After a successful collegiate career skating with the River Hawks for four years, followed by nine seasons of professional hockey, Barry Goers '10 has retired his blades and has set his sights on something completely different – becoming a ninja.
Goers is fulfilling a personal goal that he started working towards since his retirement from hockey in 2018 by competing on the current 2020 season of the hit NBC television show, American Ninja Warrior.
"I've been a huge fan of the show since pretty much the beginning and I always just really wanted to try it," Goers explained. "I was one of those people who would sit there and think I could do it and want to try it. So, I kind of made it a goal, or dream, to compete on the show when I was done playing hockey. Fortunately, I met some really cool people and I started training, and things came true for me."
Among those "right people" Goers met was Jake Murray, an American Ninja Warrior veteran. Murray, alongside fellow Ninja Warrior participant Bart Copeland, helped Goers train for his rookie appearance on the show.
"I was training at Earth Treks and this other guy was training next to me and we just started talking," Goers remembered. "He was talking about American Ninja Warrior and I said I really want to try to go on that show. Well, it happened to be Jake. I got his contact info and we ended up reconnecting later on after I met Bart Copeland at one of my first Ninja competitions. I just felt so fortunate to meet these two pros and they brought me under their wings, so it was really just a lucky turn of events where I ended up meeting some really great people to help get more into the sport."
The Ivyland, Pa. native, now living in Colorado, noted the significant differences in training for a hockey season compared to ninja training.
"I have sort of reverse engineered myself," Goers said. "In hockey, you're building yourself from the ground up. Legs are really the focus. But when I got into ninja, I was hanging from stuff and realized my upper body is not where it needs to be, so I really focused on training upper body, especially my grip strength and forearm strength."
Despite never competing on American Ninja Warrior before this season, Goers is far from an amateur when it comes to these types of obstacle courses. In fact, Goers has proven that he is more than capable of holding his own weight regarding these competitions.
"In Colorado, fortunately there are a lot of ninjas who live here, so we have a lot of local competitions," Goers added. "There's the Colorado Ninja League, and there's an amateur division and pro division. I competed in the amateur division this year and won, so I was pretty excited about that."
Although Goers was used to the spotlight thanks to his professional hockey career and multiple playoff runs, the UMass Lowell alum admits he was still nervous setting foot on the big stage for his first ever American Ninja Warrior run in the qualifying round, which aired on NBC back in September.
"Being in the dome there in St. Louis, I will say the course is very intimidating. I didn't think I'd be too nervous, but let me tell you, it was a completely different experience than playing in a hockey game. I don't know if it's because it's just you up there, but when I got to the steps of the stage to go up and start my run, I was extremely nervous."
But despite graduating from UMass Lowell 10 years ago, Goers acknowledged that his time as a River Hawk still helped him prepare for the American Ninja Warrior stage regarding both mental and physical preparation.
"American Ninja Warrior is obviously so physical and mental, and I think some of the greatest things I learned from school really have to do with those abilities. Playing college hockey at Lowell, I learned how to take care of my body from a standpoint of diet, nutrition, and training on a daily basis. It's absolutely been a big piece of how I train for Ninja Warrior now. Even on top of that, being a student-athlete at a school like Lowell, you really learn to balance and juggle a lot of things, and I think that builds your mental strength as a human being. A lot of American Ninja Warrior stuff is just being mentally strong."
Goers' training clearly paid off, as he turned in a great performance in his qualifying run during his ANW debut, making it all the way to the fifth of six obstacles on the course.
"On the fifth obstacle, when I came around the first Ferris wheel and survived the drop, I looked over to grab that other holds on the next Ferris wheel and I swear it was kind of like it zoomed away from me, almost like you see in a cartoon. So, unfortunately, I fell off trying to transfer and make that transition, but I thought I moved pretty quickly through the course and did pretty well to that point. It was a great learning experience for me. I learned a lot from my first time on the course."
And although he didn't finish the qualifying course, his Ninja Warrior dreams live on, as he was saved from elimination and advanced to the semifinals through a great performance by his teammate Murray. The first half of the 2020 American Ninja Warrior semifinal runs airs on NBC tonight, Monday, October 12, at 8 p.m. And while we'll have to tune in to see how Goers does tonight, he did say he hopes to be invited back in future seasons and become a regular on the show.
"I 100% hope they bring me back. If it were my choice, I'd go back and compete every year. My hope is that I did well enough this past season that they'll want to bring me back, but I'm looking to keep getting stronger, more technical and more skilled. I hope to be a regular in years to come. That's really my goal and I have my fingers crossed."
And even though he has his hands full with his ninja training and his two young boys, Goers still makes time to stay up to date on all things UMass Lowell.
"I've been so proud to be a River Hawk alum," Goers concluded. "Coach
Norm Bazin and all the boys there with the River Hawks have done an amazing job, and it's great to see the school behind the program, too. I know there's been a lot of updates to the arena and the facilities, and even though I haven't been able to make it back east recently, it is definitely a goal of mine to take my wife and my boys out there one day to show them the campus and see a game. I would love to do that."
