Fritz still Sound Tigers mainstay after two difficult years
BRIDGEPORT — Back on the ice and feeling good, Tanner Fritz is creeping up the Bridgeport Sound Tigers’ leaderboard in a couple of scoring categories. He became one of only four players to skate in six Sound Tigers seasons.
For a couple of reasons, that was not entirely a given last summer.
“I don’t think I was ever — I don’t know if I was close” to retiring, Fritz said.
Fritz went 22 months playing only four professional hockey games, partly because of two surgeries, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and partly because, amid all that, Brandy and Tanner Fritz’s first child, Emmett, needed medical attention.
“I did have conversations with my wife,” Fritz said. “Going through all that, it was so much. The thing about it was I was getting back on the ice when Emmett was going into the hospital. Kind of the last thing on my mind was hockey. “I wasn’t fully healthy yet, having the same problem with the hip. Later, toward the summer, I wasn’t sure I could play even if wanted to. I didn’t want to retire on something like this, but if your body tells you you can’t play ...”
The hip feels better now. Emmett will turn 2 in June, developing a bit of his own personality, Dad said. And Fritz is back in his role as what Sound Tigers coach Brent Thompson once called the ultimate utility player, good in any situation.
“I’m happy with his effort day-in, day-out,” Thompson said. “People don’t see the effort he puts in in practice. The guy shows up and competes every single day.”
Fritz, an Alberta native, competed his way from Ohio State into an every-day ECHL role in 2015-16, on to the AHL with the Sound Tigers by the end of the season, a regular AHL spot the next year and 34 NHL games the year after that.
During a late-season call-up to the New York Islanders in 2018-19, an injury led to a blood clot in his hand that needed surgery and ended his season.
“I never thought it was going to be my last little stint in the NHL,” Fritz said.
He came back in the fall, played four games for Bridgeport, then needed hip surgery from wear and tear.
“I’d dealt with it a couple
of years, where I wouldn’t really notice it too much on the ice but afterward I’d have trouble with it,” Fritz said. “It came to the point of getting in so much pain, taking a few hard strides, I couldn’t do that.”
Recovery typically takes six to eight months, Fritz said, so he hoped to make it back onto the ice by the end of the 2019-20 season. In February, he started skating, but now he thinks that might have been too soon.
But at the same time, Emmett went to the pediatrician.
“He wasn’t himself, acting a little different,” Fritz said. “She sent us right to the hospital. Luckily, Yale is such good hospital for pediatrics.
“He was in the hospital for close to three weeks, kind of figuring everything out.”
Fritz said Emmett was diagnosed with epilepsy, and an MRI showed that his brain was underdeveloped, a one-in-a-million genetic mutation so rare, Fritz said, it doesn’t have a name.
“As first-time parents, we were more in shock for the first bit,” Fritz said.
“They’re telling us all this stuff, he’s hooked up to a million different things: You’re so scared. It’s such a helpless feeling. Nothing you can do for him.”
Yale geneticist Michele Spencer-Manzon has been good with Emmett and them, Fritz said, and they’ve been in touch with other parents going through the same thing. There have been lots of visits to doctors and lots of physical therapy, and Emmett is doing well.
“The spectrum for him is so broad, they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Fritz said. “We’re taking everything day to day.
“It’s almost lucky I wasn’t playing last year. It would have been tough to go through that and play hockey. I was able to be there with him in the hospital, be with him even after that. Even with COVID we got to make sure he got the best care he needed.”
The AHL suspended the season on March 12, 2020, and it never resumed. In summertime, it wasn’t clear when the AHL might return.
But physical therapy helped the hip feel better, and he got back on the ice again. Brandy and he bought a home in Milford, comfortable with the area and well set up with Emmett’s doctors. He worked his way back into shape and was good to go when the season started Feb. 5.
Fritz’s 132 career points place him 10th on Bridgeport’s all-time scoring list, seven points out of sixth alone. His 88 assists in 185 games rank seventh, but only four more and he jumps to fourth.
The only others to play in six Bridgeport seasons are current Chicago Blackhawks coach Jeremy Colliton, former captain Kyle Burroughs and teammate Parker Wotherspoon. Fritz and Wotherspoon are the only two to play in six seasons in a row, and Wotherspoon’s first two were brief springtime stints after his junior-hockey season.
And he’s right back to being one of Bridgeport’s top forwards.
“In this short little window of eight games, after having almost a year off, he’s competing, playing a simple game,” Thompson said after Wednesday’s 3-0 loss to Providence.
“His penalty kill, his faceoffs are good. He’s a leader on the hockey team.”