He went 45-58-17 with a 2.79 goals-against average, .905 save percentage and six shutouts. He now is the owner of Condon Performance Consulting, working as a mental performance counselor for athletes.
BOSTON -- When Mike Condon was at Northeastern University, serving as goalie coach for two seasons from 2021-23, he noticed that conversations with his goalies, specifically Devon Levi, sometimes would expand from the two minutes anticipated into hour-and-a-half marathon sessions. The talks would extend past the minutia of coaching and technique into areas far beyond.
He took note.
So while he loved goalie coaching, loved coming up with a practice and a plan, it seemed like maybe there was another turn his career should take.
He decided to go back to school.
"I was like, this is more beneficial than talking about where you're holding your glove," Condon told NHL.com, after appearing as a featured speaker at the 2026 National Goaltending Symposium in Boston in August. "I want to learn how to do this the right way."
Boston University was right down the road. Condon applied to BU's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development and was accepted, earning his master’s degree in counseling psychology and sport psychology in May, 2025. He started working in performance consulting, something he called an "ever-evolving puzzle."
"It's almost like throughout chapters of our life things come in for a reason," Condon said. "I was supposed to play for a bit, but it's almost like my playing career was for what I'm doing now. It's almost like this is what I'm supposed to be doing."
He spoke to NHL.com about his struggles with mental health while in the NHL, getting into the mental performance field and the importance of finding a counselor you trust.
When did the study of mental performance start to interest you?
"One of my regrets was not studying psychology in college (at Princeton). I studied political science, international relations, which I guess you could argue is like the psychology of countries? But the mental game was always very hard for me. I didn't enjoy playing games. I'm like, why don't I enjoy this? I love practice. I love certain aspects of it, but the game itself was always very hard. When you would win a game, it wasn't like, yeah, we won. It was like ‘thank God we didn't lose.’ Those are two completely different experiences. I was always perplexed by that. I wasn't sure if it was my personality, my upbringing, my disposition, but I was trying so many things and nothing ever clicked. I always thought that as I played more it would get easier and I would finally reach that transcendence of, ‘oh, it's finally clicking, I'm enjoying it, I've established myself,’ but it was actually the opposite. Things were getting worse over time and they even got worse after I was done playing, so it was this really weird motivation to figure that out. You see so much suffering in hockey and coping in bad ways that I wanted to, at the very least, in my next chapter of life have a little bit of meaning and use what I've learned to help others."
What was hockey like for you?
"Most fun I'd ever had playing sports was like JV soccer. The most fun. Excited. I would get sad when it would rain and the games would be cancelled but then I found myself in the NHL being like, ‘I hope this game gets cancelled.’ I was like, ‘something's not right, but you've got to smile.’ It was very rewarding and I was very driven, but the enjoyment aspect of it, it was more just like surviving. But I think that had a lot to do with my upbringing too, this mode of just fighting and surviving. And I was good at that, but you're not going to last long doing that. You're going to burn your body out and my body quit before my brain did."
How did you get through games when you were dreading them?
"Resilience is studied a lot in psychology and I don't think you can think your way to resilience. It's basically just how I was raised. My upbringing wasn't traumatic, it was difficult in its own way. My parents got divorced (when I was) 7. … It gave me a lot of independence because you're in between houses. It was painful, so I learned to get through pain and just show up and go to work. But I also had two role models in my brother and my dad, who were hyper-resilient people, and that became a value that we had. It's not about the accomplishments, it's about the effort and the attempt. And I always had that support, no matter what, for me to go out and do what I want, even if we didn't have the money. My dad, he was a state trooper, he's working 90 hours a week, he's not very good with money and the hot water gets shut off. So that morning when the hot water is shut off in January, my dad called them navy showers, which is basically just hop in a cold shower. You hear your dad scream from the cold water, you hear your brother scream from the cold water, you're 13 and you're watching this and you're just like, OK, this is what we do."
Did you have anyone to talk to during your hockey career?
"There were a couple times when I worked with people that weren't specifically sports psychologists, more kind of people off the beaten path who were healers, to speak. But my trainer that I found right after I graduated school, his name was Scott Rehm, he was a UFC fighter and a UFC cut man. He was just a guy with a lot of wisdom and grew up in Southie, short, smokes, tattoos, but he had a ton of wisdom. We could resonate over a common experience of him walking into the Octagon. There's way more consequences than me walking into a hockey game, his capacity for death is a lot greater than mine. Just the conversations there of what it means to be able to willingly walk into that, he was really the mentor that helped me probably the most. … I love that man. Cried with him, got very close, and that's what it's really about. It's about how well you connect with each other."
What was the process of formalizing the learning like, integrating that with your lived experiences?
"I had to check my ego because I was walking into a sports program and a lot of the teachers never played sports. So I was sitting there like, what are you guys going to tell me about this? But I had to suspend that for a little bit, forget what I thought I knew, learn what the book says, reference it with what I know. I think the most valuable part of the degree was just talking with people who have sat across from people, hundreds and hundreds of hours, and being like, ‘how do you help people? How do you go about doing it?’ We made it super complex to have all these theories, but then it's actually very simple: If you can provide shelter for somebody for an hour and have a genuine authentic conversation, that literally changes people's brains. And when they come out of that, they'll feel better. That's what the actual work is. … But it was hard going back to school. I was 34, I had two kids, it was a lot of money, it was a lot of time, but I knew that I’d be mad at myself if I didn't do it.”
How do you see the greater attention on mental health in the NHL now?
"We've seen it, saw a couple guys this year. I know Spencer Knight took some time, Linus Ullmark took some time, Victor Hedman took some time. … It's nine months every other day against the best on frozen water with knives on your feet. It's a lot. So prioritizing the healing, the way you can actually recharge -- you can see it when guys get too tired to where they can't function. I just didn't have the courage to do that. I don't think I could, either, because I was an undrafted guy, on two-way contracts. You're making 75 grand or 600 grand, I never spoke up ever. … But it's important. I'm glad guys are doing it more."
What has the interest been in your services?
"We see it everywhere, in school all the charts and the curves, mental health concerns are going up through the roof, especially after Covid. I'm not sure if that's awareness or if it's actually people are suffering more. I think life is getting more complicated. There is a huge demand for it. There’s plenty of people doing the work and we need more people.
"It's getting bigger, and if you look at the hockey climate now it's more (stressful) than it's ever been in terms of the choices and the options. … There's these hockey academies, there's all this money and you have to be on the trajectory earlier and if you're not, you’re kind of screwed. I think the risk factors are hitting kids earlier and earlier, risk factors I didn't have to experience because I was shielded. It makes kids more exposed and vulnerable."
How challenging can it be to handle all that, on the ice and off?
"You go home and you've got to be a human. You can never get away from it. Like what if your dog dies? What if your girlfriend breaks up with you? What if something happens in your family? Life doesn't care, but you still have to compartmentalize and show up. That is a very, very hard thing to do."
