Re: Canada IS hockey
Waterdown hockey coach knew he had something special in Ellis, Visentin
The defenceman with the thunder in his stick was already there when the goalie with the impeccable technique showed up. They were just kids then, not yet the two most important pieces of a Canadian team that’ll be going for a gold medal against Russia Wednesday night.
It was the spring of 2007. Ryan Ellis was in Grade 10 at Waterdown District High School. Despite being younger than all the other players — sometimes by as much as four years — he had earned a spot on the school’s senior hockey team in his first year of high school and then again that second winter.
“I put him with my biggest defenceman as a partner to protect him in Grade 9,” head coach Paul Hanley says. “Ryan ended up covering for the other guy.”
The junior team had its tryouts after the senior team’s season was over. There was no official league so it was put together for tournaments and exhibition games, mainly to give the younger students a chance to play and an opportunity to get experience.
Joining Ellis on the ice that first tryout was a rather scrawny, serious kid looking for a spot in net. Mark Visentin was a high school freshman who had decided he could somehow find time for a little more hockey between his AAA games and practices with the Halton Hurricanes and his goalie training.
Hanley knew a little bit about him. High schools are small communities with fast pipelines so word gets around. Coaches hear about top jocks that are moving into the neighbourhood all the time, though the ad hoc scouting reports don’t always turn out to be accurate. Visentin, however, lived up to the billing right away.
“He would just make saves look easy,” Hanley says. “He was so technical.”
Not surprisingly, both kids made the cut. Just as predictably — in hindsight, anyway — the team was pretty darn good. Better than that, really. They played 18 games and never lost. In one tournament, Visentin didn’t give up a single goal. Only once were they pushed to overtime where the winning goal was scored by … well … go ahead and guess.
Yup, Ellis.
As you might expect, Hanley says he saw signs of something unique in the pair. Visentin’s intensity and absolute urgency to get better was unusual. Ellis’ vision, creativity, poise, and passion for the game were unique. As was his shot. As the home of one of the school board’s scholastic hockey academies, testing was regularly done on the players to gauge their improvements. One of those markers involved pulling out the radar gun and registering shot speed.
The 138 km/h Ellis reached has never been matched.
Funny though, despite being a goalie Visentin insisted on doing that test, too, with his goalie stick and goalie gloves on. If he was going to spend so much time working on his puck handling, he wanted to find out if he was getting better and stronger at it.
Hanley, of course, obliged. After all, the 28-year teaching veteran knew he had something special on his hands. He also quickly realized he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for long. By the next school year, Ellis had moved to Windsor to play for the OHL’s Spitfires. Meanwhile, Visentin politely let him know there just wouldn’t be time in his schedule to commit to the senior team with all the other hockey he was playing. A year later, he, too, was in the OHL, playing in Niagara for the IceDogs.
“They only played together for that one year,” Hanley says.
Until now, of course. Still, that one short season has given him a connection to the pair — and to this year’s World Junior Championship — that’s rather exclusive.
Plenty of people in small places like Waterdown and Freelton are connected in their own ways. Guy Brown School, where Visentin’s mom is a Grade 5 teacher, is having a red-and-white rally Wednesday morning to get pumped up for the big game. Waterdown High School is also having a red-and-white day organized by its student council.
But Hanley’s position is a little different. He lives and dies with every game, preferring to watch alone so his nervous outbursts aren’t mocked. As he does, he can’t help but pick up familiar notes in their play. Things he saw years before anyone else was really paying attention.
Seeing Ellis captain the team with the same calm and creativity — and shot — he showed at school is familiar. Seeing Visentin taking over in net at the most crucial time and earning player of the game honours against the United States, too. And after those times when the goalie insisted on being tested for his shot like everyone else, the coach couldn’t help but notice that his former student was getting kudos from his defencemen for his puck handling, which they claimed prevented the Americans from establishing a decent forecheck.
For Hanley, the whole thing has been almost surreal. Especially now that his two students — both first-round NHL draft picks — are playing for a gold medal.
“What are the chances?” he asks. “I’ve got two Waterdown boys playing who have had a huge impact on Team Canada’s success.”
It’s a rhetorical question with a simple answer.
Once in a lifetime.
sradley@thespec.com
