Hills, as many other freshmen in college hockey do, underwent a routine EKG/ECG prior to the start of her career in the NCAA at the University of New Hampshire in 2022. She thought nothing of it, considering she had never exhibited symptoms of any kind of heart problem in the past.

The results of her test seemed to be a bit off so she then had to undergo a stress test to figure out what was really going on. Ultimately, Hills was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome (also known as WPW), a congenital heart defect that is caused due to having an extra pathway between the upper and lower chambers of the heart which can cause irregularities in heart rate. For someone who had never exhibited any symptoms of the condition, Hills was more than surprised, to say the least.

“It was a huge shock. I had apparently been living with it my whole life,” she said in an interview with APX reporter Sydney Wolf. “They were surprised that I had made it my whole entire hockey career playing an intense sport without a major issue popping up. They were extremely surprised and said I was very lucky.”

Those with WPW may not experience any symptoms aside from a fast or irregular heart rate but if untreated it could lead to serious heart problems or even cardiac death in children or young adults in rare instances, according to the Mayo Clinic. It isn’t something to ignore or play around with.

Instead of getting ready for the season and preparing to play hockey out on the ice that fall like all of the other freshmen, Hills decided to take a redshirt season in order to do the surgery required to try and fix her condition. She ended up having two procedures, which eventually would cure her, but both of them were fairly high-stakes surgeries that could’ve been life-altering if they had gone wrong.

“They wired up stuff through my veins and in the first surgery they mapped my heart and wanted to cauterize it, but the extra artery that they wanted to cauterize was really close to a lot of healthy arteries and if it burnt anything else my hockey career would’ve been done and I would’ve had to get a pacemaker. It would’ve been completely life-altering,” she said. Obviously, a procedure of that risk was scary, but it is something that was necessary to fix her condition.

“The first surgery was a fail. The second one they went in and decided to try to freeze it, but the freeze didn’t work, so they took the risk and cauterized it,” she added. “Luckily for me I’m completely cured and Mass General (the hospital) was absolutely phenomenal.”

That was not the way that Hills wanted to start her collegiate career but she persevered and had all of the procedures done and was then completely cured from the condition. She took a redshirt freshman season at New Hampshire but then went back to normal for the next season in the fall of 2023. Unfortunately, the adversity for Hills didn’t stop there and she would have to battle through a few more obstacles before ending up at Bemidji State, where she is set to play now in 2025-26.

Hills, originally born and raised in Massachusetts (in both the Milford and North Andover areas), was under the impression that she would likely see a bit of playing time as a redshirt sophomore for the Wildcats but she ended up competing in just over 36 minutes out on the ice that year. Despite enjoying her time at New Hampshire, she didn’t feel like she was going to get the opportunities that she wanted in net at the Hockey East program and she also wanted to try a different team dynamic someplace else, so she decided to enter the transfer portal. She knew it would be a challenge to find a team to take a chance on her with not many statistics to show from her time in the NCAA so far but she was able to find a landing spot at Saint Anselm College, located in Manchester, New Hampshire.

“I knew what I was capable of and I worked really hard and I wasn’t going to settle for just sitting on the bench,” Hills said about her desire to find a place that she could prove herself in goal. “(Saint Anselm) was a perfect spot for me to get the playing time I wanted to get the footing that I needed to show people and myself that I can play at the Division I level.”

And Hills did just that. The Massachusetts native had a record-breaking season for the Hawks in 2024-25 and posted a .937 save percentage and a 2.79 goals-against average through 22 games as the primary starter for the squad. She felt great about her performance at St. A’s but she felt the program left things to be desired for multiple reasons, so she decided to enter the transfer portal once again in search for a better fit.

She felt a bit more secure in entering the portal this time around due to her eye-popping statistics from the 2024-25 season but it still can be nerve-wracking to enter the portal and not know where you might end up. For a while she was a bit anxious that she would have to return to Saint Anselm after talks fell through with a few different teams but she eventually got a call from Bemidji State head coach Amber Fryklund that would change everything.

“My first phone call was great, I think I was on the phone with her for like two hours,” said Hills about her very first conversation with Fryklund. “It was just a great conversation and with how she runs the program, we call it ‘Beaver Hockey’ - it’s growth and gratitude, and it’s something that I wanted to be a part of.”

It finally felt like the kind of team dynamic that the netminder envisioned from her experience in college hockey. Hills’ name was originally recommended to Fryklund after her advisor and some of her previous coaches had heard that BSU was looking to add a goaltender to its roster to help round out the team in 2025-26 since one of its current netminders was dealing with an injury. The now New Hampshire resident now joins a current squad of sophomore Kaitlin Groess (Ham Lake, Minn.), incoming freshman Ashlyn Hazlett (Minnetonka, Minn.) and the currently injured junior Eva Filippova (Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia). The Bemidji Pioneer reported that Filippova had suffered a significant lower body injury and will be out until at least midway through the upcoming 2025-26 season, which is why the Beavers needed to add another goalie to its roster.

“You’re also playing in the WCHA which is the best league in college hockey and it was getting the chance to not only play in that league but to be a part of a team that wants to be here and with all of our practices so far it’s just a next-level energy,” she added. “I couldn’t be happier with the team dynamic and the coaching dynamic, everyone just wants to be here and the coaches care about you as people both on and off the ice and want to make you better as both a person and a player. I’d recommend Bemidji to anyone that can get to this level because holy crap, it’s just unreal.” 

Hills was officially introduced as an incoming transfer to the Beavers roster in early May of 2025 and now in September she has officially started both practices and classes at the campus in Northern Minnesota.

“We have a goalie injury so were looking to add another goaltender this season and she was one that we identified first and foremost as a great human being,” said Fryklund about recruiting Hills on WCHA Media Day in mid-September. “She’s someone that we connected with, had some conversations with, and it was a good fit for us and a good fit for her. Again, relying on her experience coming in and her leadership as well has been significant for our program. Really excited to add her to our team and our goalie depth this year.”

It can be tough at times for Hills to be competing so far away from home but she says that Bemidji is already starting to feel like a ‘second home’ in a way due to how much she has fallen in love with it already. Although she still misses her family, including her parents and younger brother, she still talks to her parents pretty much daily which obviously helps quite a bit since they are still very much in touch.

Hills’ father is actually one of the main reasons that she started playing hockey in the first place. His life revolves around the sport since he runs an advising firm and Ava said that she started skating from a very early age. She joked that she and another kid around her age who was a close family friend would get put on synthetic ice as soon as they could walk and the parents would put little piles of M&M’s around on the ground for them to shuffle over and get used to being on skates.

The Hills family lived in Milford, Massachusetts, for a chunk of her childhood before living in North Andover from around third grade through junior year of high school when then she moved to Pembroke, New Hampshire. She became a goaltender like most other people, which is by trying it through her rotation in youth hockey and eventually falling in love with it.

“It was my turn to be goalie and I threw a fit, I did not want to do it all, it was a temper tantrum,” Hills laughed about her beginnings as a netminder. “I did it and I was terrible, absolutely terrible, but I loved it. I Absolutely loved it, refused to take the pads off, and I haven’t since.” 

Ever since that day she has been a goaltender and she primarily competed with the Boston Shamrocks and NAHA (North American Hockey Academy) in her older years of youth hockey before making the jump to the NCAA.

Now, Hills is preparing for her ‘senior’ season of college hockey competition even though she technically redshirted her freshman year at New Hampshire. This means that although she is a senior in her schooling that she still has this season and one more season of college hockey eligibility, so she can play both 2025-26 and 2026-27 with Bemidji State. She is currently working on finishing up her undergraduate degree in finance and is thinking about pursuing a Masters degree in 2026-27 or possibly just earning a second major.

You can catch Hills and the rest of the Bemidji State squad in action starting in just a few short weeks. The squad will open up the 2025-26 season with an exhibition game against WCHA foe the University of Minnesota at a neutral site in Brainerd, Minnesota, on Saturday, September 20, prior to its regular season home opener on September 26 and 27 against the reigning national champions in the University of Wisconsin.