Canadian high diver Molly Carlson is used to being off the ground. Carlson is in Red Bull’s Cliff Diving circuit where athletes dive into water from over 20 metres high, and she’s one of the best in the world at it.
So, imagine the 26-year-old finding herself in front of players like Marie-Philip Poulin reading the team’s lineup before a game. She was wondering how a girl from Thunder Bay ended up in the Montreal Victoire’s locker room and one of the team’s most visible supporters and unofficial Hype Girl.
Carlson doesn’t have her following solely for her diving ability. With almost 4 million followers on TikTok, the Canadian is the CEO of the #BraveGang, the name her and her followers have. She has been open with her battle with body dysmorphia which turned into an eating disorder, and her raw emotions resonate with so many. She just didn’t realize who, exactly.
“I post my videos to be funny, like, ‘haha I’m relatable, jumping off a cliff,’ obviously I’m not relatable, but at the end of the day, I’m facing fear, and everyone can be brave,” Carlson said. “But you don’t realize you’re on the For You page of the literal Olympic champions of women’s hockey, and then you get there, and they all know who you are, and you’re like, ‘I have been watching you on TV for years, and now I’m in your locker room and you’re clapping for me.’ Like, this feels wrong. I truly am so grateful for this community I’ve started in Montreal, and I think we’re all coming together.”
Carlson’s story isn’t about hockey, nor the Victoire, it isn’t even about the Montreal Canadiens, the team Carlson grew up cheering for (we’ll get to that later). It is a story about Montreal.
Montreal has a reputation of being a city devoted to the Canadiens first and foremost, and certainly there is a lot of truth to that. However, there is a sporting culture deeply engrained in the city that bubbles under the surface, or in Carlson’s case, 20 metres above it.
While Olympic Stadium is far from a point of pride for many in the city, the 1976 Olympics the city hosted has left a footprint in the city beyond those on the budget. The Olympic Park is still in use and still has the pool and diving centre as well as the training facilities for the Institut National du Sport du Québec (INS), a private, not-for-profit organization that supports all athletes involved in Olympic or Paralympic sports and high performance coaches in Quebec.
It’s there where Carlson’s connection to the city started. The Canadian diving team trains in Montreal, so growing up Carlson would come to Montreal, and when she saw the best divers in the country being Canadiens fans, she wanted to be like her idols.
“Everyone in my family was always cheering on the Maple Leafs,” Carlson said. “I absolutely have always been a Habs fan.”
Carlson came to Montreal full-time after her NCAA career at Florida State (where she was a three-time All-American) came to an end in 2020. She had seen high diving videos of Lysanne Richard, who represented Canada at the 2015 World High Diving Championships as well at the 2018 and 2019 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. Wrist injuries made it hard for her to dive, but high divers enter the water feet first.
She knew that Montreal was going to have the only 20-metre indoor platform in the world, and messaged the federation with her interest.
Their response wasn’t just a favourable one.
“Their literal answer was, ‘how fast can you move to Montreal?’” Carlson said. “I was like ‘what do you mean how fast can I move to Montreal?’ And they were like, ‘we see the potential, we think this is going to be a great fit. You’re going to love Montreal, I promise.’”
Carlson hadn’t been to the city since she was 14 years old.
”I moved on a dream, and it came true,” she said. When she came to Montreal, she was the only one training. There are now eight people training in high diving in the city with new 12 and 15 metre platforms to help develop the next generation.
Not only has Carlson’s career taken off since taking the leap to move to Montreal (no pun intended), it connected her to the city and the sports culture within it like she couldn’t have imagined. Not as a girl in Thunder Bay, and not even as a young adult moving to the city.
“I noticed when I moved here the pride Montreal has, I was like, I want to be part of this fan base,” she said. “[In] Montreal, people are so rowdy and proud. That’s the energy I want to be part of. Montreal announces that they’re having a sporting event, and it’s electric, like everyone wants to pull up to watch it. And I think that’s so special to be in a city that loves sports so much.”
Carlson got a taste of that herself when she competed in the first Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series event in Montreal last summer. Over 50,000 people went to the Old Port to watch the event.
“It was insane,” Carlson said. “I think what was really emotional was never feeling like I belonged as an athlete. Being from a small town, you never felt like you had a huge community cheering for you. You never felt like you were part of something bigger. As soon as I moved to Montreal, I felt really welcomed right away and supported, and all of a sudden I was like Montreal’s own. It’s just such an honour to be part of a big city and be known.”
Hockey, once again, becomes the measuring stick to help her try and explain the scope.
“You go to the hockey games, and your jaw is on the floor because so many people are cheering for them,” she said about the Bell Centre, which holds over 21,000 fans. “The fact double that came to watch me gave me goosebumps. There are videos of me literally crying on the platform before I jumped because I just felt so loved and respected and supported, and I’ve never really felt that before in such enormous amounts of people. So it’s really special. I think I want to be able to represent this beautiful city forever and it’s become my home.”
On top of Carlson winning the Montreal event, her boyfriend, British diver Aidan Heslop, won the men’s competition. Carlson convinced Heslop to move to Montreal as part of their growing high diving training group and says he has also been adopted by the city’s fans.
Carlson’s connection to hockey in the city, especially women’s hockey, came through Victoire defender Erin Ambrose. The two share an agency, the Dulcedo Group, and met through various agency events. When Ambrose signed with Dulcedo, Carlson was one of their biggest clients, so Ambrose was aware of her from afar. The two aren’t just linked by agency, or outsiders embraced by Montreal’s sports culture. They have both been very open about talking about their mental health struggles after not being named to an Olympic team.
It was during an event, watching fellow Dulcedo athlete and Montreal-based diver Caeli McKay Riendeau, where Ambrose and Carlson got to know each other. The story becomes full circle here because Ambrose, also from Ontario, met McKay Riendeau (from Calgary) while both were training at INS. Ambrose through a trade to Les Canadiennes at the time, and McKay Riendeau as part of Canada’s diving team.
Ambrose remembers meeting with Carlson and Heslop, and the conversation turned to the Canadiens.
“It was like, ‘OK, enough with the Habs, you have to get in with us,'” Ambrose remembers saying.
“I was like, I need to go see what this hockey is all about, and cheer on my girl,” Carlson said. “She was hyping it up. When I went to the first [PWHL] game, my jaw was on the floor. I didn’t realize these girls are body slamming each other for like, three hours, and it’s such an exciting game.”
The path from Carlson, Victoire fan to Carlson, Victoire Hype Girl reading the lineups came organically. The team’s staff noticed her posts when at games with Ambrose’s tickets and decided to expand the relationship. They had cameras there to see Ambrose deliver the team’s new merchandise to her door, and eventually that led to her being nervous in front of the team.
“It started with just going to the game, crying at the game, just being inspired,” Carlson said. “I cry over everything. I’m so inspired every time I go.”
That was when things escalated.
“Now I think it’s time you read the lineup,” Carlson recalls Marie-Christine Boucher, the team’s director of business operations, saying. “I’m shitting myself. I’m like, I don’t know hockey. I don’t know any of these words. Like, do you say right field? I don’t know,” Carlson said.
Then she went into the coaches room to meet with Kori Cheverie and her staff. Carlson was worried, but she realized she didn’t have to be.
“They were all like, oh my gosh, you’re Molly the high diver, they were hyping me up. And I was like, what? I’m over here terrified and you guys know who I am. This is so cool. From that moment, I connected with the coaches, and Kori was, ‘yeah, I see your stuff online, and we’ve always wanted to have you’. It was just really cool and I was like, how on Earth did I get in this room?”
The first time nerves may have gotten the best of her.
”The first day Molly came to do the lineups was absolutely the most adorable thing,” Ambrose said. “I say that so genuinely, because she was so excited but so nervous, and we had to make fun of her because she still messed it up.”
The second time Carlson read the lineup couldn’t have been a bigger stage: Game 2 of their PWHL semifinal against the Ottawa Charge, it was the game Montreal ended up winning 3-2 in the fourth overtime. It got Poulin to start calling her the team’s good luck charm and in pure #BraveGang fashion, she posted her way through it. And, yes, she stayed until the very end.
“When she did Game Two, she came in and I gave her a hug after, and I said, ‘Molly, we’ve talked about this. It’s on left wing, not in left wing’, and she just dropped a big F bomb,” Ambrose said, laughing.
”After the game, I texted Molly, because the trooper stayed through four overtimes,” Ambrose said. “I just said, ‘thank you for staying there for the whole time’. And she was so embarrassed by the fact that she had to do the starting lineup again. I was like, we loved it, we joke about it, but like, we also love it, like the girls do vibe with it, and it was very much appreciated.”
“That quadruple overtime game, because obviously I knew Molly was there, and knowing that she stayed the whole time, one of the first things was I wanted to see her socials, because Molly’s socials are absolutely incredible and beyond entertaining. I think for me, it was just like, it’s so cool to see it through somebody’s eyes who lives it, but isn’t in it,” Ambrose said.
It wasn’t the only Montreal playoff game she attended. The NHL wanted to capture Carlson taking in a Canadiens playoff game and there she was, with her boyfriend not only watching the game but on the glass in the first row.
“I’ve been going to nosebleed seats for the past years of my life,” said Carlson. “And don’t get me wrong, nosebleed seats at the Montreal Canadiens events are so much fun because the people get so rowdy. And I love it. I’ve always touched the ceiling and just had the best time. And so when I got that call from the NHL and they said, ‘We want Molly front row, we want to film her in her voice and reacting during Game 4 of the playoffs’. I was like, I don’t belong here. Give it to someone else. Like, this isn’t real. And so you always get this imposter syndrome, like, should I be here? It just doesn’t feel like this is my life.
“But that happened. I’ve never sat that close and you’re behind the goal. I literally was flinching. I wanted to do a sport swap with Erin. I wanted to go in slowly. Now I’m like, I could never do that. That was scary. Just sitting behind the glass was scary. I just can’t imagine.”
(Editor’s Note: Ambrose, for the record, still wants to try the swap.)
Carlson, because of her following, does get recognized when she goes to games. She admits it’s more at the PWHL games, where people try to find her based on her live posts from games and sometimes had a line out to the concourse waiting for her. She still gets people coming up to her at Canadiens games, which she admits is still surreal.
“This is so random, like, little old me from Thunder Bay, Ontario is getting recognized… It’s just so cool.”
And in case you’re concerned about the Ontario-born’s loyalties when Montreal faces Toronto? No need to be.
“I honestly can never watch Toronto beat them,” she said. “So as long as we’re winning I’m happy.”
