Reggie Millette was just beginning to embrace the sport of hockey – a sport that ultimately would change his life – when he attended a professional game at Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and saw a player who stood out from all the rest.

That player was Leo Thomas.

“One hundred percent, the first Black hockey player I saw was Leo Thomas,” Millette said.

It was around 2008, and Millette had just begun skating as an 8-year-old when he saw Thomas on the ice for the Fort Wayne Komets, then a member of the International Hockey League. 

Coming to Fort Wayne, where Millette lived for about three years, already had impacted his life positively. 

Taking up hockey, which happened simply because he was tired of sitting in the stands watching his sister figure skate, gave him purpose.

There were roadblocks along the way – namely a lack of money – that have made Millette’s ascension in hockey remarkable. But he’s overcome them, playing junior hockey in the North American Hockey League and USHL, NCAA hockey for American International College and now ECHL hockey for the Tulsa Oilers.

Millette got to play this month at the Coliseum, which brought back a flood of memories. 

He’d skated the Komets’ flag onto the ice when he was a youth player and attended other games with friends. 

One night, Millette was lacing up his skates in the Komets’ locker room, readying to participate in an intermission event, and Komets tough guy Brad MacMillan sauntered in, having just been booted for fighting. They chatted, and that helped elevate Millette’s passion for hockey.

But seeing Thomas, who helped the Komets to three straight IHL titles when Millette lived in Fort Wayne, took it to another level – even if they never took a picture together.

“Whenever you see your idols, I was never like, ‘Oh, let’s go take a picture,’” Millette said. “I was more just like thinking, ‘That’s my idol! I want to be like that! I’m going to go train.' I didn’t need the picture, but it would make me want to go skate and do what I could to be like that.”

Hard work is something that has set Millette apart during his career. He’s never been a playmaker – he had one assist in 22 games for AIC between 2021 and 2023 and has only one assist in 15 games for Tulsa – and he’s only 5-foot-11, but he’s carved out a role time and again as a blue-collar energy player.

“I try to bring energy and stability, just consistent play,” Millette said. “That’s the biggest thing for me.”

Millette, 23, is one of the most unlikely players in the ECHL, when you consider his beginnings. 

He grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, well before they had a pro hockey team in the ECHL. His mother was in a halfway house, and Reggie Millette bounced from one family member’s house to another, often getting in trouble at school and seeing life through a much different lens than he does now.

His idols back then were drug dealers, he admitted, and there was every reason to believe he’d wind up in jail himself.

He eventually moved in with his grandmother, Pamela McNair, in Fort Wayne. He called that place a “safe haven,” and he began trying out various sports. 

Even though Millette bristled at getting onto the ice – his first pair of skates hurt his feet so badly he cried – trying hockey outweighed the boredom of watching from the stands. Eventually, the sport stuck.

Seeing Komets such as Thomas, MacMillan and Lincoln Kaleigh Schrock – whom he liked because he fought a lot – certainly helped amplify his passion for the game.

But hockey was expensive, especially the better at it Millette got. 

When he was 11 and playing travel hockey, he and his grandmother did everything they could think of to come up with the money – they collected cans and wrote people for grants – but the bills were piling up, and Millette was told one Saturday that he couldn’t participate in practice the next Monday unless his ice bill was paid.

He went anyway and found out the most glorious news: Someone, anonymously, took care of it for him. To this day, Millette doesn’t know who the benefactor was, but he acknowledged that without them, his hockey career probably would have ended right then.

Asked what he would say to them, if he ever met them, Millette said: “I would just give them as much thanks as I could. I don’t even know if the words would come out right. I just hope that through my play, I just hope they could tell that I’m so grateful.”

It wasn’t the last time he benefited from the kindness of others.

When Millette was 12, he was invited to play for Victory Honda, which was based in Plymouth, Michigan, but that required a two-and-a-half-hour commute from Fort Wayne, something that quickly became too much for McNair to handle. 

The team’s coach, Rick Scero, and his family, invited Millette to live with them, rather than placing him with billet housing. The Sceros gave Millette a structure he’d never really had, one that would enable him to pursue his dreams of playing hockey at high levels, and he remains incredibly close with the Sceros to this day, living near them in Northville, Michigan.

He skated in the NAHL for the Austin Bruins from 2017 to 2019, and again in 2020-2021, totaling 15 goals and 37 points in 112 games. He played for the USHL’s Dubuque Fighting Saints from 2019 to 2021, accruing five goals and 12 points in 60 games.

At AIC, he was part of the team that won the 2022 Atlantic Hockey Championship and earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

“That was a whole different experience, trying to balance school and hockey, especially coming from juniors,” Millette said. “I had to get used to being in classrooms again, while preparing for practice, and doing it all in the same day. I was having to focus on things besides hockey. But my teammates helped me out, especially as a freshman. And we won a championship, so my memories are all going to be special because of that championship.”

Millette raves about the way AIC’s coach, Eric Lang, prepared him for professional hockey.

“Coach lang and the staff really helped me realize the consistency that you have to bring,” Millette said. “I think that’s the biggest part. It’s really hard to make the lineup at AIC – they hold a really tight rope on guys – and I think that’s one of the biggest things that prepared me to keep being consistent and bringing it every single night.”

In his lone pro game at the Coliseum, Dec. 8, the Oilers lost 4-2 to the Komets. There was nothing remarkable about Millette’s stats that night – he had two shots on goal and was minus-1 – but he hopes he made an impact. 

Maybe there was a youngster in the crowd, who saw Black faces on the ice, like those of Millette and teammate Dante Sheriff, and thought that despite it being a predominantly white sport, they, too, could someday make it to the pros.

Sheriff gives us the lead! 2-1 Tulsa. pic.twitter.com/meDMtK1IrK

— Tulsa Oilers (@tulsa_oilers) December 10, 2023

Millette said he thinks about that a lot, that maybe now he’s the Leo Thomas to some kids out in the stands.

“I hope I inspire someone to do something good,” Millette said.

And even though he never got a photo with Thomas, Millette hopes any young hockey players won’t hesitate to ask him for one. Whatever it takes to get them passionate about hockey.

“I love it when people want to take pictures with me,” he said. “I eat it up, for sure.”