Petes draft pick from sports family
Aaron Chiarot’s brother Ben is in the NHL playoffs with the Winnipeg Jets
New Peterborough Petes draft pick Aaron Chiarot comes from a Hamilton sports family dynasty.
Chiarot, a defenceman with the Mississauga Minor Midget AAA Reps, was drafted Saturday in the ninth round, 163rd overall.
He’s 16 and already six-foot-two and 190 pounds.
The selection, according to Hamilton Spectator columnist Scott Radley, “added another chapter to the Chiarot family story. One that’s already rather long.”
His brother Ben played for the OHL’s Guelph Storm and now plays for the Winnipeg Jets, who are in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Another brother Josh Chiarot, who recently finished four years in the Ontario Junior Hockey League including parts of two seasons with the Hamilton Red Wings, plans to play for Brock University next season.
Meanwhile his sister Taylor is a one-time McMaster University women’s basketball career scoring leader — and a former European pro basketball player. She now coaches at the high school and college level.
Aaron is 12 years younger than Taylor, 11 younger than Ben and five years younger than Josh.
Despite that age difference, Radley writes, they’d all spend hours in the backyard throwing a baseball or football around.
“When they weren’t doing that, a tiny Aaron would place pucks on a shooting pad in the driveway so Ben could practise his shot,” Radley writes.
They are the children of Tara and Matt Chiarot.
Matt Chiarot was a former linebacker at the University of Western Ontario, brother of a former linebacker at Mac and son of 1957 Grey Cup-winning Tiger-Cat, Gord.
The Chiarot family sat around the kitchen table of their West Mountain home in Hamilton waiting for Aaron to be drafted last Saturday.
“We were all eagerly watching,” Taylor told Radley. Aaron told Radley it was stressful as the rounds started to move along during the draft. He’d thought he might go in the third or fourth round. Yet as the rounds blew by he remained unclaimed. Then the fifth and sixth and seventh passed with nothing.
“I knew eventually a team was going to pick me up, “Aaron told Radley. “(My parents) just told me it doesn’t matter where you go as long as you show up ready to go.”
Radley writes that “the brothers — who all shared a bedroom growing up — still work out together in the summer, skate together in the off-season and chat constantly.
“Ben just asked the Jets’ strength and conditioning coach to come up with a regimen for his kid brother. Which they’ll do together whenever the Stanley Cup playoffs end for him.”