Stu Cowan: Backyard rinks helped Canadiens' Matheson develop his skating ability

“My brother and his friends were three years older than me. You had to figure it out otherwise you weren’t going to be able to play.”

Canadiens defenceman Mike Matheson credits his older brother, Kenny, for being able to skate the way he does.

“Growing up, I was always on the ice,” Matheson said after the Canadiens’ morning skate Thursday at the Bell Centre. “I was skating a lot and I feel like I was always playing catch-up with my brother and his friends.”

Matheson’s father, Rod, would build a backyard rink every winter at their Pointe-Claire home on Montreal’s West Island.

“My brother and his friends were three years older than me,” Matheson said. “You had to figure it out otherwise you weren’t going to be able to play.”

Matheson learned to skate when he was 2, but Hockey West Island wouldn’t accept players until age 5. So he started playing ringette at age 3 with his sister Kelly, who is five years older.

But Matheson says it’s the backyard rink that laid the foundation for the elite-level skater he would become in the NHL.

I asked Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis recently what impresses him most about Matheson’s skating ability.

“To me it’s his glide,” St. Louis said. “It’s like there’s no friction on the ice. He’s obviously got great strength, a great push, but his glide is just so elite. One-two-push and then he just kind of floats on top of the ice. It’s impressive”

It certainly is.

“We used to have a few families in the neighbourhood that made (backyard) rinks,” Matheson recalled. “We’d have tournaments where we’d play on one rink until it got all snowy and then one of our neighbours had a pickup truck and we’d all load into the pickup truck, go to the next rink and start playing there until that one got all snowy and then we’d go on to the next house. It was a lot of fun.”

While hockey has now become a 12-month-a-year-sport for many kids, Matheson’s father would make him put his skates away no later than May 31 every year. Matheson played some soccer, but preferred football and was named the offensive MVP as a running back with the mosquito Triple-A Lakeshore Cougars in 2005.

“Nowadays, everything is so organized,” Matheson said about youth hockey. “You see kids skating all summer. I didn’t do that at all. But I loved hockey and I was on the outdoor rinks non-stop.”

Matheson took some power-skating lessons during hockey season as he got older, but he still doesn’t think it’s good for kids to skate 12 months a year.

“Definitely not,” he said. “I think there’s too much of that now. You get so zoned in on one sport and there’s definitely the risk of losing interest, for starters. There’s that great feeling when training camp starts (as a kid) and you haven’t been on the ice and there’s all that excitement.

“You can tell when guys are really good at one sport and then there are guys who are athletes,” Matheson added. “I think you’re way better off being a good athlete.”

Matheson’s favourite player to watch skate as a kid was Sidney Crosby and they were teammates in Pittsburgh for two seasons before the Canadiens acquired Matheson in a trade last summer that sent defenceman Jeff Petry to the Penguins.

“I think the way he controls his edges is the best in the world,” Matheson said about Crosby. “It’s obviously a little bit different as a defenceman. Watching Tanger (Penguins defenceman Kris Letang) and Nick Lidstrom and those type of guys, they use their skating for defensive purposes more. It was just watching how well Sid was able to control his edges and protect the puck and use that to his advantage even though he wasn’t the tallest guy. You couldn’t get the puck off him.”

Matheson became a father in June 2021 when his wife, Emily Pfalzer, gave birth to son Hudson. The couple met at Boston College when Matheson was playing for the men’s hockey team and Pfalzer was on the women’s team. Pfalzer played defence on the American team that beat Canada for the gold medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.

I asked Matheson what advice he has for hockey parents who would love to see their kids skate like him.

“I think the motivation for anything has to come from the kid first,” he said. “As a parent, you definitely want the best for your kids and you want them to succeed and you want to put them in the best position possible to do that. So I see that from a parent’s perspective: ‘I’m going to get him into every camp.’ I think sometimes that can be less beneficial if the kid just doesn’t happen to be as interested in it. But if he or she is and wants to get better, then it’s just work at it.

“Whatever it is … whether it’s skating, whether it’s reading, it doesn’t matter. If there’s motivation, just work at it.”

scowan@postmedia.com

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