Friday, October 19, 2018
FACEOFF 2018
4B
Hayden Lavigne: No longer a mystery
Written by Tien Le
H
ayden Lavigne
is
currently
reading a mys-
tery
book.
It
should come to
no one’s sur-
prise, though. After all, he’s a mys-
tery himself.
Talk to people around Lavigne
and two common themes emerge.
One is that he’s a serious, intense
guy. Two is that no one can ever
tell what he’s thinking — he’s just
an enigma.
“He’s very closed book, he’s very
— he doesn’t show a lot of emotions,
he doesn’t reveal a lot about him-
self,” said Lavigne’s mother Julie.
“He can be taken the wrong way
sometimes, he doesn’t show excite-
ment, it used to drive me nuts.
Like, ‘Aren’t you excited?’ ‘Yeah,
I’m excited.’ He doesn’t outwardly
show it.”
As Michigan coach Mel Pearson
puts it, “You win, there’s Hayden.
You lose, there’s Hayden.”
And it’s hard for the goalie to
express himself. His emotions are
stashed under a mask and his body
language locked away in a stance.
But, if you want to know what he’s
feeling, all you have to do is just
ask.
“Other guys will give you an
answer,” said goaltender coach
Steve Shields. “And they’ll make
sure it’s something that’s an accept-
able answer, but Hayden will just
say what he feels. He’s real.”
A few years back, National Hock-
ey League goaltender coach Mitch
Korn, now coaching his 27th year,
came to Michigan to talk with the
team. He gave them the regular
spiel on the league. But then he
asked, “Why do you think you’re
going to be in the NHL one day?”
The team answered with the
answers everyone wanted to hear,
the ones that wouldn’t spark any
controversy if overheard. But Lavi-
gne made his intent clear.
He responded simply: “I don’t
know; I just know I will.”
***
Hayden Lavigne was born April
7, 1996 in Brampton, Ontario.
From a young age — three-years-
old — he made up his mind on
what he wanted to do. He let his
mom know that he wanted to be
on skates, that he wanted to play
hockey.
Despite catching her off guard,
not knowing where that desire
came from, Julie tried to get him
on a team. But being decisive didn’t
get Lavigne any favors, it was too
late for him by the time she found
people his age on a team.
“I know some kids who started
when they were four, I think by the
time I asked they were full and they
wouldn’t take him,” Julie said.
So when Lavigne turned five, his
mother took him one more time to
try and join a recreational team.
At this point in his
childhood, he had
to make a decision.
He dabbled in snow-
boarding and biking
but Julie thought it
was time he chose
one sport to focus
on.
“Even when he
was young, he had
to choose what he
was gonna focus on
because any rec sport, you can’t
do more than one rec sport,” Julie
said. “There’s not enough hours in
the day.”
Around the same time he chose
hockey, Lavigne fell in love with
being a goaltender.
Lots of players don’t choose to be
a goalie by default. Many find that
it’s due to a gear — the ability to be
different as Shields noted. Others
find it due to a lack of staking abili-
ty. But for Lavigne, it was different.
“Now the best athletes are the
goalies,” Shields said. “Lots of goal-
ies had a similar thing, where they
had a chance to play when they
were younger or they really, some
kids just like that position. You
don’t think about that when you’re
young, and you’re out there playing
goal and stopping pucks.”
And it’s as simple as that. Lavi-
gne didn’t find out about the gears
or the pressure until later. He
just loved being goalie because he
thought it gave him the best chance
to win.
“He perceived that winning was
under his control,” Julie said. “So,
it was easy. Just stop the pucks.”
Then, she said her and Jeff Lavi-
gne, Hayden’s father, actively tried
to convince him to switch. See-
ing other hockey parents doing
the same with their children only
offered assurance. But Lavigne
stuck with the position.
The decision was largely to the
credit of a coach of a six-year-old
rec team.
“(He) saw him playing once and
said he wanted him as the goalie,”
Julie said. “Saw him play once as
the goalie. Like, at five years old,
they had to rotate it,
but I remember that
the coach of the rec
team (watched) the
five year olds play
and said, ‘I want him
as my goalie.’
“And I said, ‘Well,
could he come try
out as a player?’ And
he said, ‘Well, he
could, but I really
want him as my goal-
ie.’ I said, ‘You saw him play once
and he doesn’t even get a shot!’ I
mean, they could hardly skate! He
goes, ‘Yes, he was very focused.’ So
I said, ‘Okay.’ But anyway, that was
the start of it. He wanted it and the
coach wanted him so that was how
he started.”
Lavigne differed from most of his
teammates though. For one, he had
other hobbies outside of hockey.
“When you’re in minor hockey,
it’s hockey 24/7, seven days a week,
four weeks a month, twelve months
a year, almost,” Julie said. “And I
think people, some people, will say,
‘You gotta get off the ice, you gotta
do other things,’ but when you’re
going to minor hockey and every-
body’s doing it, you kind of just do
it.”
Minor hockey is an amatuer
league just below juniors, and yet
despite being less competitive in
nature than most of the other hock-
ey leagues, it was serious enough to
warrant national tournaments and
regional championships.
So while many dedicated most
of their time to the sport, Lavigne
found his time divided between
other things he loved. Jeff would
take him out to hunt at an early age
and developed a love of the out-
doors.
Lavigne enjoyed games of tags
while continuing to snowboard,
hunt and mountain bike, despite
pleas from his coaches.
But when he approached the age
of ten, he faced a similar decision
to the one he saw when he was five.
But this time, it carried a lot more
weight. He was contemplating giv-
ing up hockey for a bit to try com-
petitive snowboarding. Julie told
him he couldn’t
“He toyed with giving up hockey
for a year, just because, you can’t
do both competitive sports,” Julie
said. “But, like any other athlete,
they’re really good at almost any
sport they try, right?
“So, he toyed with wanting to
be a pro snowboarder as well, or a
competitive snowboarder, but he
decided to stick with hockey in case
— there’s a risk, right?”
The risk of injuries are always
present, but it was the risk of lag-
ging behind that threatened Lavi-
gne the most.
“You leave one sport to do anoth-
er and then you wanna come back
and all of the sudden you can’t get
in at the same level,” Julie said.
“And it would probably be true with
hockey.”
So in order to keep up with his
peers and to minimize the risk of
injury, Lavigne gave up two of his
hobbies for good. No more Christ-
mas-time snowboarding or sum-
mer-time mountain biking.
It left a hole in Lavigne — even
with more time dedicated to hock-
ey. But, when he moved up to the
junior hockey level, he adopted a
new hobby — fishing.
“I got into it my first year in the
USHL,” Lavigne said. “We were
done playing pretty early and I had
to stay down there to finish high
school, and there were a lot of small
ponds and not really a whole lot
to do because we were in a really
small town in Nebraska, so I kind
of got into fishing that way.”
For a goalie, patience is a large
aspect of the game. Move too early,
and the attacking opponent could
have an empty net to score on.
Move too late, and the reaction to
the puck might not be on time. So
by picking up fishing, an activ-
ity that relies heavily on patience,
Lavigne used it to better his skills
on the ice.
But the hobby held a higher
importance than just improving an
aspect of his game.
“I think more than my patience,
it’s helped me relax on the ice and
realize that it’s just a game. I tend
to get very tense and frustrated,
and fishing was kind of a big out-
let for me and how to just kinda let
that go,” Lavigne said. “Like when I
was on the water, it was like, ‘Okay,
well I don’t have to do anything
except fish.’ ”
Adopting the hobby during his
first year in the USHL might have
been a stroke of luck. The first sea-
son with the Tri-City Storm, to
put it lightly, was rough for Lavi-
gne. He underperformed, splitting
time with Jacob Johansson. Post-
ing a subpar .895 save-percentage
through 27 games, he was shad-
owed by Johansson’s .910 through
42 games.
“Fishing kinda filled that void,”
Lavigne said, “and gave me an
opportunity to be outside and enjoy
the weather and the scenery and all
that stuff and still keep me occu-
pied without worrying about fall-
ing and breaking my arm or leg.”
If fishing was needed during a
mentally-taxing first season, it was
needed even more so through his
second season in the league, when
he went to the Waterloo Black
Hawks. Faced with tighter compe-
tition after being cut from Tri-City
— this time seeing a four-man rota-
tion at the position — Lavigne was
given less time in the net, and sub-
sequently, the team saw less from
him. Posted .866 save-percentage
“He can be
taken the
wrong way
sometimes.”