Keystone Kash’s High School Hockey Players Blast His MAGA Makeover

Before Kash Patel joined an administration waging war on “wokeness,” the athletes he coached said he was the definition of it.

Hockey players who knew the FBI director as “progressive” Coach Kash say they’re stunned by his political turn—insisting the anti-DEI warrior now dominating cable news bears little resemblance to the coach they remember from Washington, D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson High School.

“But six years later, he’s thrown all of that integrity away and lost the respect of everyone on that team for power and money—and a taxpayer-funded private jet trips for him and his girlfriend, who’s closer to me in age than him."

Before his bumbling FBI tenure, the 46-year-old was a relatively obscure intelligence official during Donald Trump’s first term.

Patel also moonlighted as a volunteer assistant coach from 2017 to 2019 at Woodrow Wilson—now Jackson-Reed High School—one of D.C.’s most diverse public schools. His protégés remember him recounting his origin story: how his family immigrated from India to Long Island, New York, in the ’70s and became massive fans of the Islanders.

Gidney believes Patel’s firsthand experiences as a man of color helped shape both his coaching style and his fierce loyalty to the team.

Often, Gidney said they were “the only team with Black kids” on the ice. Once, he remembers an enraged Patel losing it on the opposing team after a player called one of them the N word.

“The political agenda he’s pushing now, compared to what I’ve seen him do in real life…sticking up for the Black kid in a sea of white kids playing hockey” doesn’t reconcile, said Gidney, who now attends Penn State University

The revamped Patel, who is the first person of color to head the FBI, also left former athlete Jake Edwards unsettled. Like Gidney, he remembers Patel pushing for a more inclusive ice hockey community.

“There was one girl on our team, and she was called a homophobic slur by another team that we were going up against,” Edwards, now a college student in Canada, recounted in an interview with the Daily Beast.

“At the time, Coach Kash actually backed her up and tried to go after those people who said they said that, in defense of her, which kind of shows how much he has changed in the interest of pursuing politics,” he said.

As a Trump loyalist, Patel has stood firmly behind the president who targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the public and private sectors. He’s also been vocal about that support, making headlines in October for firing an FBI trainee for merely displaying a pride flag on their desk.

Both former athletes said Patel never struck them as an overtly political person, but rather as a career federal worker focused on investigations. For Edwards, the biggest shock was learning about Patel’s trilogy of children’s books, The Plot Against the King, a retelling of “Russiagate” from a pro-Trump perspective.

“He never talked politics when he was our coach,” a baffled Edwards said.

The college student has written off most of Patel’s over-the-top Trumpism as political posturing. “I’m kind of at the point now where I feel like he probably is just playing a role to suck up to people in power,” he said.

What’s more, Patel, a former podcaster who did not respond to a request for comment, has previously benefited from the very DEI policies he now denounces alongside Trump.

Last year, in a 24-page questionnaire sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patel detailed his participation in the American Bar Association’s Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, a diversity initiative, while he was a student at Pace University’s law school in 2003, The New York Times first reported.

At the time, the bar association’s website stated that the program “provides opportunities to students who are members of groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the profession, including students from minority racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, veterans, students who are economically disadvantaged, students who identify as LGBTQ+, women, and others.”

Years later, he became one of the most powerful members of Trump’s second administration, which saw the president sign an executive order on his first day back in office to end all DEI policies in the federal government.

Presiding over an agency that counts more than 38,000 people has also come with its fair share of controversies for Patel—some of which are hockey-adjacent.

Most recently, the Trump appointee filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic after a report citing more than two dozen anonymous sources alleged Patel has a drinking problem so severe it could “threaten national security,” along with erratic, paranoid behavior.

He’s also come under fire for jetting across the country to see his 27-year-old girlfriend and aspiring Christian country singer Alexis Wilkins perform—despite heavily criticizing his predecessors’ use of taxpayer-funded government aircraft.

And in February, Patel was seen celebrating Team USA’s gold medal victory over Canada at the Winter Olympics in Milan—on the same day an armed intruder was shot outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Video footage shows Patel leading locker-room celebrations, belting out chants, chugging beers with players, and phoning the president himself.

That same day, Gidney, a newly minted legal drinker, was at a bar with friends celebrating Team USA’s victory. He was enjoying himself—until he checked his phone and saw videos of his old Coach Kash guzzling down beverages.

That’s become a common experience for several of Patel’s former players—but one that Gidney feels especially deeply. Sometimes, he says, he feels haunted by his old coach.

At the gym, Patel flashes across the row of televisions near the treadmills. A glance at someone else’s phone reveals a clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing the embattled Trump appointee.

To Gidney, Patel was once the man who defended him when he could not yet defend himself. Now, his former coach has helped dismantle policies the government put in place to protect people like him.