Koala hoping to become a Blue Bear
The newest member of the Port Colborne boys high school hockey team sounds more like a koala than a Blue Bear.
South Niagara? New South Wales is more like it when you hear Jarrod Callaghan say a few words.
Before coming to Canada at the beginning of October, the son of Gary and Becky Callaghan had spent all of his 14 years in Sydney, Australia.
For the past five years, ever since attending a birthday party held at a skating rink, he has played as much hockey as he could on a vast continent where ice hockey is, at best, a niche sport and where rinks are few and far between.
While Sydney and its sprawling suburbs make up Australia’s largest metropolitan area, with a population of upwards of 5.7 million, Callaghan could count the number of rinks in his hometown on one hand.
“Something like five,” he estimated.
Callaghan played at most 20 games annually in Sydney. With the Blue Bears and the Port Colborne Sailors, his bantam team, Callaghan could easily double that in his first year in Canada.
A love affair for Canada’s national winter sport started at that “skating birthday party” five years ago.
“I tried it out, and I really liked it.”
He decided to take skating lessons and six months later began taking part in a hockey development program every Saturday.
Callaghan is confident he can play bantam rep and high school hockey 15 time zones away from Oz.
“I feel I can definitely keep up,” said the 5-foot-9 right-shooting forward, who rates shooting as the strength of the game.
“It’s pretty hard and most of the time it’s accurate, it’s definitely my best skill as a player.”
On his teams in Australia, the skill level was “all over the place.” Callaghan played with some of double A calibre while others barely knew how to skate and were staying close to the boards.
“My passing is pretty average,” he said. “In Australia, you don’t pass very much.”
In Sydney Callaghan was a big fish in a small pond. In Port Colborne, on the north shore of Lake Erie, he will be more like a minnow in that lake starting out.
Callaghan appreciates the learning curve will be steep now that he’s in a country where hockey doesn’t take a back seat to any sport.
“No matter what, I will be getting better here than I would in
Australia,” he said. “I don’t care if I’m not as good here, because I will be getting better and developing as a player a lot quicker.
“I just want to see how far I can develop as a player.”
His family chose to emigrate to Niagara because his mother, the former Becky Sherk, was born in Welland.
“It really got real when dad got made redundant at his job.”
Gary Callaghan got the ball rolling in June when he sent videos of his son playing hockey to Blue Bears head coach Shawn Coers as well as to Port Colborne minor hockey.
Coers liked what he saw, and what he’s seeing.
“He’s a player, good hands, aggressive. He’s going to be a player for a Grade 9, he looks good.
“He’s got power forward written all over him.”
The high school coach conceded the videos, while showcasing a promising prospect, were poor substitutes for seeing the player first hand.
“That was the difficulty, it’s hard to judge the quality of the competition,” Coers said. “He looked good, but until you see him against the type of competition he’s going to see in high school hockey it’s hard to tell.”
“Only time will tell really. You can see the strength and you can see he’s got a good shot, he’s practised that a lot.”
Hockey in Australia, where the national sport is cricket, is not entirely foreign to Coers. Scott Corbett, a friend from Dunnville, emigrated about 10 years ago after marrying a woman from Australia.
“He plays in their pro league,” Coers said. “The pro league doesn’t get paid, but the calibre of hockey, it’s the same thing”