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.”

