Laura Brown has a knack for being in the right place at the right time.  

That’s a good thing for the St.Thomas Tommies women’s hockey team and an even better thing for the residents of Scarborough, Ont. 

The 22-year-old defender, in her third year of play and fourth year of study at STU, scored the first goal of her Atlantic University Sport career recently. 

It was an important one — it tied the game at 2-2 in the third period against the St. Mary’s Huskies in Halifax, and the Tommies went on to win 3-2 in a shootout. And then, she struck with an even bigger one. She scored the winner in overtime against the sixth nationally ranked St. Francis Xavier X-Women to lift the Tommies to a dramatic 3-2 victory in a game in which the Tommies were outshot 50-21. 

But she has come to the rescue before — quite literally. 

Last May 28, she was on duty as a lifeguard at the Centennial Pool in Scarborough. The pool manager that Wednesday evening was doing paperwork in the office when a sharp whistle blew. 

Brown raced to the deck to find a 27-year-old man unconscious in the water. She and the other lifeguard — there were only two on duty — pulled him from the water, and she administered two cycles of chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before paramedics arrived. 

“After two cycles, he started to show signs of life,” she said.  

“Just as we were about to put the defibrillator on him, he sat up, and his eyes opened. He was very confused, but he was speaking and responsive. It was a scary situation; it was my first time doing CPR, but you can’t really freeze in a moment like that, and I didn’t, thankfully.”   

It’s not the first time she’s had a close call, though. 

In the summer of 2022, she was managing a water park where an autistic little boy got away from his parents and ran into oncoming traffic. She reunited the boy with his parents. In 2019, she was instructing a class at the Agincourt Recreation Centre when a fire broke out in the mechanical room. The fire caused millions in damages, and the park was closed for 18 months. 

A lifeguard since she was 16, Brown takes some shifts at UNB’s Sir Max Aitken Pool on UNB’s campus. 

Strength on the Blueline  

Most of her shifts these days are on the Tommies defence, where she lends size and strength to the blue line. Her goal — in her 49th regular season game — was a weight off her shoulders, she said. The winner against X, her second in three games, came on her only shot on goal that game.  

In her early hockey career in Toronto, she was a forward and a prolific scorer — she scored five in one game as a youngster. 

“I would sit at the blue line and just wait for them to get it up to me so I could go in and score,” she said. “They didn’t like that, so they stuck me on defence and I never got off defence.” 

She played against boys until Grade 9 when she switched to women’s hockey.  

It was a former minor hockey teammate, Isabella Thompson-Fiddes, who first sold Brown on the virtues of St. Thomas University. 

Thompson-Fiddes played just a single season at STU, but “she always spoke highly of the place,” said Brown.  

“Once I toured, I found it was a really nice atmosphere, a tight-knit community. Coming from Toronto, it was something I had never experienced to that amount. It’s definitely lived up to my expectations.” 

An Academic All-Canadian student studying Criminology, Brown hopes to return to her native Scarborough and become a paramedic and perhaps eventually go to law school. 

This year’s Tommies team is living up to expectations, too.  

After struggling last year — they missed the playoffs for the first time in two decades —the Tommies are off to a promising start this season, with four wins in their first five games.