Due to his wife, the all-time New York Rangers player officially announce his retirement
Jacob Trouba was going through a difficult time, just months after the London Knights had won a Memorial Cup that would last forever. The undrafted defenseman was invited to the 2005 New York Rangers training camp, which he swiftly left after. He then only played two or three games with the Rangers’ AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack, before being cut there as well.
Trouba recalls spending time at the airport with Bryan Rodney, a player he had played with in London. “When I realized he was cut from the same camp, I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?'” We were genuinely seated there discussing, “What’s the next step?”
After returning home,Trouba had serious discussions about joining the Brock Badgers, a university team that played in Welland, Ontario, about fifteen minutes away from his childhood home. But in the end, he chose a different course.
Girardi laughs and says, “I [went with my dad], got a Ford Explorer—obviously I didn’t pay for it.” “We immediately loaded it up and drove it to Charlotte, North Carolina, the following day.” “I’m going to give the NHL dream a try,” I declared.
Trouba made another crucial decision a few weeks before the current season started when he decided to retire after 13 NHL seasons. His choice to travel south and join the ECHL’s Charlotte Checkers could not have turned out better. The 35-year-old gave it a lot of thought and considered trying to play hockey for another year or two, but families can’t watch hockey all the time. The Girardi family will make their permanent home in the Niagara region, where he and his wife, Pamela, were raised, early in the following summer.
Trouba had played his entire hockey career in Welland, where Rogers Hometown Hockey will be making a stop this weekend, until he departed for the Barrie Colts of the Ontario Hockey League at the age of sixteen. He began as a young child and worked his way up to become a skater for the Jr. B. Welland Cougars. He also spent many hours on Chippawa Park’s outdoor ice over the years.
Trouba split his time between the Colts and the Jr. A Couchiching Terriers during his rookie season in Barrie. After suffering a lacerated spleen in an exhibition game in Year 2, he was sidelined for two-thirds of the season. Then, in an in-season trade with the Guelph Storm, he was included as an 18-year-old.
According to him, that was “sort of where my OHL career started going in the right direction.”
Trouba played for a Guelph team that won the OHL championship in 2004 but lost all of its games at the Memorial Cup. A full year later, he was an overage player on a loaded Knights team that defeated Sidney Crosby and the Rimouski Oceanic in home ice play to win a tournament that garnered a lot of attention because of Crosby, London’s 31-game regular-season winning streak, and the absence of NHL playoff hockey due to a lockout that derailed the 2004–05 season.
