The Last Word A chapel talk by Jake De Saint Phalle ’16
I ’m
sure a lot of you have heard of John Scott after his NHL All-Star game appearance. For those of you who haven’t yet, read his article, “A Guy Like Me,” on the Players’ Tribune. It’s really a great read. For those of you who don’t know, Scott was an NHL player on the Arizona Coyotes. As it does every year, the NHL conducted a fan vote to choose the captains of each division’s All-Star team. When the final results were tallied, it was revealed that Scott would represent the Pacific Division as its captain. Now, those of you who don’t follow the NHL are probably thinking he would have to be a pretty talented and high-scoring player if he was selected as an All-Star captain, but that isn’t the case. Scott, in fact, is among a dying breed in the NHL: a big, tough, gritty enforcer who drops the gloves to provide protection to his more skilled teammates and give his team some extra motivation. He was not always that type of player, though. Growing up, Scott never wanted to or expected to be a fighter at the next level. He idolized Ray Bourque, the 11th all-time leading scorer, with 1,579 points in his 23-year NHL career. That’s far off from Scott’s current 11 points through his first nine seasons. Regardless, Scott always knew he wanted to play hockey; he just never envisioned that it would be as a fighter. Scott’s path to his dream conveys a message that resonates with me today. Since kindergarten, I have loved hockey. My dad, a college hockey player himself, had me hooked since I was four years old and he took me out on the pond to skate. This is a comparable start to many NHL careers, but that’s where the similarities end. As time went on, my brother really took on the hockey player role while I lagged behind. I never really seemed to fit on the ice past squirts, and soon enough I played only for my middle school team, which had one practice and 12 games a season. I still loved to watch and play the sport, among others. When I came into my junior and senior years at Avon, however, hockey began to create more negative emotions in my life than positive. Somehow, playing two shifts a period just didn’t hold the same appeal. There were times when I really hated the sport and dreaded going to the rink for practice every day. I had always known I had no future playing competitively, but I found that I could no longer even play just for fun. I feared enduring this would ruin the game for me. What kept me going was an alternative area of sports that I found my sophomore year when my advisor, a few friends, and I started Prep Sport Report, a social media platform we used to 56 56
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report on athletics in the prep school leagues. I really embraced PSR because it was something I was actually pretty good at, and it still involved what I love most: sports. Scott faced a similar juncture in his path. He was a stay-athome defenseman when he played youth hockey, and admitted he was never the best player. In his own words, he was cut from every Junior-B team he tried out for. Regardless, he knew he loved hockey, so he worked to improve and, eventually, procured a scholarship to play at Michigan Tech, a Division I program. From there, he received an improbable offer to play for the Houston Aeros, the then-AHL affiliate of the Minnesota Wild. Prior to that stint in the AHL, Scott had never been in a hockey fight, odd for a guy tabbed as an enforcer. Then, one game, he fought one of the biggest guys in the AHL and said this about the experience: “Oh, OK. Wow. This feels good. Not my face. That feels bad. But it feels good to make my teammates go nuts.” As a result, he decided to embrace the role of enforcer, not because it was his nature, but because it was his way forward. Lo and behold, by his third year in the AHL, he got a call up to the NHL and became an All-Star in what he loves to do. In my case, I decided to take up sports journalism and broadcasting as a full-time gig because it beats sitting on the bench any day, and it was my own way forward. As a result, I now write articles that hundreds of people in New England prep sports read and have become the Eddie Olczyk of AOF hockey (and I choose Eddie O. because I do not want to compare myself to Pierre Mcguire). The one thing that I hope you all take away from this is not how John Scott punches people in the face for a living or how I’m some kid who can’t play hockey, but that you must find what you love and make it work for you. Scott changed his whole game to make a career in what he loves to do. I changed professions in the sports realm to find a legitimate way forward in what I love to do. So, even if what you love looks impossible to accomplish, it’s not. There is always a way to modify it to make it your own and to excel at whatever that may be. If you do this, one day you too will be an all star.