Sports

Better playing through chemistry

By Matthew Semisch

03/17/2015

Hockey players at the youngest age groups are largely looking out for themselves. It’s not a great thing to admit to, but harshness doesn’t make the fact any less true.

Young icers, those at and around the elementary school age level, play an almost entirely individual-based system. At that age, it’s all about players developing their own skill sets as opposed to finding out how to play with others.

That mentality lingers as players get older, but it does begin to fade with time. As hockey players age, they see the whole rink better and are better equipped to build chemistry with teammates.

Luke Amsbaugh and Noah Grant, two seniors on this season’s Bottineau-Rugby (B-R) boys hockey team, have been playing together for 15 years. 

In that time, they’ve gone from a pair of stand-alone puck novices to one of the deadliest duos in North Dakota high school hockey.
They weren’t always on the ice at the same time on the teams they grew up playing for. Sometimes they were split apart, and even B-R head coach David Hoff occasionally broke up his top forward line last season of Amsbaugh, Grant and junior Austyn Lorenz.

Because of how often Amsbaugh and Grant shared the ice over the past decade and a half, though, an extraordinary level of chemistry between each other was created. It’s something that, looking back now at the end of their high school careers, they feel was always going to happen.

“It’s just easy to play together when we’ve been playing with each other for as long as we have,” Amsbaugh said. “It’s not so much about a style of play but just understanding what the other guy is going to do when, and it’s about instinct. 

“You develop that when you’re playing with somebody often enough. It’s just from playing together so long, and when you’ve playing together as long as we have, that chemistry is going to come around eventually. There’s no magic to it, just repetition.”

Some people would say that the pair were in the right age group when their bond began to develop. Grant agreed with that notion, saying that the same thing couldn’t have happened if he and Amsbaugh began playing together later in life.

“With us, it wasn’t something where you’re 19 and you meet a teammate and you’re playing with him until you’re both 29,” Grant said. “When we started developing as players, we worked into our own systems together from being little and getting that motor memory together, and now we can read off of each other because we’ve been doing it. 

“We haven’t been making our own reads and worrying about just ourselves. We’ve grown into that development together instead of just being two individuals out there.”

STARTING EARLY

Amsbaugh and Grant were two of the earliest members of the Breakfast Club, a 10-year-old series of weekly practice sessions at the Bottineau Community Arena. Each Wednesday during the hockey season, the arena’s ice is available between 7:15 and 7:45 a.m. for young players to hone their skills.

It was there that Amsbaugh and Grant got extra ice time to work on their craft. Hoff, their coach for the past four years with B-R, believes that his Braves have benefitted greatly from the Breakfast Club’s existence.

“We with the high school team have been a beneficiary of that because we’ve had a lot of kids that are very skilled and we’ve tried to promote that and develop players like Luke and Noah have become,” Hoff said.  

“I don’t know if I necessarily followed them with their teams all the way back then, but they were on my radar because they were always at Breakfast Club and I knew who they were from a very young age, third or fourth grade, because of what we started with the skills-building.”

In Amsbaugh’s and Grant’s years leading up to the high school level, Hoff knew that the pair had not only budding chemistry but - just as important - an extraordinary work ethic.

“You look more at individuals and what kind of skill set they have and how they’ve progressed as a player,” Hoff said of how he evaluates young players, “but even more so than that, you look at whether they spend extra time at the rink and extra time on the indoor ice or if they’re on the outdoor rink on a Tuesday night, and those kids were that type. 

“They were rink rats and grabbing all the ice time they could, and that’s continued up through now. We had the ice (last Thursday) when I was collecting the team’s jerseys and things like that, and our kids were looking then to see when they could get on the ice before the arena closes this month, and that’s what you want to see. 

“You look at Luke and Noah and they’ve been doing that forever,” Hoff continued, “and it hasn’t stopped.”

That much becomes obvious when they hit the ice. Both have enjoyed very successful high school hockey careers, and both had tremendous senior seasons.

In his final B-R campaign, Amsbaugh led the state with 40 goals and 65 points. That marked a 20-point drop off from his 85-point junior season, but he was still named to the All-State and All-West Region teams as a senior.

His final point, coming in a West Region  tournament state-qualifier loss to Mandan on Feb. 21, gave him an even 300 for his high school career. He never finished a season with the Braves below the 30-point mark, which he reached as a freshman.

Grant’s rise to prominence has been much more meteoric. After only posting three points in his freshman season in 2011-12 - all of them on assists - he recorded 12 as a sophomore, 43 as a junior and 51 this last season.

Grant was a controversial ommission from both the All-State and All-West Region teams. He was one of five players from West Region teams to come within one vote of making the all-region list.

Where they will play next is uncertain. Both have been approached by coaches from teams at higher levels, but neither of them has signed yet.

What’s known for sure, though, is that their B-R successors have big skates to fill. They, along with senior defenseman Braden Pewe, have set the bar high.

Hoff sees their successs, though, as something his younger players should aspire to.

“We didn’t have a huge number of seniors this year, but our seniors this year carried the tradition pretty well,” Hoff said,

“Hopefully younger kids in our program see the level that kids like Luke and Noah are at and see that that’s what we shoot for.”