Another Yellowknife resident is using sports as a way to a better future but he still thinks professional hockey is his thing.
Who am I to tell Zach Zorn he's wrong?
Zorn is off to Concordia University in Montreal to play with the men's hockey team there and I'm happy he is. We should always be happy when someone is combining athletic prowess with education (my new favourite one-two punch in life, by the way … no longer rye and Coke) and he's determined.
He's fresh off three seasons with the Merritt Centennials of the B.C. Hockey League, one of the toughest Tier II junior hockey leagues out there, and even more impressive was that he did it as a walk-on. It's tough enough to get a walk-on spot anywhere, especially when you're battling against protected roster players and veterans who already have guaranteed spots for the most part.
For most in Tier II junior hockey, school is the goal with most players looking to score a full ride to an American college of some sort. Zorn was hoping for the same thing but it didn't pan out because the NCAA Clearinghouse is a pain in the butt. Believe me – I went through it in my younger football days with the University of Michigan so I know what he went through.
Yes, I was invited to a combine in Ann Arbor in 1996, where I was on the shortlist for an international roster spot. Problem was you needed to have an absolutely clean and complete transcript because the clearinghouse determines eligibility. Thanks to missing a couple of pages, I was told it wasn't meant to be.
There's no shame in going to a Canadian university for sports, especially for hockey, because almost everyone who's playing university hockey will have played junior hockey in Canada. Why? Because they're ineligible for post-secondary sports in the U.S. The NCAA considers junior hockey players “professional” because they receive a stipend while they're playing.
Believe it or not, that's being paid to play.
But it's what Zorn is hoping for when he completes his university days: being paid to play hockey. If things go his way, he could make a good go out of it. Several NHL stars first went to school before making it big – Paul Kariya, Jonathan Toews, Connor Hellebuyck – and who's to say Zorn can't do the same thing?
I sincerely hope he does well enough to get a look from professional teams either here in North American or even in Europe. Naturally, you want to to stay home but there's greener grass everywhere and the salaries in Europe are nothing to sneeze at. The best part? Most countries don't tax foreign nationals. Imagine if Zorn nails down a contract in the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia worth a few million?
I'm not saying that's going to happen but it's nice to dream, isn't it? No pressure, eh?
But beyond all of that, the worst thing that could happen when Zorn is done in four years time is he'll have a degree of some sort in his back pocket, something a lot of student athletes will tell you is the reason they went and played sports in the first place. That's all we talked about in high school – getting the free ride in Division 1 and playing in the U.S.
You take a look at a lot of young people and where they come from. Take away all the ones who used mom and dad's chequebook to pay their way through school and you have people who simply want a diploma at the end of it all, something that shows they actually accomplished something. If they get drafted and sign a big deal and then a giant endorsement deal, that's icing on the cake.
Plenty of them are the first in their family to complete university or college (like I was) and that's their ticket. They aren't worried about that other crap. That piece of paper in their hand means they've got a leg up on so many others.
As anyone in the professional sports business will (hopefully and honestly) tell you, your child will not be the next big superstar and don't tell me they will be. They won't even get a sniff of the big time and they won't even get drafted. If that were the case, I would have gone in the first round of the National Football League draft in 2000, signed a front-end loaded rookie contract and been wearing, using and choking back all sorts of crap from (insert major multinational corporation here).
As it is, I'm here writing about those who do it because that's more honest. You want a gander at how out of touch some parents are with their own ego? Watch the documentary Trophy Kids. It should be force-fed to every parent who even has a thought that their child will be signing with an agent by the age of six.
As for Zorn, he's doing it the right way: go to school, get your diploma and take your chances after that. If it doesn't work, at least he has something to fall back on besides false hope.