Tournas hopes to keep things rolling
The 19-year-old rookie right winger with the Moncton Wildcats has collected points in nine of the team’s first 10 games this season, including a pair of goals in the team’s latest outing, a 5-3 loss to the Victoriaville Tigres last Friday night at the Avenir Centre. His eight goals and six assists are tops in team scoring.
But for Tournas, the roll he’s on began when he was three years old.
“I went to the rink when I was three…I stepped on the ice, and they handed me back to my parents and said ‘Bring him back in a year,’” Tournas said. “I started bawling my eyes out. Then I started roller blading in the kitchen of my house for a year. My dad was the goalie. We used the fireplace as the goal, and I pretty much rollerbladed from the time I got home from daycare until the time I had to go to bed. I got to the point where I probably was more comfortable on rollerblades than I was on my own feet.”
The next year he was back on the blades, back on the ice.
“I fell in love with it, and haven’t been off the ice for more than a week ever since.” he said.
The family is based in the tiny town of Redding, Connecticut, population 8,765. Hockey players may be among its chief exports, if you count Niko and his sisters Effie and Christina, twins who played at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and graduated last year. Or it may be thoroughbred horses. His dad Peter, in addition to being a huge hockey fan, is an owner and trainer of thoroughbred horses, his horses running regularly on the New York circuit at Saratoga, Belmont Park and Aqueduct.
That might explain how became “a diehard (New York) Islanders fan. We used to get picked up from school and head to Islanders games. They were never too good when we were growing up and I think it was like $7 a ticket to sit all the way up top at the Nassau Coliseum. So we used to go to pretty much every home game.”
A hockey career was still more a dream than an ambition though. But eye-popping stats while playing for his high school team, the Joel Barrow Falcons in 2021-22 – he scored 59 goals and assisted on 15 in just 21 games – drew the attention of USA Hockey. He was one of 40 players invited to a training camp and played well enough there to draw the attention of Noel Rubin, the coach of the New Jersey Rockets. He and his dad lived in a hotel from Monday to Thursday, and he was on the ice about six hours a day in total. He played 77 games for the Rockets 16 AAA program, scoring 67 goals and 118 points in 2022-23, third in team scoring. The leading scorer? His current teammate and linemate Kuzma Voronin, who scored 61 goals and set up 75 in 73 games.
“It was tough, but I think that’s where I became a pretty good hockey player,” he said. “You’ve got to get better if you’re playing six hours a day.”
That led to his being drafted by the Omaha Lancers of the USHL, but he was traded in the preseason to the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders in 2023-24, where he connected with another future Moncton teammate, goaltender Rudy Guimond.
It was a rough ride for Tournas: he played sparingly in 42 games, was scratched for 18 others; and managed just two goals and three assists.
“It was a very humbling year, I would say,” he said. “It was tough mentally to go through that.”
He went to camp with the RoughRiders, but, with no promise of increased ice time, he went looking for a better opportunity. That took him briefly to Salmon Arm, B.C. – six long days with the BCHL club. One exhibition game was enough to convince him to return home to Connecticut and play for the Danbury Hat Tricks of the North American Hockey League, where, his scoring touch still intact, he scored 39 goals and 74 points in 56 games.
“I needed that mental reset,” he said. “It had started to be ‘I have to go to the rink’ instead of ‘I get to go to the rink.’ I got to go home and it probably saved my career, saved hockey for me.”
He still talks daily to the coach and general manager there, Lenny Caglianone.
“I call him, I play video games with him…he’s probably one of my best friends,” said Tournas. “He’s like a best friend and a coach all in one..I would do anything for that guy on the ice.”
He was drafted by the USHL’s Sioux Falls Stampede and might have played there this season, but Wildcats general manager and director of hockey operations Taylor MacDougall reached out and told Tournas the Wildcats needed a tall, right wing, goal scorer type this season.
Check. Check, And check. Tournas is six-foot-two, 205 pounds and emerging quickly as a star for the Wildcats. Not bad for a player chosen with the very last selection of the QMJHL entry draft. Tenth round, 182nd overall. It’s like cashing a winning lottery ticket.
He calls the move to Moncton “probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in my career so far.”
A conversation with Guimond gave him a player’s perspective on what it was like to play for the Wildcats. A 90 minute phone conversation with coach Gardiner MacDougall helped clinch the deal.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Tournas remembered. “It was kind of cool to hear from a coach, how much he cares about family and everything like that…just the genuine connection he wants to have with his players. We talked about everything under the sun. That was very big for me.
“He’s been a great addition to our group,” said coach MacDougall. “He’s got parts of his game that are even better than we thought. He’s certainly a difference maker for our team.”
Next year, he’ll be a Wildcat of a different stripe. He’ll join the NCAA Division 1 University of New Hampshire Wildcats of Hockey East.
Article by Bill Hunt
Photo: Daniel St. Louis
