Family marvels at son’s trek from Florida to Stanley Cup
His first skates were a plastic pair from Fisher-Price — the kind with adjustable wheels — and his first hockey team played at a roller rink on Goldenrod Road.
He moved to the ice when he was 7, at the newly opened rink at the RDV Sportsplex in Maitland. By then, hockey was Ryan Carpenter’s love.
He shot pucks into a tippedover recycling bin while waiting for the bus to elementary school; on summer nights, when the rains ended, he played street hockey with other kids from his east Orange County neighborhood. A little book he wrote in first grade declared his dream to play in the NHL.
Now, across the country in another city where the game is never
played on a frozen pond, Carpenter, 27, is living that dream on hockey’s biggest stage.
“It’s just unbelievable, really,” said his mother, Nancy Carpenter.
Ryan Carpenter — graduate of Timber Creek High School and one of just three NHL players who grew up in Florida — is a center on the Vegas Golden Knights, playing in the Stanley Cup finals against the Washington Capitals. His parents, who now live in Oviedo, are watching, with pride and a good dose of disbelief.
Making it to the NHL is long-shot tough, but landing on the Golden Knights, the first-year team having a storybook season, and vying for hockey’s greatest prize, well, that’s something else.
“That’s such a far-off dream you just don’t want to even think about it,” Nancy Carpenter said.
It doesn’t seem so long ago that she and her husband, Mike, were driving Ryan to RDV, then hauling his heavy hockey bag home to put the sweaty, smelly gear on the driveway or back porch to dry in the hot sun.
They don’t feel so far away from the days when he played on a travel team and they had long drives to Fort Myers, West Palm Beach and other Florida towns with ice rinks and competitive youth hockey teams. They still get emotional remembering the tough decision to let him spend parts of 11th and 12th grades in Michigan, playing for elite teams of a caliber not found in the Sunshine State.
They know it all seemed kind of nuts to those outside the Florida hockey world. Now, it’s a little surreal that the hockey world’s spotlight is on their son’s team.
For months, they’ve watched his NHL games, on TV or in person when their schedules allowed, and that was exciting. Then they found themselves, amazingly, lining up airline flights for the finals, making plans to be out in the Nevada desert and then in the nation’s capital.
The Capitals won 3-1 Saturday night to take a 2-1 lead in the series, which continues Monday night.
When they’re with Ryan, he’s still just their kid — not flashy, not anyone who seems to crave the limelight. He’s married with an infant son, and for the grandparents, seeing baby Beau, who’ll be 1 next month, is the delightful bonus to seeing their firstborn on NHL ice.
Mike Carpenter, a veteran Orange teacher and coach who now works at East River High School, tried to explain where they are this way: “It kind of just kept evolving.”
And it evolved into quite a lot of success for the oldest of their three children, with Ryan moving from a topranked junior team, to a Division I hockey program at Bowling Green University, to a contract with an NHL franchise.
But graduating from college was always a must-do, and Ryan earned his accounting degree even as NHL teams talked of signing him.
“Pro hockey could have been done in six months,” Mike Carpenter said.
And even when it wasn’t, it never seemed a sure thing, not even several months ago.
Ryan Carpenter broke into the NHL last season, playing 11 games with the San Jose Sharks, after several seasons in the minors. He was with San Jose at the start of this season, too, but then in December the team told him he was being sent back to the minors, unless another NHL team picked him up.
Mike Carpenter talked to him that night, as he did after every game, wondering if his son’s NHL run was at an end but trying to be encouraging. “Maybe you bounce back up again,” he told him.
The next day, Ryan called to say he’d been picked up by Vegas, a team that was winning, a lot, despite being a brand-new expansion squad filled with players other teams hadn’t wanted.
And on that team, he’s found a role, his father said, regular playing time, and a place where the old lessons — work hard, stay humble, listen to coaches, do “all the nitty-gritty stuff” — seem to have paid off.
Athletic talent runs in the Carpenter family. Mike Carpenter played baseball at the University of Central Florida, where Nancy Carpenter, a senior risk analyst at BB&T Bank, also earned her degree. Their daughter, Kelsey, 24, played four years of softball for Florida Gulf Coast University. Their younger son, Chris, 21, plays lacrosse at North Greenville University in South Carolina.
Mike Carpenter, who grew up in New York, never played hockey but always loved it. He took Ryan, then in preschool, to the roller rink after spotting a blurb in the newspaper about its kids hockey program.
At RDV, Ryan became a “rink rat,” the kid who always wanted to be on the ice, who always looked for extra practice time to hone his skills, He was soon asked to play on travel teams.
Then the Carpenters got to know the rinks across the state, and the expense of team fees, hotel stays and pricey equipment.
“You would just pray, don’t break it,” Nancy Carpenter said of her son’s hockey sticks. “There goes $150.”
These days, she admits with a laugh, she worries more that he’ll break his teeth. “Ryan’s blessed with perfect teeth,” she said.
With three kids playing sports, the couple sometimes felt stretched thin. But travel to hockey tournaments, some as far away as Toronto, also provided good family time.
“They all loved it. When we could go as a family, that was a highlight,” she said.
When Ryan was in high school, the talk at the rinks was that he, like other top players, should go north to get the competition he needed to hone his skills.
When he tried out and made a select team in Michigan, his parents reluctantly agreed.
“It was probably, as a parent, the toughest thing we’ve had to do,” Mike said.
“I basically cried for at least a whole year,” Nancy said.
Ryan spent parts of two school years living with host families in the Detroit area, taking classes at school there or online, until he could return to Timber Creek when hockey season ended. He graduated in 2009.
Nine years later, his parents and siblings, with their new Golden Knights shirts, are traveling together to watch him play.
“It’s amazing to see him out there on that stage,” Mike Carpenter said. “We don’t know if, or when, this will happen again. We’re going to enjoy the whole ride for now.”