Growing up, hockey surrounded Courtney Laughlin. Her father, Craig, played eight years in the NHL, six of those seasons for the Washington Capitals, and another two years in Germany. For the past 28 years, he has been a popular color analyst, broadcasting their games on NBC Sports Washington.
Courtney’s older brother, Kyle, also played ice hockey. “I was dragged to ice rinks,” Courtney says. “My mother [Linda] said I despised it. I was like, ‘Oh. I don’t want to go: Another hockey tournament for my brother.’ I didn’t want to play and my parents never forced me to. So, I did figure skating through elementary and middle school.”
Craig recalls that she simply had too much energy to just sit and watch. “She got sick and tired of sitting there with mom and me, twiddling her thumbs,” her dad says. “That’s until one moment when the light bulb went on and she said, ‘Hey, I want to play hockey and get dad to coach my team,’ which I did for many years.”
Two decades after that change of heart, hockey is now the 31-year-old’s professional career and livelihood.
Courtney, a Gambrills resident, works as an NBC Sports Washington pre- and post-game studio analyst for Capitals games, hosts a weekly podcast, “Family Faceoff,” with her father on Monumental Sports Network, and helps run her family’s business, Network Hockey Development Program. Network Hockey offers on- and off-ice training programs at The Gardens Ice House in June and July.
On top of all that, Courtney plays in a women’s league during the summer, watches hockey on television almost every night, and talks nonstop about it with her family, friends, and coworkers. “Sometimes I get home after a game late at night and I just want to watch a movie,” Craig says. “I want to take a step back, but she is 100 percent into it. She still wants to talk hockey.”
Craig says he’s especially proud that Courtney is carving a niche for herself in a male-dominated field. “She could break boundaries for women in hockey throughout our region and the United States,” he says. “There are very few [female studio analysts]. She’s trying to be that next woman who gets in the booth. I see her on the cusp of breaking through.”
Courtney got her first opportunity with NBC Sports Washington (formerly Comcast Sports Network) in 2014, shortly after she earned her master’s degree from Georgetown University in sports industry management with a concentration in social media and marketing.
The network took advantage of her top-notch social media skills.
“I brought the fans into the game with a social media segment,” Courtney says. “It was pre-game and sometimes post-game. The segment would be anywhere from 90 seconds to two minutes. It involved sending a Twitter question out to Caps fans and getting them to talk about the hot topics and getting them engaged in the show.”
NBC Sports Washington expanded her role for the 2016–2017 season, and made her a studio analyst as one of the co-hosts of a pregame show and occasional post-game. She has continued in this capacity for the past two seasons, and is more than holding her own among the guys, giving her expert opinion.
Courtney can credit her success analyzing high-level hockey to playing and coaching college hockey at State University of New York at Potsdam and also coaching at an all-boys school, DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville.
In the summer of 2013, Courtney had the rare opportunity to help out the Capitals coaching staff on the ice at their practice rink in Arlington, as the team’s prospects worked through drills at a developmental camp.
"I brought the fans into the game with a social media segment. It was pre-game and sometimes post-game. The segment would be anywhere from 90 seconds to two minutes. It involved sending a Twitter question out to Caps fans and getting them to talk about the hot topics and getting them engaged in the show."
Even though Courtney walked into the studio with a lifetime of hockey experience, she still needed to learn the nuances of talking hockey on TV. The Laughlin name is very well known on the Capitals broadcasts. However, she knew she would have to prove herself and not rely on her father’s reputation.
NBC Sports Washington Executive Producer Bob Bell says she quickly connected with viewers after he hired her.
“I would like to see her on our air more,” Bell explains. “What I really like about Courtney is her level of confidence and her knowledge of the game. We are seeing a little more of females at the regional sports networks involved in pre- and post- shows. She is a rare combination of a woman who has played and coached the game. You can’t say that about a lot of her other colleagues in the business who are also women.”
Before she started the podcast with her father, Courtney did an online show called “Caps Red Line” on the Monumental Sports Network for two years. It involved a 15-minute preview of Capitals games.
“After a year of doing the show, it was just me for the second year,” she says. “I had to learn how to produce my own content.”
Courtney and her father are now focused sharply on their podcast. Craig says she basically runs the show.
“She wants to lead the podcast,” he says. “She says, ‘Dad, we have got to be here at this time,’ and I say, ‘OK, Courtney, what topics are we going to be touching on today?’”
“She tries to give me a hard time and we have disagreements and we’ll go back and forth,” he adds. “But we also have a father-daughter relationship, so we have a lot of fun with it.”
These days she also devotes a considerable amount of time as the chief executive officer of the Laughlin Family Foundation. Courtney says that her mother, Linda, was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer in April 2018. They created the foundation when they realized that more information was needed about her type of disease.
“It’s a way to give back and we noticed how many other rare cancers there are that don’t get the research and funding,” Courtney explains.
In that same vein, she draws inspiration from her own family. She hopes her work on and off the ice will inspire others.
