Local hockey star is turning heads
At the young age of eight, Matthew Zilinski is being noticed as a talented hockey player.
Zilinski, from Cambridge, started playing when he was three years old and currently plays up an age group on the Minor Atom A Hespeler Shamrocks team. The centre has always played in Hespeler. He likes his teammates and coaches. The feeling is mutual.
“He’s very hard working, a very smart player, and he has very good hockey IQ for his age. He has a positive attitude and always comes to the rink to work hard,” said his current Hespeler coach, Joe Lopes.
“He is a really good teammate and plays hard every time he is on the ice.”
Last year, Zilinski was deemed an exceptional player by Hespeler Minor Hockey Association, which is required in order to allow the player to play an age group above. To be deemed exceptional, the Ontario Minor Hockey Association outlines that the player must have superior skills to other players in their age group and considered to be in the top three best players on the older team.
Also, they must be physically and socially mature and must be one of the top three forwards, top two defenders or the top goalie.
For the past couple of years, Zilinski has been playing on high-level spring teams including Edge Hockey, which is run by Todd Hoffman, the father of National Hockey Leaguer Mike Hoffman. This will be his third year on the team.
Daryl King, the coach of the AAA spring team, said he first noticed Zilinski in early 2017 when he coached for Waterloo and his team was playing Zilinski’s Hespeler team. Zilinski scored 10 goals.
“I was so impressed with him and he was the best kid on the ice by far from both teams, no one could keep up with him,” said King.
“There are other kids that I would say that are just as talented as him, but what separates him from most of the other kids his age are his hockey IQ and the fact that he passes the puck,” said King. “He could deke out everyone on the ice if he really wanted to, but it’s the fact that he wants to get his teammates involved. He is always looking to see where an open guy is … and he would rather see them score than him, which is just incredible at his age because most kids just care about scoring.”
King said, after scoring his 10 goals, he hardly celebrated as he would put his head down, skate away, then continue playing.
“He doesn’t get excited when he scores but, when his teammates score, he goes crazy and that just shows what kind of kid he is.”
According to King, Edge Hockey is a tournament team composed of players born in 2010 that plays in Toronto and occasionally in other areas. The team plays in May and June.
“We practise and participate in tournaments and basically we are just pulling the best kids from around the area, so we have kids from five or six different cities on the team,” explained King.
“(The team) competes against other top kids from the Toronto or Barrie area so it is almost like an all-star team, and you are playing against other teams of similar calibre.”
Zilinski has also been selected to join the Toronto Pro Hockey team this spring which is a Toronto Pro Development AAA elite spring hockey team.
“The spring program is meant for kids to get to play with new kids, push their skills and talent level and to play against other top elite kids in and around not only Ontario, but also Canada and the United States,” said coach Jamie Ritskos.
Ritskos remembered Zilinski as a six-year-old.
The team he was coaching at the time played Hespeler in a tournament over Christmas, and when Ritskos wanted to form a team of elite level players outside of the GTA, he reached out to Zilinski’s coach and parents to watch him play to see how he had developed. Ritskos had also seen Zilinski play in the King of the Rings tournament last spring, a high-end Toronto tournament where he won with his Junior Titans spring team. “He is a smart player, not a selfish kid, and has high-end skill,” said Ritskos. “He makes his linemates better because he knows how to use them, knows how to get open for them, knows how to distribute the puck and he knows how to cover for his defencemen.”
Ritskos’s team will compete in three tournaments in Toronto this spring that are part of the BRICK Series — North America’s invitational superelite hockey event series. According to Ritskos, the spring teams are a way to put these players in the Toronto Professional Hockey Development Program database, which gives them the opportunity to be chosen for the BRICK team — a team that will be chosen next year and will compete at the BRICK Invitational hockey tournament in Edmonton in July.
Zilinski said his multiple coaches are all great and have taught him how to pass and how to be a team player. He said his favourite player is Wayne Gretzky because, as great as he was, he never acted as if he was. He said he wants to be just like him one day and play in the NHL.