The Rink Rat

Lee Stempniak '05 made it to the NHL the old-fashioned way: by working harder than anyone else.

LEE STEMPNIAKWAS NO ONE'S ALL American and certainly no ones future NHL player—when he arrived at Dartmouth as a freshman in the fall of 2001. A good-not-spectacular player for his junior hockey team, the Buffalo Lightning, he had been recruited by Dartmouth and, well, Dartmouth. Cornell had been interested early on but backed off. Yale was on again, off-again until it settled on the latter. No one in NCAA hockey circles was exactly accusing the Big Green of stealing away a blue-chipper.

Only one thing distinguished

Stempniak in the mind of Tracy Perrin, the Zamboni driver at Thompson Arena: Stempniak was the kid he couldn't get off the ice when it came time to clean it.

"You done yet, Lee?" Perrin would typically ask.

"Five more minutes?" Stempniak would beg in return. And Perrin would go fetch himself a cup of coffee.

It continued this way as fall turned into winter, as Stempniak cracked the Big Green's line-up and began collecting points in bunches. Finally, Perrin got so curious—who was this rink rat?—he introduced himself to Stempniak's mother, Carla. The two became friends, and one day they both say Perrin made this prediction to Carla: "No one is going to be able to outwork him. He's going to make it to the NHL some day."

AS PROPHESIES GO, IT WAS PRETTY outrageous. Lee Stempniak? In the NHL? Come on. Even under the suspiciously inflated measuring system used for filling out college rosters, Stempniak was listed as 6-feet, 195 pounds, hardly NHL dimensions. Growing up in hockey-saturated West Seneca, New York, he was like a lot of kids—he started skating when he was 4 or 5, played whenever he could and spent spare time banging pucks into a rug his father hung on a wall in the basement.

Hockey wasn't exactly in the family genes. Carla worked the graveyard shift at the post office and says no one in her family really played. Stempniaks father, Larry, a printing press operator, played in an industrial league but admits, "I stunk."

The only things that made Stempniak different from the other kids on his various youth hockey teams were his relentless desire to improve himself and his preternatural maturity.

"Even in preschool I remember a teacher asked me, 'He's so focused. How do you do it?'" Carla says. "He was just always self-disciplined."

It was an approach Stempniak took with him to St. Francis High in Buffalo, where he graduated as the valedictorian with a trunk full of scholar-athlete awards. Still, the only Ivy League school that really seemed to want him was Dartmouth, which was convenient, because Stempniak had already fallen in love with the school.

"I still remember coming up for a visit," Stempniak says. "Driving over the Connecticut River and up onto the Green, I just knew. I think anyone who has gone to Dartmouth can remember that feeling. I just knew it was the perfect place for me."

IT MIGHT BE EASY FOR DARTMOUTH coach Bob Gaudet 'Bl to take credit for what happened next—Stempniak's transformation from unheralded recruit to NHL-ready package. Except Gaudet quickly admits: It was all Lee. "You have kids who are high maintenance and kids who are low maintenance. And then there was Lee. He was no maintenance," Gaudet says. "You never had to check under the hood to make sure things were okay. He was incredibly humble, and he just always seemed to do things the right way."

For a while, it was the kind of thing only his teammates and coaches—and, of course, the Zamboni driver—really noticed. The first year Stempniak was eligible for the NHL draft, in 2002, he was passed over. But by the end of his sophomore year he was getting harder to ignore. He finished that season with 49 points, second best in the ECAC. And the St. Louis Blues drafted him in the fifth round. By junior year the secret was re- ally out. Stempniak was named first- team All-America.

Yet his ferocious work ethic grew only stronger. "He had the best hands on the team, but you'd see him after practice doing simple stick-handling drills," Gaudet says. "He was a great shot, but you'd still find him firing countless pucks at the goal, 18 inches above the ice on the goalies stick side, because he knew that's where he'd be sure to score. It's the oldest story: Stempnia came in here and he definitely had some God-given ability, but he worked so incredibly hard to make the most of what he had. He literally was the first guy on the ice and the last guy to leave it every single day."

Stempniak also kept up with his studies: He had a 3.6 GPA as an eco nomics major nad was teasingly known around Chi Heorot as "The Horn," an honor bequeathed to the most studious brother. He was also notorious among his teammates for his weight training program. " During Christmas break, when the coaches tell you to get four lifts in, the rest of us would be joking about how we did only one. He'd do five," says Dan Yacey'05

STILL, THE CHASM BETWEEN COLLEGE All-American and NHL player has swallowed up more than a few big men on campus.Stempniakwent into his first training camp in 2005 figuring he'd have two or three years in the minors before he got his NHL shot. But the organization had other ideas: Stempniak so impressed coaches with his conditioning, strength and drive, he was on the Blues' roster opening night of his rookie season.

He was sent down to the minors a few times but always bounced back up. And once the Blues committed themselves to a youth movement midway through the season—"I was in the right place at the right time," Stempniak says—he was up in the NHL to stay. He finished his rookie season with 14 goals, impressing veterans with a poise beyond his years, a trait he attributes to his days in Hanover.

"When you're at Dartmouth,you're in the presence of so many incredible people," Stempniak says. "They're reading books in Russian. They're writing these amazing papers. They're artists, musicians, actors. You really learn to respect everyone's talent. And when you get accustomed to being around such remarkable people all the time, being in the NHL doesn't feel quite as overwhelming."

Now 24 and in his second season, Stempniak is part of the Blues' power play. He takes game-deciding penalty shots. And the Blues brass say he's pro- gressed beyond their expectations. "You guys up at Dartmouth did a good job with him," general manager Larry Pleau says. "He's a solid NHL player and he's going to be able to contribute for a long time."

"Then I realized," Perrin laughs. "He was in the weight room."

Power Play The right wing's successearned him a spot in the NHL'sYoung Stars game at the league's all-starcelebration in late January.

"He literally was the first guy on the ice and the last guy to leave it every single day." -BOB GAUDET -81

Brad Parks is a staff writer for the Newark Star-Ledger.