Phillip Rave bio

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The Story of Phillip Rave

 

Rave on the ice in Austria

 

As boom-or-bust prospects in hockey go, recent VHLM declaree Phillip Rave is among the more dramatic examples you will find. The 22-year-old is a physical specimen at 6-foot-4, 195 pounds and has a litany of athletic accolades to his name, yet almost no hockey experience to speak of. He hails from Lichtenstein, a mini-country with a population below 40,000 nestled in between the winter sports havens of Switzerland and Austria. With nothing but three partial seasons of low-level hockey to his name at age 22, Rave is an incredibly raw package of rare talent and athleticism. Let's take a look at his story, and what has led him to pursue a career in the VHL at this point of his life.

Phillip Rave was born in 2001 to Maria Meier and Bennett Rave. Bennett was a Canadian hockey player who moved to Switzerland in the early 1990s and played several years in the second-tier Swiss league, settling down and eventually marrying Maria, a Lichtensteiner, and moving to her hometown of Vaduz when he retired in 2000. Phillip was their first child born a year later.

For Phillip, winter sports were everywhere growing up, and his first love was skiing. He loved skating too, but for whatever reason, didn't particularly care for the idea of hockey at an early age, instead training in speed skating. For years growing up, Phillip split his time between the mountains and the oval, and in both skiing and short-track speed skating, he was seen as a significant up-and-coming talent.

His parents were of the belief that there was no need to focus on a specific sport growing up, so Phillip dabbled in pretty much any winter sport you could think of. He tried cross-country skiing, he tried snowboard cross, and he had brief forays into bobsleigh and curling, too. Through some combination of good genetics, a strong work ethic, and a love for being involved in pretty much anything related to a winter sport, Phillip became an exceptional athlete and he did at least relatively well at all of them. His two favourites, though, were mostly set in stone. 

Phillip did eventually get around to trying hockey, too. As a 15-year-old with good size for his age and skating ability obviously derived from his speed skating successes, he found a home in the Austrian junior system and, over two seasons, he played 54 games scoring 31 goals and adding 14 assists. Hockey, however, wasn't the sport that captured his heart at this time. He loved watching it, but he wanted to ski. And in 2018, a 17-year-old Rave watched Tina Weirather capture Lichtenstein's first medal in 30 years when she took bronze in the super-G - a monumental moment for the tiny nation that only served to deepen his desire to pursue a skiing career. He turned down the opportunity to advance in Austria's junior hockey programs to become a better skiier.

 

Tina Weirather's super-G bronze medal at Pyeongchang 2018 was a massive national accomplishment for Lichtenstein, and a huge source of inspiration for Phillip Rave

When he couldn't get on the slopes, Phillip did continue to train in speed skating, and he qualified for two straight World Junior Speed Skating Championships - winning a pair of bronze medals of his own. Rave was beginning to find the skiing success he so badly desired, too. His preferred event was the super-G and in 2020, he registered his first two top-5 finishes. With a couple more strong finishes early in 2021, Rave found himself with a very real chance to compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics, something that could only have been described as a dream come true when he watched Weirather's run four years earlier. But Phillip's form slumped, perhaps from pressure put on himself to qualify, and he didn't place in the top-10 again in any races leading up to the January 2022 cutoff for qualifying. Phillip narrowly missed out on earning a spot high enough on the FIS points list. He was heartbroken.

Needing a bit of a break from skiing after the near-miss, Phillip returned to the skating rink for something to keep him occupied. Now another four inches taller than he was when he last competed in short-track, Phillip found returning to his old speed skating form a little awkward. But he began to play pick-up hockey games with some friends and realized he actually missed the game. When an Austrian semi-pro hockey team held open tryouts in advance of the 2022-23 season, Phillip signed up, and with his size, strength, and skating ability, the team didn't require much convincing to give him a chance to play.

He played 34 games with the squad over the '22-23 season, scoring 24 goals and adding 10 assists, alternating between looking clueless on the ice and looking impossible to defend. Yet his game showed growth as the season went on, looking a little more refined, looking a little more dominant. And when Phillip realized how much he was enjoying hockey this time around, he felt it might be time to commit to it. And so, after a summer of training, Phillip Rave declared his intentions to sign with a team in the VHLM - and the first page of one of minor league hockey's more intriguing stories began to unfold.