Episode 286: Brooks Laich on Being the Best at Getting Better — and Why He's Now Building the World's Playground

The Athletes Podcast — Episode 286

Some conversations you finish and immediately want to run through a wall. This was one of them.

For episode 286, I sat down with Brooks Laich — 776 NHL games across 14 seasons with the Washington Capitals, Maple Leafs, Kings, and Senators, a Calder Cup champion in Hershey under our episode 100 guest Bruce Boudreau, and now the founder of World Playground, a booking platform on a mission to make travel affordable for everyone. He's also, by his own cheerful admission, only the second-fittest person in his own house — his fiancée is Katrín Davíðsdóttir, two-time Fittest Woman on Earth.

We went over an hour. Here's what stuck with me.

From a town of 600 to the NHL

Brooks grew up in rural Saskatchewan — a town of 600 people, the nearest city two hours away, winter six months of the year. His explanation for how a kid from there makes the NHL comes down to two words: passion and obsession. Every small town in Canada has a rink, and Brooks was on it every single day, in every form hockey takes — organized, shinny, road, roller, gym class.

He also shared a stat that floored me: Saskatchewan produces more NHL players per capita than anywhere in the world — 41 per million residents. His theory is that small-town kids simply get more ice time than city kids, and they get it under harder conditions.

"You'd drive 70 miles to another game, get your bag out of your dad's pickup, and your skates would be frozen. There's hardship to playing where we live — and it makes for tough kids that turn into tough professionals."

The speech from his mom that changed everything

At 12 years old, after a rough first day at a provincial baseball tournament, Brooks was sulking in his room when his mom walked in and delivered one line: you're hoping to hit the ball — you need to know you're going to hit it, and hit it hard.

He hit it hard the next day, won the provincial championship, and says he never struggled with self-belief again.

He tied it to a study of 400 championship teams that found the leader was rarely the best player — it was the person who built genuine rapport with every teammate, every day. And the one trait those leaders shared? A mother who believed in them.

My honest takeaway, and I said it on air: pause the episode, text your mom. My mom was a principal like Brooks' dad, and she hardwired the same belief into me. I wasn't planning on getting emotional 15 minutes into a podcast, but here we are.

The letter he never mailed

This might be the story of the episode. At 16, Brooks left home to chase the NHL, billeting with a family five hours away. Three weeks in, homesick and doubting everything, he wrote a full-page letter to his parents saying he wanted to come home — then stuck it in a desk drawer instead of mailing it. When he found it three weeks later, he'd already settled in.

"There was a time, just three weeks in, where I thought — I always knew I wanted to be an NHL player, but I don't know if I'm going to get through being away from my family."

How close the whole thing came to never happening is the part nobody sees from the outside.

Honest about the hole: 30 years chasing a Cup he never won

I asked Brooks about the highlights of his career, and he gave the most honest answer I've heard on this show. Part of him, he admitted, views his career as a failure — 30 years pursuing one thing, the Stanley Cup, and never winning it.

"Most people would look at my career as very successful. And I believe that. But there's also a shadow side — I never achieved what I set out to do."

The perspective he's landed on: he got to play the game he loved every day for over three decades, alongside Ovechkin for ten years, against Crosby, with childhood idols like Sergei Fedorov. That's a wild success — and the hole can be real at the same time. I pushed back a little on the "failure" framing, because a 14-year NHL career is roughly triple the league average, but I respect that he didn't sand the edges off his own story.

"The best at getting better"

If Brooks ever writes a book — and I'm holding him to it — he already has the title. He says that after 16 he was rarely the best player on any team he played for. But on almost every one, he was the best at getting better.

His formula for being what he calls an "applied athlete" is brutally simple: go out the door every day to get better at your craft, come back in the door better than you left, and repeat it for 30 years. From age 19 he went to bed at 9 p.m. every night — "rest is a weapon" — and was in the gym by 6:45 a.m. all summer, finishing three-and-a-half-hour sessions as other pros were just arriving.

"Every single decision you make in a day — every one — is: does this make me better or worse at my craft? That's the only filter."

For the young athletes listening: if you win most improved player, win it again next year. And the year after. Stack improvement on improvement and, in Brooks' words, you'll leave people in the dust.

Why he built World Playground

Brooks' new obsession is the same competition, repurposed. He used to want to win a Stanley Cup; now he wants World Playground to be the best travel booking platform in the world — and the model is genuinely unlike anything else out there. The platform strips out the commissions and markups that inflate travel prices and passes the wholesale rate straight through to you. Not a cent of commission kept, ever, across 2.2 million hotels, 13 cruise lines, and flights on the way.

The inspiration is his parents. His dad — the principal of his tiny hometown school and, per Brooks, "the fairest man on the planet" — used to say that fun is the last thing families can afford, and quietly brought lower-income kids tubing, golfing, and to hockey games. His mom did the same with food, feeding anyone who walked through the door.

"I don't look at us as a travel company. I look at us as a memory company. I've climbed Kilimanjaro with my mom, taken my dad to Alaska to fly fish — those are my best memories in life, and they only happened because I could afford to travel."

The safari story alone is worth the listen: his dad initially passed on joining because "I've seen the animals… on TV," then spent the entire drive locked in like a scout on a rhino hunt. His mom, meanwhile, summited Kilimanjaro just after her 64th birthday and is now known around town as Kilimanjaro Jane.

My own bucket list went on record in this episode: getting my dad to Scotland and Ireland to play the golf trip he never got to take with his dad, and getting my mom to Europe. Both are getting booked through World Playground — if I can save 15–20% on trips like that, why wouldn't I?

Homework: his book, my in-person event

Brooks challenged me directly on this one, and I'm putting it in writing so you can all hold me accountable: an in-person Athletes Podcast community event is going on the calendar for 2026. His argument was hard to argue with — if my mission is to connect and inspire, at some point you have to get people in the same room and let the magic happen. Where should we go? Send me a note or answer the poll — World Playground is facilitating, and Brooks has already offered to help make it happen.

In exchange, Brooks owes the world a book called The Best at Getting Better. He claims he has no desire to write it. I told him that's what ghostwriters are for. We're checking in at the end of 2026.

His advice for the next generation

We wrap every episode the same way, and Brooks delivered a three-parter: be the best at getting better, create the circumstance you want to see in the world, and — the one that stuck with me most — choose your struggle.

"Don't build an easy life. Choose struggle, but choose the struggle that you want. There's no life without struggle — but you can choose it, lean into it, and who says you can't have fun the entire way?"

Thanks for tuning in to episode 286. Watch or listen wherever you get The Athletes Podcast, and if this one hit, share it with an athlete who needs it. Shout-out to our sponsors: Perfect Sports — code AP15 saves you 15% on Hydro Splash and their new creatine + electrolyte formula — plus Birdie Juice, Fairway Co., and Titanium Ford, who put me in the Sand Bronco you've seen all over my stories. Hosted by David Stark.