Gulls a boon to already-solid youth hockey – The San Diego Union-Tribune

People note his place of birth — Vancouver, B.C. — and nod knowingly. Of course. Peter McNab was another college and National Hockey League star who grew up on the ponds and rinks of Canada.

Now a Colorado Avalanche broadcaster who’s lone been considered among the premier NHL analysts, the 63-year-old McNab has a playing resume that includes 15 seasons with the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabres, Vancouver Canucks and New Jersey Devils, three straight appearances in the Stanley Cup Finals and 82 points over 107 playoff games.

“What Peter doesn’t tell people,” said younger brother David McNab, “is that he was also Sandy the Gull.”

That is, the mascot of San Diego’s minor-league team, the first of many local franchises to be known as the Gulls.

“Think of that,” said David McNab, an executive with the Anaheim Ducks. “The kid skating around the San Diego Sports Arena in that big bird head would go on to play almost a thousand NHL games and score 813 points.”

The McNab brothers both were Point Loma High products who had no local prep hockey to play in their teens, yet still managed to excel at NCAA powerhouses, Peter as a center at Denver University and David as goaltender as a college goalie for national-champion Wisconsin. As it happens, the Badgers program also gave the NHL a defenseman named Chris Chelios, who played for 26 seasons and certainly became the only Hockey Hall of Fame inductee who attended Mira Mesa High.

Parenthood was the reason the aforementioned trio lived in San Diego. Max McNab moved his family here to become general manager and coach of the WHL Gulls in 1966. The restaurant business brought Chelios’ father and his clan from Chicago to San Diego.

More and more over the past decade, however, athletes born and raised in San Diego have removed the novelty of top-notch players coming out of Southernmost California. Indeed, they’re making it on the national level, not despite their San Diego background, but because of it.

Moreover, the arrival of the newest Gulls and the American Hockey League is expected to intensify the boom in youth hockey in San Diego.

“A big-time boom,” said Stefan Demopoulos, the San Diego native who played on last year’s NCAA-championship team at Providence. “Them coming here is a huge factor. I remember my own upbringing, going to Gulls games, and that being a big influence on my hockey. The caliber then wasn’t even close to the AHL. I have a bunch of friends playing in the AHL, top of the line athletes. These kids growing up in San Diego will go to these games and be really struck by how good they are.

“Before, if you were a kid wanting to see top-notch hockey, you had to go to L.A. Now it’s in our own backyard. And with all the players going between the Ducks and the Gulls, they’re going to get to see NHL players as well as AHL players.”

One of three Demopoulos brothers who each were Division-I athletes in three different sports, Stefan has returned since graduation to coach youth hockey at the rink where he started, now known as the Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Center. The hockey director there is former Canadian college player Jason Galea, PhD, a sports psychologist.

“It is going to help a tremendous amount, and in different ways,” said Galea. “For a lot of family, it’s going to be a huge eye-opener, and it’s going to be a huge classroom of education. Not to take anything away from what we’ve had here in the past, but if you were a family really into hockey and took your kids to games in years gone by, you’ve seen older players.

“Well, now you’ll go to a game and see an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kid working his way up and down the ice. If you’re a teenager, that guy might even look a heckuva lot like a kid you’ve got on your team. That’s a huge thing for inspiration and motivation.”

Chances are, too, that someday soon the youth-hockey players will see AHL players who first laced on skates in San Diego.

Remarkably, three of the Frozen Four teams vying for the national championship last spring had at least one player from San Diego on the ice. Stefan Demopoulos of La Mesa was a senior forward on Providence’s surprising national-championship team while Escondido’s Nikolas Olsson was a freshman on runnerup Boston University. Two locals – Austin Ortega of Escondido and Grant Gallo of San Diego – were on the Omaha team that lost to Providence in the semifinals.

The most celebrated goalie in college hockey, Thatcher Demko, is a Boston College sophomore from Scripps Ranch who’s already played for Team USA and been drafted in the second round by the Vancouver Canucks. Tyler Moy, a Harvard junior from San Diego, was taken in this year’s draft by the Nashville Predators. (Moy’s younger sister, Keely, also has committed to Harvard’s women’s-hockey program.)

Robert Francis of San Diego is a senior forward at UMass-Lowell, J.T. Osborn of Alpine a senior forward at Western Michigan and Alec McCrea a defenseman from El Cajon who’s just beginning his college career at Cornell.

“There’s definitely a bond between all the San Diego players you see at that level,” said Demopoulos. “You can even kind of see it in their game. The California game is different than anybody else’s. There’s a little more skill there because of all the roller-hockey played here, and there’s no hitting in roller-hockey. All the California guys have really good hands. To see it is actually kind of funny.”

During the 2013-14 season, the American Hockey League had two San Diego products on the same team, the Rochester Americans.

The Buffalo Sabres made Jonathan Parker the first San Diego-born player signed to an NHL contract, but after a few seasons with Rochester, Parker is signed for the 2015-16 season with the Philadelphia Flyers’ affiliate in Reading, Pa. Chad Ruhwedel, a defenseman from Scripps Ranch, has spent the last two seasons shuttling between Rochester and Buffalo.

Ruhwedel, like all of the aforementioned players from San Diego, basically had to commute to Los Angeles to face the best competition on a regular basis. Virtually all then had to move farther away as teenagers to play at higher levels in Canada and the Midwest, most notably with the U.S. Hockey League, which has become the leading source for the top NCAA programs. For instance, Brian Williams of Mira Mesa and Nate Kallen of Scripps Ranch currently are on USHL teams.

Hope among local hockey people is that promising players will be able to stay closer to home with the greater number of rinks and top-calibre that have popped up around San Diego County. The latest skating facility is the Poway Ice Arena, partially built to suit the Gulls as their training headquarters, adding to the brand-new Icetown Carlsbad, the Kroc Center, San Diego Ice Arena, Ice-Plex Escondido and Westfield UTC.

Sandy Fitzpatrick, who had brief NHL stints with both the New York Rangers and Minnesota North Stars before wrapping up his hockey career with the Gulls, saw first-hand the impact that a local professional team can have on the area’s youth hockey.

“With the Gulls in the WHL, the local hockey program in the 1970’s was up over 600 kids playing in San Diego, and all we had was the Mira Mesa House of Ice,” said Fitzpatrick, who stayed in town and forged a second career in the financial-services field. “That rink was going 24 hours a day on weekends. My oldest son played as a 9-, 10-year-old. They were having to rotate those awful 2 am practice times around to different teams.

“The program was really strong. After the Gulls (disbanded in 1974), the program started to go down somewhat because the (WHA) Mariners weren’t nearly as good at getting involved in the community as Max McNab was. It really shrank. By the time Mariners were gone, the youth program was under 100 kids. It was absolutely destroyed.”

Especially over the past decade, the game has surged mightily in San Diego County. According to USA Hockey, the number of local registered players in either youth or adult leagues currently is pushing 4,000, up from 1,919 in 2004-05. Randy Moy, the former college coach who is president of the San Diego Junior Gulls program that includes 16 different travel teams, said the quality of the AHL game should create yet another big wave of young hockey talent.

“There’ll be a great impact,” said Moy, the father of Tyler and Keely. “It’s amazing how much the (NHL) Ducks and Kings have done to promote hockey in Southern California. Having the Gulls here will do the same.

“What’s already happened here has been incredible when you think about it. My wife (Susanna) and I have looked at each other at times and said, “Who’d have ever thought you could raise two D-I hockey players in San Diego, California? We’re just lucky that, of all places, there’s such a great hockey environment here.”