Regina’s Grady Greenslade scored three goals in just 10 seconds on March 12.Supplied
The thousand-to-one shot went in. Pigs flew. The moon turned a shade of blue. In a U13 hockey game last month, Regina’s Grady Greenslade scored three goals in just 10 seconds of game time.
“In 35 years of watching hockey, I’ve never seen anything so exciting,” said Regina Falcons head coach, Scott Karpinka. “Not in minor hockey, not in watching the pros.”
His Falcons weren’t up against a group of lightweights, Mr. Karpinka adds; they were playing neighbouring Balgonie; and the rival Prairie Storm sat much higher in the standings than the Falcons.
It would surely be one for the record books – if these things were kept for U13 hockey. Grady more than halved the NHL record set by Billy Mosienko in 1952. The pint-sized Winnipegger scored three goals in 21 seconds as captain of the Chicago Blackhawks, still the fastest hattie in league history.
Grady credits his pregame porridge – taken with a spoonful of craisins, some sugar and a little milk: “I felt it gave me all the energy I needed to get up and down the ice.”
After a period, the Falcons were locked at one with the Prairie Storm. “Sometimes, the second period is my best friend,” says the Grade 7 student at École St-Pius X, in Regina’s south end. Grady didn’t have a single scoring chance in the first.
His first goal of the day came with 11:30 remaining in the second. Grady grabbed a rebound at the hash marks and ripped the puck at an opening he’d spotted. “The goalie was screened,” he insists. Either way, the Falcons were now up by one.
When the ref dropped the puck at centre, Grady’s right winger grabbed it, and the two went racing down the ice on a 2-on-2.
Grady was fed a beautiful pass, and snapped the disc past the goalie for his second of the day; 11:24 now remained.
Mr. Karpinka considered switching up the lines. But it was starting to feel like there was a little magic floating in the fog above the ice.
“Nope. I’m going to keep him out there,” Mr. Karpinka remembers thinking. He and his assistant gave each other a nod: “We were on the same page: Let’s keep ‘em out there.”
This time, when the puck dropped, Grady grabbed it, and went charging down the left wing. He found himself in line with the goalie and thought: “I better pass. I don’t want to seem like a puck hog.”
But Grady’s pass banked off the goalie. And right back into the net.
With 11:20 remaining, the Falcons were up by three.
The Prairie Storm collapsed after that. The game ended 9 to 1. It was the Falcons’ biggest blowout of the year.
Grady, who later netted a fourth goal, says he felt terrible for the goalie, remembering his time in net in novice, and what it felt like to have a puck fly past.
The team headed to Boston Pizza to celebrate its big win, and Grady’s hat trick. Even at the restaurant, “the team kept hyping me up,” Grady recalls.
But he insists that wasn’t the highlight of the season for him – not even close. It was the time the team spent together. He remembers one night, in particular, playing mini sticks in the hallway of a Brandon hotel, long past bedtime.
“I just loved helping my players improve. I loved pumping them up in the dressing room. I loved helping anyone who needed it.”
Grady’s teachers and coaches insist he’s a workhorse, not a thoroughbred: “Grady is never satisfied,” says Sheila Luff, who teaches his split, Grade 7/8 class at St. Pius. “He’s always asking how he can get better, especially at math. He’s trying to get 100 per cent all of the time.”
“I’ve never had a young player be such a leader,” says Mr. Karpinka, choking up, describing how Grady once led the team through edgework when the coaches were late to practice one day.
“It was like having a third coach out there. It’s like he was born to be captain of a hockey team.”