Dream on Hold
By Tony Saxon, Guelph Mercury
David Searle spent half his life working towards playing in the Ontario Hockey League.
In early January, after finally becoming a regular on the Guelph Storm blueline, the 18-year-old Peterborough native did something very rare for a major junior hockey player a step away from a professional hockey career: he packed his bags and went home.
Searle is back at Adam Scott Collegiate Vocational Institute, upgrading some of his high school courses and looking for a part-time job. He finds it hard to watch hockey.
“It seems like I was forced into the (hockey) lifestyle and I don’t even know if I wanted to actually do it,” Searle said, in a phone interview earlier this week, focusing on why he quit the Storm.
“You grow up playing hockey, you play it every year and it becomes an expectation that you go play hockey every day . . . I love hockey. But I started thinking that maybe this just isn’t what I wanted to do any more. It was just a personal decision.”
The team has respected that decision.
“We have to remember that these players are also teenagers growing up,” Storm general manager Mike Kelly said.
“The day we lose sight of that, guys like me should get out of junior hockey. We have to be sensitive to general teenage life and remember that the most important thing is the welfare of the kid.”
Like almost every youngster playing AAA rep hockey in small-town Canada, Searle was conditioned to take his game to the highest level possible.
Skilled and big, the Guelph Storm drafted the 6-foot-6, 230-pound Searle, in the second round of the Ontario Hockey League draft, in 2008. The chance of a hockey career looked promising.
But two shoulder surgeries and a year of junior B hockey limited Searle to just 13 games in a Storm uniform over the first two years. Frustration set in.
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