For Chelsea Dinnin, the rink has never simply been a place where hockey games are played. It has been a second home.
Long before she was travelling across North America and Europe as a social-media creator, coaching at Balmoral Hall School or inspiring players through camps and private sessions, Dinnin was a three-year-old girl following her parents to the rink.
Born in Winnipeg and raised in a small Manitoba community just outside the city, Dinnin grew up as an only child with her parents, Sheri and Ken. Her father played hockey, while her mother played ringette. Between the two of them, there was little doubt that Chelsea would become part of the rink culture. “We’ve always been a ‘rink’ family,” Dinnin says.
She started playing hockey at three, beginning in her hometown with the boys. As she grew older, Dinnin continued to challenge herself, moving on to the Eastman Selects at the Bantam and Midget levels.
Eventually, she found herself playing for the Balmoral Hall Blazers during her Grade 12 year. That season would become one of the highlights of her playing career. The Blazers captured the Junior Women’s Hockey League championship, giving Dinnin a taste of what could happen when talented players came together with a common goal.
From there, she moved on to Laurentian University and the OUA. Then the world changed. COVID-19 brought university hockey to a halt, and Laurentian ultimately folded its hockey programs. Dinnin returned home to Manitoba and, after everything she had experienced, decided it was time to retire from competitive hockey.
But hockey wasn’t finished with her, not even close. Dinnin eventually began playing in Winnipeg’s Junior Women’s Hockey League, a chapter of her career that she remembers with particular fondness. “Some of the most memorable hockey I played” came during that time, she says.
Today, the 24-year-old has found a different way to stay connected to the game. She works full-time in social media, coaches at her alma mater, Balmoral Hall, runs her own one-on-one training sessions and organizes hockey camps.
And, remarkably, hockey has taken her places she never could have imagined when she first laced up her skates at three.
Dinnin’s story is not just about hockey. It is also about recognizing an opportunity and being willing to try something different. She first began posting on social media at 12 years old. At first, it was simply something she did occasionally. Around the same time, she discovered hockey tricks online and decided she wanted to learn them herself.
That decision eventually became a defining part of her identity. Dinnin would spend hours practicing, repeating tricks until she could master them and then challenging herself to learn something new. There was no guarantee that anyone would ever watch, she did it because she enjoyed it.
Then came COVID. During the pandemic, Dinnin began posting more regularly on TikTok. The response was significant, and her following began to grow. What started as an experiment eventually developed into a substantial social-media presence, particularly on Instagram. The hockey skills, tricks and personality that she had developed over years of practice opened doors far beyond the rink in Manitoba.
Dinnin has since travelled extensively as Dream Hockey, visiting 10 U.S. states, two European countries and five Canadian provinces.
The opportunities have been anything but ordinary. In 2023, she attended the NHL Stadium Series in North Carolina, where she had the chance to skate on the ice and watch the game.
The IIHF sent her to Latvia and Finland to create social-media content during the Men’s World Championship, where she worked alongside players including Adam Fantilli and Winnipeg’s own Nic Ehlers.
She has participated in the Winnipeg Jets’ skills competition, taking part in the shootout and shooting-accuracy events. She travelled to New Jersey to play floorball in a Jomboy Media tournament—and helped her team win. More recently, she travelled to California and Nashville for a pair of roller-hockey tournaments.
For someone who started making hockey videos because she enjoyed learning tricks, the journey has been remarkable. Yet perhaps the most important part is that Dinnin has been able to build a career around something she has loved since childhood.
While social media has taken Dinnin around the world, coaching has brought her back to where her hockey journey took a significant step forward; Balmoral Hall. Dinnin is an alumna on the school, and her return came when she was coaching another team in Manitoba.
The Balmoral Hall coaching staff reached out to her about a new assistant-coach position. She applied, she got the job, and suddenly, she was back at the rink that had played such an important role in her own development.
There is something fitting about Dinnin now standing behind the bench at Balmoral Hall.
She knows what it feels like to be a young female hockey player trying to figure out where the game can take her. She knows the uncertainty that can come with transitions between levels. She knows the disappointment of having a university program disappear. And she knows what it feels like to discover that a hockey career doesn’t necessarily have to end when playing does.
Her coaching career has also brought her into the Canadian Sport School Hockey League (CSSHL). Balmoral Hall joined the CSSHL female league for the 2024-25 season, and Dinnin was there as part of the program’s coaching staff. The season couldn’t have gone much better as Balmoral Hall won the CSSHL Division II Western Championships in its first season in the league.
For Dinnin, the experience has been rewarding on several levels. She enjoys the travel, the competition and the opportunity to coach against programs from across Canada. But she is particularly excited about the growth of the women’s game and the opportunities being created for young players.
The showcase weekends, she says, are particularly valuable because they bring teams together for concentrated weekends of high-level competition. It is a far cry from the landscape Dinnin experienced as a player, and that growth is something she doesn’t take for granted.
Dinnin believes one of the biggest developments in women’s hockey has been the arrival of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). The PWHL has given young female players something that wasn’t always easy to see growing up: a professional destination.
For Dinnin, watching the league expand has been exciting—not simply because of the players competing at the highest level, but because of what their existence means to the girls she coaches. There is now a visible pipeline as college and university hockey can lead somewhere.
The professional game exists and young players can watch elite women compete and imagine themselves doing the same thing. But Dinnin believes there is still another piece missing.
She would like to see a professional development league beneath the PWHL, something that could provide another level of high-level competition for players who aren’t immediately able to crack a PWHL roster. In men’s hockey, a player can move through the pro ranks with the ECHL and AHL while continuing to develop.
Dinnin sees an opportunity to create something similar for women. “I think it would be a great way for players to still develop and get the chance to get called up to play,” she says.
It is an idea rooted in the same philosophy that guides her coaching: development doesn’t have to stop simply because a player hasn’t reached the highest level yet.
Dinnin had plenty of inspiration growing up. Her biggest hockey role model was, and remains, Sidney Crosby. But her interests extended well beyond hockey.
She was also a tennis player and golfer, following athletes such as Serena Williams and Jordan Spieth. Those influences helped shape the athlete she became, but hockey remained the constant.
Now, she is becoming an influence herself. For a long time, Dinnin never thought of herself as a role model, but that changed recently. Young girls began to recognize her, approaching her for pictures and autographs. They wanted to meet her; they looked up to her.
For Dinnin, the realization has been both flattering and difficult to comprehend. “It’s hard to realize it because I’m just a person,” she says. But that may be precisely why she is such a meaningful role model.
She isn’t presenting an impossible version of what a hockey career has to look like. Her path has included championships, university hockey, an unexpected program closure, retirement, a return to competitive hockey, coaching, social media and opportunities that took her around the world.
Her journey hasn’t followed a straight line, and it doesn’t have to. That is perhaps the most important lesson she can offer young female players: you can love hockey without knowing exactly where it will take you. You can change direction, discover new opportunities, leave the ice and find another way back, and you can build something entirely your own.
At just 24, Dinnin is already living several hockey lives at once. She is a former player, coach, trainer, camp instructor and social-media creator. She is an alumna who has returned to help develop the next generation at Balmoral Hall. She is also part of a generation that has watched women’s hockey undergo an extraordinary transformation.
She recently bought a new house in a small Manitoba town, continuing to build her life in the province where she has spent 24 years.
The rink remains a major part of that life. Only now, she sees it from a different perspective. Instead of being the young player looking toward the adults around the rink, she is one of the adults that young players are watching. Instead of dreaming about where hockey might take her, she is helping show others where it can take them. And instead of simply consuming the hockey content she once searched for online, she has become one of the people creating it.
From a three-year-old girl skating with the boys in a small Manitoba community to travelling internationally, working with professional athletes and coaching the next generation, Chelsea Dinnin’s journey reflects just how much the hockey world can change.
But one thing has remained constant; she still loves being at the rink. And now, she gets to help make the rink a place where the next generation of girls can dream a little bigger.
