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He’s like a sponge. Right from age seven when he first started playing, he’s been a student of the game who’s obsessed. He just loves to learn and loves to hear stories and find anecdotes of what makes players better. If he can instill that in his game and pass it onto others, he’ll do that. — Brad Scheifele
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That Scheifele took the long road to the NHL isn’t surprising. Travelling long distances is in his blood. For years, Mark’s father spent nearly every day on the road, driving a motor coach for a tour bus company he co-owned out of Kitchener, Ontario. During the week, he used to travel everywhere, from New England and the Finger Lakes in central New York to Florida and Branson, Missouri.
Having a father who spent hours upon hours travelling sent a subconscious message to Mark that there are no shortcuts in life. The route from point A to point B is filled with twists and turns and is subject to whatever obstacles the highway throws at you. For Mark, whose career included several detours, it was like that with hockey.
From an early age, he seemed to grasp the idea that you weren’t going to get anywhere in life without working for it. Growing up, he played every sport imaginable. His parents had two rules: you could only play two sports per year and once you started a sport, you couldn’t quit until the end of the season. In school, Scheifele played everything, including basketball, volleyball and track. When he was in the fourth grade, he was named Athlete of the Year at Grand River Collegiate Institute. “My brother was in grade six at the time,” said Scheifele. “That kind of made him mad.”
Was he a natural? Yes and no. “I honestly have a natural skill at most things, but I would try pretty hard at it,” said Scheifele. Hockey was the passion, though. He didn’t just watch hockey games, he watched individual players, studying what made them so successful. He geeked out on the game. He could tell you not only which way a player shot, but also which stick he used and what the curve pattern looked like and how flexible the shaft was.
Despite their son’s passion, Scheifele’s parents tried to make hockey fun. They never talked about making the NHL or getting a college scholarship or even playing major junior. There was no end goal aside from having fun. “You just wanted them to enjoy what they were doing without putting pressure on them,” said Brad Scheifele. “I used to say that whenever they played a rep sport, it was like work because they would be on the ice for five days a week or more. So whenever they had a chance to play pond hockey on an outdoor rink, it was nice to have that available to us.”
Mark Scheifele plays for the Kitchener Jr. Rangers. The Rangers weren’t a strong team and won only one tournament. Photo courtesy of the Scheifele family
Stanley Park, in Kitchener, Ontario, where the tennis courts were converted into an outdoor rink in the winter, is just around the corner from where Scheifele grew up. All winter long, he and his brother would walk over and play for hours. In the summer, their street was quiet enough that they could skate around on their rollerblades and play street hockey games without fear of passing cars. Mark, who loved the Detroit Red Wings, always pretended he was Steve Yzerman. His brother was Nicklas Lidström. Or sometimes they were just two goons having a good time. “Yeah, well, realistically I would never be able to beat him because he’s two years older than me and two years stronger than me, but I would always try my hardest,” said Scheifele. “He would push me down; I would get back up. Obviously we ended in fights a good amount of time, but it was just brotherly love.”
Scheifele’s parents might not have wanted to put too much stock into their son’s hockey career, but Scheifele had other ideas. He was the one, at seven years old, who found out that there would be tryouts for a travel team. And he was the one telling his parents—not the other way around—of the importance of being prepared. His brother joked that he and his sister must have “gotten the lazy genes, where Mark was always keen, always telling you that you have to leave way in advance to get to practice. That was continuous with whatever he was doing.”
Scheifele sounds like a motivational speaker when he talks about his approach to athletics. “You don’t play hockey,” he said. “You invest in yourself by doing everything possible to be successful.” Each year, he tried to find a different regimen to incorporate into his training. One summer, it was his shot. The next, his skating. Slowly he would add to his entire package, getting faster, stronger, smarter, more dominant in each skill. “The road never ends,” he said. “Each year there was something that he was going to grab a hold of,” said Brad. “I think that learning curve was never-ending, because he knows that you never know everything. It’s a fine-tuning kind of thing for him.”
Scheifele grew up watching Kitchener Rangers games and played for the Jr. Rangers. Photo courtesy of the Scheifele family
Scheifele scored 40 goals and 79 points in 49 games in his minor midget year for the Kitchener Jr. Rangers. But he didn’t play in a particularly competitive league. The tournaments his team entered were not against elite competition, so the numbers he was putting up didn’t overly impress scouts. Plus, Scheifele wasn’t much to look at back then. “I was tall and skinny and played on a pretty weak team in Kitchener so we didn’t get a whole lot of exposure,” said Scheifele. “We only won one tournament, but it was kind of like a B-level tournament. I don’t even think I was on scouts’ radar, to be honest.”
The Saginaw Spirit selected Scheifele in the seventh round of the OHL draft. At the training camp, he and Vincent Trocheck, who later made the NHL with the Florida Panthers, were trying out for the final spot on the team. Trocheck had been selected twenty-fourth overall. Scheifele and Trocheck tied for first in scoring during the intra-squad games. “Obviously they cut me,” said Scheifele. “Said, ‘Get stronger,’ all that jazz.”
Even so, Scheifele wasn’t sure the OHL was the right way to go. He had grown up going to Kitchener Rangers games, had watched Derek Roy win a Memorial Cup, had dreamed of doing the same. But after Saginaw cut him, the OHL no longer looked like a real option. College hockey seemed like a better fit for a player who was still growing into his frame. Several schools had shown interest in him. He had even visited Cornell University, where he verbally committed. “I was pretty keen on going there. I was like, ‘This is my route.’”
Scheifele was still another year from enrolment, so the decision was where he was going to spend the next season. Initially, the plan was to return to the Kitchener Jr. Rangers for his midget year. But then he got a call from Todd Hoffman. Hoffman, who had coached Scheifele during his OHL draft year, was going to be coaching the Kitchener Dutchmen Junior B team and wanted Scheifele on the team. Hoffman was a more pro-style coach. His son Mike played for the Ottawa Senators, so he had an idea of what Scheifele needed to do to get to the next level. “Having seen his son go through it, he had a better understanding of the draft, all that kind of stuff,” said Scheifele.
Still, playing Junior B didn’t look like it was going to be a good fit for Scheifele. Junior B level is not a young man’s league. The players are typically a lot older and more physically mature. Scheifele wanted to develop—not sit on the bench. “[Mark and his parents] had gone and watched the Junior B level of play in Kitchener. And they hemmed and hawed, because anytime they went and watched that team play it was always the older guys getting ice time,” said Hoffman. “So I had to really talk up the program and how I coached. I promised them from day one that he’s going to play and he’s going to develop. And that’s what he did.”
* * *
Everyone else is such a phenom, but that kid just worked his ass off. He would be on the ice for an hour before practice just shooting pucks. I’d get to the rink and be like, ‘Oh shit, he’s already been there for thirty minutes.’ We didn’t have a scheduled workout, but he’d be working with our personal trainer before and after practice. He always wanted to get better. To go from playing Junior B for the Dutchmen to the Barrie Colts and then the NHL in a six-year span is incredible. — Ryan Clarkson, fo
rmer teammate
* * *
Ryan Clarkson doesn’t know if he should tell this story. It’s not that it’s embarrassing. It’s just that you know how everyone says what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas? Well, what happens at a Rookie Party is supposed to stay at the Rookie Party. But in this case, he will make an exception. Midway through Scheifele’s rookie year with the Kitchener Dutchmen, everyone met at teammate Paul Sergi’s place in Waterloo for what was framed as a night of team bonding, but was also an excuse to get the first-year players pretty drunk.
Scheifele was not just a rookie. He was an extremely underaged rookie. And while some sixteen-year-olds would not have thought twice about doing something like drinking beer, Scheifele wasn’t like most sixteen-year-olds. At the same time, he didn’t want to seem like he wasn’t a team player. So he came up with a compromise. “Hey Clarkie,” he asked real quietly, when no one was around, “do you think it’s all right if I drink root beer?”
If it had been anyone else, Clarkson might have used the moment to embarrass the kid in front of his teammates or maybe used it as a chance to get him even drunker. But Scheifele wasn’t anyone else. By the time of the rookie party, he was already the leading scorer and best player on the team. He was clearly headed on a path to the NHL. But more than that, he was someone the veterans liked and respected.
“It was funny, because I usually give it pretty hard to the rookies in the first year,” said Clarkson. “I got it bad, too, when I was a rookie. Scheife’s the only kid that I let drink straight root beer. Scheife was just such a respectful kid. It’s not like he came to me and said, ‘I’m drinking root beer.’ He asked me politely. What am I going to say? ‘No’? Like he’s the nicest kid on the planet. I’m like, ‘Sure man,’ because you knew he was going to make the NHL for sure. If he didn’t want to drink, then he doesn’t have to drink.”
Still, the first time Scheifele arrived at tryouts, it wasn’t apparent that he was going to be in the NHL much less lead the Kitchener Dutchmen in scoring. Scheifele didn’t even think he was good enough to make the team. It wasn’t because he was rail thin or that his skating was sloppy. It was that he still didn’t really know how good he was. He didn’t grow up being told he was this or that. When he came to the Kitchener Dutchmen, he had just been cut from the Saginaw Spirit after being picked in the seventh round of the OHL draft. His confidence was shot.
“The first time I met him was on the ice,” said Clarkson. “I was one of the better players that year coming in and I remember him coming to me and saying, ‘Hey Clarkie, do you think I’m going to make the fourth line? Do you think I can make the team?’” In the beginning, Scheifele didn’t look special against players who were bigger and physically more mature than him, partly because he was still growing into his body. But the bigger reason was that he was so humble. A rookie’s place on most hockey teams is to defer to the veterans. But by the second month of the season, he started to separate himself from everyone else.
“He was a little shy at the time,” said Derek Schoenmakers. “But what stood out was that he was a gamer back then. He literally lived and breathed hockey every second of the day. We used to go to his house after practice or it would be the summer and we’d go to the gym for two hours, go home and he’d be wanting to shoot pucks for another two hours after that, to the point where your hands would be ripping apart and he’s saying, ‘C’mon, one more puck.’ That kind of thing. He just lived and breathed hockey. There was no doubt about what he wanted to do. First guy on and last guy off. He loved being at the rink. That’s what stood out the most. Obviously, he was an all-world talent.”
When he wasn’t practising at the rink or working out, Scheifele was at home pounding pucks at his hockey net either by himself or with his teammates. A favourite game was “horse,” where the first player tries to hit one of the corner posts with a shot and if he’s successful, the next player has to replicate the same shot. If he misses, he gets a letter. The game continues until one of the players has spelled “horse.” Or sometimes they would go “around the world” and take turns trying to hit each of the four corner posts and crossbar in succession. “His net was honestly disfigured,” said Schoenmakers. “It didn’t even look like a net. Posts were curving every which way. It was in shambles.”
Scheifele finished the season with 18 goals and 55 points in 51 games. His linemate Clarkson had 27 goals and 43 points. “I was lucky to play with him,” said Clarkson. “I can attest that a lot of my goals were because of him. I like to shoot a lot and he was more of a playmaker back then. You can see that he can definitely shoot the puck, but he was always looking to pass first. He set me up a bunch of times, for sure.” In the playoffs, Kitchener lost in the first round to Brantford, a team that Clarkson said was “stacked with guys from the OHL.”
“We didn’t have a deep team or anything like that by any means,” said Clarkson. “It was pretty much me and him and our goalie. I remember the playoffs—me and Scheife were playing together and the game we lost 7–5 in Brantford, I believe I scored a hat trick and Scheife had four or five points.” Although the season ended earlier than anyone wanted, Scheifele had put himself back on the map. And he did it through perseverance and hard work.
“I honestly believe he wouldn’t be where he is today had he not played that year of Junior B,” said Hoffman. “I always say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. If you’ve got the aspirations to be an elite player and play in the National Hockey League, like he always had, just be patient. Everything’s going to work out at the end of the day if you continue to do the little things on and off the ice the right way. Just look at him today.”
* * *
Dale Hawerchuk is a Hall of Fame forward who scored 1,409 points in 1,188 games during a sixteen-year NHL career. Once he retired, he spent the first few years raising horses in Hockley Valley, Ontario, until one day he “woke up and realized that [he] really missed the game” and got into coaching. In 2010, Hawerchuk had been running a Junior A team in Orangeville when Barrie Colts owner Howie Campbell called and asked if he wanted to take over coaching the team.
It was an offer that came with some serious strings attached. The Colts had just lost in the OHL championship after long-time head coach Marty Williamson suddenly resigned and took a job with the Niagara IceDogs. He wasn’t the only one leaving. Alex Pietrangelo, Kyle Clifford, T.J. Brodie and Alex Burmistrov were heading to the NHL, while the team’s top-three scorers were also turning pro. Like it or not, the Colts were heading toward a rebuild. The problem was that in a quest for a Memorial Cup, they had given up many of their top prospects and had no one to rebuild around.
So Hawerchuk turned to Scheifele, a Junior B player who a year earlier had been passed up 133 times in the draft because he moved slowly and didn’t look like he could handle playing against men. “I had a discussion with Dale Hawerchuk and he said, ‘Do you think this kid can play in the league?’” said Hoffman. “And I said, ‘He’ll come in at the beginning of the year and be a fourth-line guy, but I promise you by Christmas or January, he’ll be pushing for a top-six player. He’s a real strong player today and he’ll get even better, because he wants to be the best. He’s that type of kid.’”
But that’s not what Hawerchuk saw when he first scouted Scheifele. Watching him play in the Cottage Cup tournament in Huntsville, Ontario, Hawerchuk saw a lanky kid whose skating wasn’t exactly fluid. But there was something about the way Scheifele moved around the ice that intrigued Hawerchuk. He wasn’t the fastest, but he was rarely out of position. It was like he had an innate knowledge of where the puck was going to be and how to go and get it.
Plus, he had size—and an NHL-calibre release that couldn’t be taught. “I just saw instincts,” said Hawerchuk. “I saw the routes he was taking away from the puck. He wasn’t the greatest skater when I first saw him, but you saw all this good stuff. And then you meet him, and you see he’s only going to get better.”
Finding Scheifele
was the easy part. Getting him to Barrie was a bit more difficult. Scheifele had verbally committed to Cornell University and was planning to spend the season playing Junior A hockey for the Huntsville Otters before enrolling in college the following year. Well, that was what he had told the Saginaw Spirit. The word around the league was that Scheifele would have no problem playing closer to home, if a team like the Kitchener Rangers were to trade for him.
Before that could happen, Barrie swooped in and acquired his rights from Saginaw. On September 8, 2010, the Colts traded over-age goalie Mavric Parks for Scheifele and a second-round pick in 2013. “When we made the trade, I said to Dale to give it a couple of days and we’ll get a call from Kitchener,” said Colts general manager Jason Ford, who at the time was the team’s assistant GM. “Sure enough, a couple of days passed and we got a call from Kitchener. But we weren’t going to trade him.”
Instead, after the Cottage Cup ended, the Colts invited Scheifele and his parents to stop by Barrie on their drive back from Huntsville to Kitchener and made their pitch. “I was going to play in Huntsville, actually, because the Huntsville Otters were a Junior A team and they were hosting the RBC Cup and they were trying to load it up. As soon as I left [Barrie], I was like ‘I want to play here,’” said Scheifele. “Dale wowed me.”
Barrie is a two-hour drive from Kitchener. But what the Colts lacked in geographic proximity, the team made up for by selling Scheifele on its proximity to the NHL. The team was rebuilding and Scheifele would have an opportunity to play more minutes than most rookies usually get. “We also offered him the biggest education package you could get,” said Ford.
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