A few common threads run through the stories of elite players who are touted as the next big thing. Inevitably, their parents have an athletic background. More likely than not, their fathers played a reasonably high level of hockey, if not professionally, and took active roles in their sons’ development. Connor McDavid’s father played to Junior A, Sidney Crosby’s dad was a QMJHL player and the Tkachuks’ dad is Hall of Fame material. This is the stuff we’ve come to expect in the bios of 17-year-old phenoms.
Shane Wright’s story falls outside the template.
“We’re not hockey people,” says his mother, Tanya, a school teacher.
“I played soccer growing up, not hockey,” says his father, Simon, who works for a nutritional-supplements company.
Though clearly proud of what their son has accomplished, the Wrights seem at times mystified, or maybe amused, by the stuff that goes on around the game off the ice — which is to say this whole circus looks to them the way it must to anybody who hasn’t entered the vortex that is minor hockey. They did pick up the signs that Shane was physically precocious and maybe in the 99th percentile on some counts, even away from the arena. “Shane’s sister is three years older than him and when she was learning to ride a two-wheeler, he stepped right in and picked it up immediately, way ahead of other kids his age,” Tanya says.
Shane Wright’s exceptional path to the top of the NHL draft board
Source: Pinas Ko Mahal
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