Hayley Moore, Wakefield/Brown University hockey

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Early on, Hayley Moore set her sights on attending Brown University and enrolled at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham in part to focus on hockey and improve her chances of playing at the Division 1 level.

“I asked for hockey equipment for my fourth birthday and was on a team at 5,” said the 28-year-0ld Wakefield native. “I kind of worked my way up from there.”

“Brown was a dream of mine when I was young,” added Moore. “It’s the oldest women’s program in the country. When I was much younger there weren’t a lot of programs you could go watch, and we went to a few games. When I went to high school and had to start thinking about college, that was somewhere I could picture myself going and playing. It became more and more of a reality and it really worked out in my favor.”

Her first season in Providence, Moore was the Bears’ second-leading scorer, and she led the team in scoring her final three years. Her career totals (69 goals, 64 assists) rank eighth all-time in program history.

Team highlights included three Mayor’s Cup wins over crosstown rival Providence College and a come-from-behind victory at St. Lawrence in an ECAC semifinal match her sophomore year that earned a championship match against Harvard.

“Unfortunately we didn’t win that one, but it was an awesome game,” Moore said. “That was a big highlight.”

After graduating from Brown in 2008, Moore skated for a season in Switzerland and then one with the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League.

She was a volunteer assistant coach at the University of Massachusetts Boston for one year, then worked at St. Mark’s School in Southborough as women’s hockey coach/assistant athletics director before a stint as an assistant coach at Harvard.

In May, she joined the Bedford-based East Coast Wizards, where she works with Paul Kennedy, her coach at Cushing, among others. The Wizards field 42 teams, half of which are for girls and young women, many of whom hope to play at the collegiate level some day.

“I really wanted to combine what I learned at both St. Mark’s and Harvard,” said Moore, who resides in Brighton. “I want to help younger players develop skills, and also navigate them through the recruiting process.”

Hockey opened the door to all of it for her.

“One of the biggest things athletics has given me is opportunities, whether it’s to go to Cushing, or Brown, or travel to Europe, or play in a professional women’s hockey league and meet these incredible people and learn from them,” Moore said.

“I got to do so much travel, especially while I was at Harvard recruiting, and traveled to many different parts of North America and got to go to places I never would have gone, like British Columbia and Alberta. Really the biggest thing is it’s given me the opportunity to do things I never would have been able to do in everyday life.”