National Post (National Edition)
HOW AUSTON MATTHEWS BECAME SO GREAT.
The extraordinary story of how Auston Matthews became the first overall pick in the NHL began with an uncle who happened to buy a pair of season tickets to the city’s newest professional sports team. The Winnipeg Jets had relocated to Arizona in 1996, a year before Matthews was born. The first time he went to a game, he sat on his father’s lap for free, paying more attention to the Zamboni, which he called el trucke, and to the remote-controlled balloons that dropped parachuted T-shirts from the rafters, than to the actual players.
Matthews’s mom Ema grew up in a family of nine children on a ranch in Hermosillo, Mexico. When she met Brian Matthews while working as a flight attendant, she didn’t even know how to speak English, much less know anything about hockey. Matthews’s father Brian was only slightly more interested in the game. He was born in California and had pitched in college before his arm blew out as a junior.
Young Auston received a Daniel Briere jersey as a Christmas present when he was six years old, and was hooked. “It was pretty much the hottest thing,” Matthews said of the Coyotes. “To have a new team come in was a pretty hot topic, especially with the players like Roenick and Tkachuk.”
Turning a hockey fan into a hockey player, however, was almost as difficult as growing grass in the desert. Hockey wasn’t baseball, which Brian Matthews understood. And it wasn’t golf, which was literally in their backyard. There was no template, no previous examples of what worked and what didn’t. In some ways, that worked to the Matthews’s advantage. Brian Matthews didn’t feel the same pressure that Canadians feel when enrolling their kids in hockey. He didn’t follow any guidelines, because there weren’t any. Instead, he started writing his own learner’s manual, implementing ideas from other sports and questioning every rule that the hockey traditionalists threw his way.
The first obstacle: cost. Ice was hard to come by in Arizona, so because of that it was really expensive. When Matthews was three years old, his mom pushed back the C-section birth of his sister by an hour so he wouldn’t miss his first hockey practice and essentially toss money down the drain. As Matthews got older and played at higher levels, the costs multiplied. “It’s not like you’re living in Detroit and you’re driving a couple of hours to play somewhere else in Michigan. Or if you’re in Boston or New York or something,” said Brian. “Everything was like an adventure. As you look for better and better competition, you have to head out east. There’s a cost element, there’s a time element.”
The Matthews family sacrificed. Ema worked two jobs — at Starbucks and as a waitress — to help pay for their son’s passion. But they also found out a way to feed their son’s insatiable appetite for more and more hockey, while at the same time allowing Matthews to practically skate for free. They lived about a ten-minute drive from Ozzie Ice, a dualrink facility that had one ice pad and one synthetic pad that were about one-third the size of a regulation rink. Aside from games of pickup hockey, Ozzie Ice was mostly used as a training rink. That is, until Brian, who volunteered at the rink, suggested creating a three-on-three league.
“It exploded,” he said. “I mean, who doesn’t want to play in a league where the score is 48-45?” Since Brian was helping out with the league — running the score clock, and making sure the officials showed up and the teams had a goalie and enough players — his son also hung around and helped out. Inevitably, a team would be short a player and Auston would ask if he could fill in.
“Sure,” said his father. “Just grab a jersey and go.”
“We’d skate all day,” recalled Brian. “It was ideal for me and ideal for Auston. He’d be smoked by the time he got home, but with a big grin on his face because he got to skate all day and score a lot of goals.” The beauty of playing three-on-three meant there were more opportunities to touch the puck and more opportunities to score goals than in traditional games. It was also non-contact, so Matthews could play with bigger and older kids. Some laughed at the type of hockey that was being played, with scores resembling a football game, but for a young player still developing his stickhandling and skating skills, it had obvious advantages over skating up and down a full rink, sometimes going an entire game without actually touching the puck.
“A lot of the skills I’ve developed today are from that,” Matthews said of Ozzie Ice. “It was my own little backyard rink. I was there constantly. I had every team’s jersey so I could fill in and play for them and have fun. I’d be there all the time.” Two things came out of those onice sessions: Matthews developed a knack for scoring goals, and because the ice surface was about one-third the size of a regulation rink, he learned how to stickhandle in an area the size of a phone booth.
“You watch him in the pre-game skate and he takes the puck and stickhandles just on the faceoff dot,” said Mark Ciaccio, a former skills coach with the Arizona Coyotes. “That’s all he’s doing. He’s doing all these different stickhandling moves on the dot and it’s such a small area. That comes from playing in three-on-three. He was always good at working in tight areas. His stickhandling skills are unbelievable.” When Matthews showed up at tournaments as a fillin player on the bigger ice surface, the extra space and extra time made him twice as dangerous. It was like taking batting practice against a pitcher who is standing half the distance from home plate and then suddenly having an extra thirty feet to see the ball coming in during actual games. It was too easy.
“It’s no different than what the Brazilians do,” said Brian Matthews. “They have a small soccer game that they play in Brazil — it’s huge. It forces skill development and it forces [them] to learn how to dribble the ball and all those things. It’s no different than three-onthree. [Auston] had to learn very quickly where to go. It’s not just the skills with the puck, but without the puck, knowing where to put yourself so you can get the puck and where you can put yourself in a position to score. That sort of thing helps. And then when you go to the big ice, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all this space I have now.’ And it just opens up a whole other world for you. I think maybe it helped slow the game down even more for him.”
Most other hockey parents didn’t think this way, because this wasn’t the way they had learned how to play hockey. But Brian Matthews wasn’t like other hockey parents. There was no blueprint. Instead, he was self-proclaimed “the crazy Arizonian who looked at things differently than everyone else.” That line of thinking is how Auston Matthews ended up with Boris Dorozhenko as a power skating coach.
Dorozhenko was born in Ukraine and had been coaching the Mexican national team, which is something you don’t see on most skating coaches’ resumes. By his own admission, he is “a crazy guy” who teaches an even crazier technique that emphasizes balance and control but in ways that few can imagine. There were no pucks at a typical Dorozhenko practice. There was no time spent on systems training or scrimmaging. It was just hours and hours of skating. “I always say as far as the edges go, Boris is pretty hard to beat,” said Ron Filion, one of Matthews’s first coaches. “But the method is very out there and it’s not for everyone.”
For five to six hours a week, Matthews performed huge leaps and pirouettes, ran in circles, stomped his feet and tried not to fall down while balancing on his heels for minutes at a time. It looked ridiculous, and some parents told Brian Matthews that he was wasting his money and his son’s time. But those were typical hockey parents. The Matthews family was not trying to be typical. “Everything is very unique,” Auston said of Dorozhenko’s methods. “It’s all edgework and you do jumps and 360s in the air.
“You’re wondering ‘What the heck is this?’ But then you go into a corner and you’re spinning off guys so easily and you start to realize that’s kind of how it all works together and translates to the game. Looking at it from the outside, I know people were wondering what we were doing. But if you go into it with an open mind and work hard at it, I think it’s a really good option.”
In Dorozhenko, who was invited to live at the Matthews’s home for two years and essentially became part of the family, Brian Matthews found someone with a similar outlook. He wasn’t afraid to try new things, to admit that the old way wasn’t always the right way. In Auston Matthews, Dorozhenko found a student with natural skill but also with a sense of adventure. One year, Dorozhenko convinced Brian Matthews to put Auston on the worst team in the state, because he would get more ice time and learn leadership qualities. Another year, Dorozhenko took Auston to a tournament in Quebec City — as part of an allukrainian team.
“He was always my showman, because my style is very different,” said Dorozhenko. “Every day we were changing drills — some didn’t work, some were a waste of time — but Auston was trying them all. He didn’t complain. We would skate three hours on the ice and afterward he’d be shooting pucks on net. He had such energy, such passion. He’s a gamer.
“I started working with him when he was eight years old and he was really just making his first step on the ice. Auston was very competitive right from the beginning. He hated to be second. He had to be first. It helped him a lot. Some of the drills I do are very hard for beginners. I remember one particular drill, he was almost crying because he couldn’t do it. I asked him to quit or to have a break for fifteen minutes. But he said no and kept trying and trying until he got it. When he felt not satisfied with a drill, he would keep doing it again and again.”
The results were so good that Brian Matthews eventually pulled his son out of Triple-a and put him in a lower level, where there were fewer games, just so he could spend more time working with Dorozhenko. A year later, Brian signed his son up for Triple-a, but only as a practice player so he could learn proper positioning. Again, it was something no one else was doing. “I don’t know many kids that could take a year off,” said Filion. “But at the end of the day, not everyone is Auston Matthews.”
I STARTED WORKING WITH HIM WHEN HE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD AND HE WAS REALLY JUST MAKING HIS FIRST STEP ON THE ICE. AUSTON WAS VERY COMPETITIVE RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING. HE HATED TO BE SECOND. HE HAD TO BE FIRST. IT HELPED HIM A LOT. — BORIS DOROZHENKO BOOK EXCERPT