And if you love doing what you're doing , you're gonna work a lot harder at it and you're just gonna do it in your free time . So I would say my biggest challenge that I've faced was injuries , I guess throughout the last couple of years , I had some injuries with my knees and you know , when you're , when you're , when everything's not fine tuned and perfect and , and not feeling good on your body , you're not gonna be able to perform at the level that you want to . So just like preh have and , and making sure you do all the little things right every day to keep yourself from getting injured .
So I would say my biggest challenge that I've faced was injuries , I guess throughout the last couple of years , I had some injuries with my knees and you know , when you're , when you're , when everything's not fine tuned and perfect and , and not feeling good on your body , you're not gonna be able to perform at the level that you want to . So just like preh have and , and making sure you do all the little things right every day to keep yourself from getting injured . You know , here at the University of Michigan , we have access to the best professionals in the world when it comes to dealing with your body and , and keeping it right .
So making sure you see those guys and establish a good relationship with them rehab is the best way to stay healthy . And if you're healthy , the game's a ton of fun . And once again , when you're having fun , you're gonna play great and you're gonna keep getting better , I guess throughout my career , I always just pretended like somebody was watching and I always gave my best effort when I was out there on the ice afterwards .
Even when nobody's watching , there's so much more to the game of hockey than goals and assists . It's , it's all the little things like just back checking , never taking a stride off listening to your coaches just being in the right spots , the right places at the right times can make your game look effortless and then just being a good teammate , picking guys up on the bench , having juice , having energy for me , Michigan , obviously academically and as far as hockey goes is right there along with the best of any university in the entire nation . Also , I live an hour down the road .
You got to enjoy juniors , um , keep getting better every day there . I would say when you come into college , uh , you're coming from juniors , you're probably one of the better players where you're coming from if you're , you know , moving on to college and , you know , just knowing that guys are bigger and stronger and they're , they're grown men pretty much out there . So I guess like listening to older guys , uh , just knowing that they know what they're talking about , they've been through it , they're gonna give you their best pieces of advice to get you to where they have been and what they've gone through .
