Chris Snow, the assistant general manager to NHL‘s Calgary Flames, has been diagnosed with ALS. His wife, Kelsie Snow, shared the news in a letter, which was posted on the team’s official website revealing how Snow has been enrolled in “a clinical trial for the most encouraging ALS gene therapy treatment to come along.” This is done at the University of Miami and the hope is to stop the progression of the disease.
“In the simplest terms, this drug works by silencing the effects of the mutated gene, and in Miami we could see how hopeful the doctor felt,” Kelsie said in the letter. “So hopeful that when I asked if he believes this drug could stop progression entirely, he said, ‘We don’t know, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. We are leaning into that possibility, as hard as we can, working to stay positive and living with intention every single day. And now we believe we have results to lean into as well.”
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Snow became the assistant GM for the Flames this year and has spent 13 seasons in the NHL. Before that, Snow was a sportswriter as he covered the Minnesota Wild for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Globe. He was able to get in the NFL front office for his analytic skills.
“There’s a lot of people today working in hockey in positions that didn’t exist five or 10 years ago. I think the reason is you look at the standings and with the exception of very few teams, everyone is packed together,” Snow said in 2016 per ESPN. “The mere idea of getting a little bit better, and it doesn’t matter what it is…it could be in player development or psychology…there’s so many areas where teams are evolving because there’s the need to try to find a way to separate yourself.”
Kelsie mentioned that the Flames assistant GM’s dad passed away from ALS last year and he also lost both of his paternal uncles to the disease. She is hoping she can tell their children a different story about their dad.
“Continue to love us and love our kids,” she wrote. “Of all the devastation this diagnosis brought, the idea of telling the two of them they were going to lose their dad was the most crushing. But now we have hope and, we believe, a different story. “
