Florida’s finest: Gostisbehere, Chychrun among state’s best hockey produce

SUNRISE, Fla. — It’s a shame that FLA Live Arena isn’t closer to South Beach. Every time that Jakob Chychrun returns home, the media workroom takes on the feel of a cocktail party, with family, friends and acquaintances gathering in multiple huddles to reminisce, banter and soak in the thrill of watching one of their own competing on the biggest hockey stage in the world.

“It’s funny because I remember being in this room as a kid when my dad would bring me to games,” Chychrun said during an interview on Monday just outside the media room. “We’d go right down the elevators and this is where you would stand and say ‘hi’ to somebody if they left you passes — or if my dad ever knew anybody on the opposing team, we would always come down here and say ‘hi.’”

“I remember being this tall (holding his hand three feet above the ground), standing right next to my dad’s leg, and staring at all the players. It never gets old. I still love coming to this rink.”

Chychrun has returned home multiple times as a Coyotes player, but this particular trip is unique for the Boca Raton product. Riding right next to him is Pembroke Pines product Shayne Gostisbehere, who is five years older and basically the dean of the NHL’s Florida products. Gostisbehere and Chychrun are first and second in points in NHL history among Florida-born players, making this homecoming (the Coyotes play the Panthers on Monday and the Lightning on Thursday) a must-see for the state’s hockey community.

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“I don’t really look at myself as a pioneer,” Gostisbehere said. “Chych will tell you the same thing. The Florida Panthers have a lot to do with the growth of hockey in the state, but when kids see guys like Chych and myself going to the NHL and not just playing a couple games, but sticking around and almost being veterans now, it’s pretty cool for them. I hope kids see that any dream is possible no matter where you are from, if you put in the work and have some ability.”

Gostisbehere was born four months after Blockbuster Video founder Wayne Huizenga was awarded an NHL franchise for Miami in December 1992, and six months before the Panthers played their first game at Miami Arena. There were only four nearby ice sheets when he was growing up, but his hockey die was still cast. His grandfather, Denis Brodeur, was a French-Canadian transplant who had played hockey on outdoor rinks and ponds growing up before his parents moved to Florida in 1955 on doctors’ advice to help with his mother’s asthma.

“I was mad at mom and dad for quite a few years,” Brodeur said, chuckling. “We lived in Miami, and there were no rinks until I was 17 years old when they opened up a rink in Fort Lauderdale.” 

By the time Shayne was conscious and focused enough to comprehend what was happening around him, his sister, Felicia, had already embarked upon a promising figure skating career with Olympic potential before hip injuries derailed that dream.

“After a while, Shayne just got tired of just sitting there watching her skate and he noticed a lot of guys on the other rink playing hockey, so he told his mother, ‘I want to play hockey,’” said Brodeur, who helped coach Gostisbehere for a couple of years. “He wasn’t old enough to be on the mites so we formed a team of mighty mites and played in-house games. Sometimes, we went up to Fort Myers, or we went up to Tampa, but that was the extent of our travel.”

Gostisbehere could have chosen a host of other sports that were more popular in Florida such as baseball or football, but despite his diminutive stature as a kid — Brodeur called him “the smallest kid I’ve ever seen in my life” — he excelled immediately at hockey.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends at school who understood what I was doing, missing school on Thursday and Friday to go play in tournaments, and not a lot of teachers understood, but it was cool to be different,” he said. “Our family was unique in that my sister was a figure skater, I was a hockey player and we were always at the rink, but also 10 minutes from the beach.”

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Gostisbehere laughs at the coincidence that the first team he played for was the Coral Springs Coyotes (pictured above). 

“We even had the Kachina jerseys,” he said. “Maybe it was fate.”

Just as has been the case in Arizona, Gostisbehere’s youth career benefited from the presence of multiple retired NHL players who had set up residence in Florida and entered the youth coaching ranks. Gostisbehere found himself on the ice with Ray Shepherd, Rob Tallas and Valeri Zelepukin.

And just as happens in other non-traditional markets, Gostisbehere’s teams had to travel far and wide to find competition.

“Our two years of Pee Wee, we had kids that were driving from Orlando, the Tampa area, and the Fort Myers area because it was the best team in the state for that age group so some of them would come three hours,” said Joe Casacci, an assistant coach for those Junior Panthers teams. “We would fly to Chicago once or twice a year to play the Chicago Mission and Young Americans. We’d go to Madison to play the Capitals. We would go to Detroit and play Compuware and Little Caesars and Victory Honda and Bell Tire, or we’d go to St. Louis to play the Junior Blues.

“We were competitive and we’d win our share of games, but you could see from an early age that Shayne’s skating ability was superior, his hand-eye coordination was superior, and he was definitely a kid that you knew was going to end up at a very high level if not the NHL. When we were out in Colorado at the Pikes Peak tournament in 2002, we were in triple overtime and ended up going to a shootout. These midget (age group) players were waiting to go on the ice after our game and after we won the game in the shootout and we were walking out, these kids are asking, ‘Hey, coach, who’s that number 10? He’s gonna go pro.’ They were referring to Shayne and it’s something that I always remembered.”

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Like Gostisbehere, Chychrun’s hockey die was cast because his father, Jeff, played in the NHL and had season tickets to the Panthers. Jeff Chychrun followed his wife, Nancy, to Boca Raton (they were married the year before he retired) where her family business, Tire Guides, was located. Jakob was on skates at an early age, and hockey was basically all that he thought about.

“It started with the Skates with Stanley,” Jeff Chychrun said of the Florida-famous, on-ice sessions with the Panthers’ mascot, Stanley C. Panther. “Three quarters of the ice was figure skaters and then on one end they had a little group of kids with a little bit of hockey gear on or not and the Panthers mascot would play probably every second time.

“Jakob spent so much time shooting in the garage and I don’t think there was ever a time he really kicked and screamed and didn’t want to go to the rink. When he was in diapers, he’d grab a wooden spoon and whack a ball. At Tire Guides, we used to ship these posters out in these cylinder tubes with lids. He’d be in the warehouse, he could barely walk, but he’s got this tube, and he’s swatting at the lid like a stick and puck.”

As Brodeur did for Gostisbehere, Jeff Chychrun spent a lot of time coaching Jakob, both because he wanted to be on the ice with him, and because he wanted to make sure he was learning the right things, mainly practicing his skating and skills and having fun.

“Jeff sat in the background, but he’s a guy that had so much knowledge that you could just pick his brain anytime, like, ‘What are you seeing? What do you think’s going on out there?’” said Jakob’s coach for the Junior Everblades, Eric Petersen. “You could see the influence he had on Jakob.

“He was just so serious about hockey from the second he walked into the locker room, and he was attentive, but I think he liked having his dad around because he was younger than the other kids, always playing up in age. He was playing with kids two and three years older than him, with hair on their nuts. They were becoming young men and they wanted to talk about other stuff, but this kid was all about hockey. There was no going swimming in the pool, no horsing around.”

Because he played with older kids, Chychrun often found himself playing in four, even six games in a weekend.

“I bounced around like crazy,” he said. “I played with the 96s a couple games, the 98s (his birth year) a couple and then mainly played with the 97s,” he said. “I would be exhausted and I would crash the entire way home, but it’s a great memory.”

Even then, almost everybody in the Florida hockey community could see that Chychrun was on a fast track. And when the team traveled, as it had to do to find good competition, other hockey communities saw him.

“It was such a small atmosphere back then in Florida so you just knew who he was,” Petersen said. “He was bigger than everyone else, stronger than everyone else, and the kid skated like a professional at like 9 years old. He would curl his hips and open up and you don’t even see that on 13- and 14-year-olds.

“His body was built at a young age. I mean, this kid was built like a tank. He just towered over every kid, especially at his age group. It really wasn’t fair. When he got the puck there was nothing but go and he saw the ice so well and did things you just didn’t see kids that age do. He would soft dump the puck to himself in the corner. It was nuts, just stuff that you don’t teach. You just have to learn by watching the game itself.”

Eventually, Gostisbehere and Chychrun both outgrew their environments and had to leave Florida. It’s a common occurrence for teenaged hockey players in non-traditional markets.

Gostisbehere went to South Kent School (Connecticut) and then Union College (New York). Chychrun commuted with his dad to play for the Little Caesars, the Toronto Junior Canadiens and then Sarnia of the OHL.

Gostisbehere won a gold medal with Team USA at the IIHF World Junior Championships in 2013, and an NCAA title at Union. Chychrun was the second of two Coyotes first-round picks (No. 16) at the 2016 NHL Draft. For Chychrun, the NHL was always the goal and he never doubted that he would get there. For Gostisbehere, it was little more than a dream; never a genuine possibility until the Flyers drafted him 78th overall in 2012.

“It was more of a pipe dream to play in the NHL for the Panthers just because I went to all of those games when I was little, but I really just wanted to play college hockey; that was my biggest aspiration,” he said. “After my first year of boarding school I realized that dream could come true, and then when I got drafted in the third round, which was higher than I thought I would go, that’s when I realized I had a shot.

“I even thought the Flyers would make me play juniors for a while because I was such a small guy, only 155 pounds and 18 years old, but they wanted me right away. It was all pretty shocking, to be honest.”

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Gostisbehere and Chychrun still visit their old haunts when they are in town, and Jeff Chychrun is still active in the youth hockey community so Jakob gets to experience firsthand what the Panthers, Gostisbhere, he and a handful of other Florida players such as Vancouver’s Quinn Hughes (Orlando) have sparked.

“I have always talked about how important it is to grow the game in non-traditional markets,” Chychrun said. “It’s growing here, in Arizona, in California, Texas. Whenever I come home, it’s fun to go to the rinks. It’s just so cool to see all the local kids like myself growing up and playing hockey. Hockey definitely has a home in Florida.”

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