NAHL drafts Monongahela native Pendo
Caden Pendo has traveled all over the Northeast and Midwest to follow his dream of playing in the National Hockey League.
His next trip, though, will really pad his frequent flyer miles.
Pendo, a Monongahela native, was selected in the third round with the 82nd overall pick of the North American Hockey League draft by the Fairbanks Ice Dogs.
“I was actually on a plane when I got the text from the GM saying they wanted to draft me,” Pendo said. “I think it will be fun.”
Pendo could have held out and weighed his options, but he didn’t waste any time. Almost immediately after the draft, the 18-year-old defenseman signed and began making his arrangements for travel to Alaska.
“It’s going to take time getting used to the long days and the long, long nights,”
Hockey
Pendo said. “But I heard it’s a really nice area.”
Pendo has already taken a circuitous route to get to Alaska.
He began playing hockey with the Mon Valley Thunder and transitioned to the Steel City Renegades program when he was 8 years old. He played there for about four years until he joined the Amateur Penguins until the 2020-21 season.
Like several elite players who preceded him, he opted against playing in the PIHL and stuck solely with his travel team.
Last season, he spent half the campaign with the Windy City Storm of the High Performance Hockey League before moving midway through the year to the Boston Advantage of the United States Premiere Hockey League where he had a goal and three assists in 11 games.
“It was a big, big adjustment because I was playing Triple-A in Chicago and, once I went to Boston, I was playing with older guys and juniors,” Pendo said. “I went from living with a billet family to [almost] living on my own. We would play in the middle of the week and I would have to go to school around those days, but it was really fun.”
Pendo has been taking his classes online for several years — even pre-COVID-19 — so he was well prepared to know how to budget his time between class time and ice time.
“We would get up in the morning and go and skate until 9:30 a.m. and then we would go home and do class and then we would skate at the end of the day,” Pendo said. “We would have practice twice a day with a workout during the season.”
Though Pendo will be making the sojourn to Fairbanks in August, he only sees that as a continuation of his hockey journey. He has NHL dreams like every other player at this level, but he’s also realistic in that he needs to take things one step at a time.
“The NHL is the goal, but I really want to go pro and maybe play college,” Pendo said. “I definitely want to play anywhere pro and, hopefully, make the NHL.”