Player Spotlight: Garrett McFadden
By: Stephanie Coratti, guelphstorm.com
Garrett McFadden may not have always been a defenseman, but he’s always been a hockey player.
“The kid was born with a mini stick in his hands,” Dan McFadden, Garrett’s dad, joked.
Growing up in what Dan described as a hockey family with both older sister Madison and younger brother Bryce playing hockey, McFadden wasted no time jumping into the sport at the age of four.
“My Dad for sure,” the 1997-born defenseman said of his gateway into the game. “He was my coach when I was little and he always made practices fun.”
“That was important,” McFadden continued. “That was the thing that sparked me loving hockey, and just made me want to be at the rink.”
The desire to play the game, and the competitive spirit that comes with any athlete, evidently made it’s way into the basement of the McFadden home.
“We have a little hockey room down in the basement with boards and all that stuff,” McFadden described of his rink away from the rink in hometown Kincardine, Ontario. “Me and my brother, we get things going down there, so it’s fun.”
While at the rink growing up, McFadden would find his way to the blue line after holding the position of centre for a few years, starting the path to his hockey career in the novice ranks.
“He was a forward to start, but he always played defensively,” Dan said of the transition that saw Garrett become a defenseman. “It was a natural progression just to put him back there.”
Natural maybe, but, as Dan remembered, it was certainly a slow start.
“His first goal as a defenseman was something,” Dan explained. “He pretty well took three quarters or more of the year to get it, but he did score one at the end of the season.”
The question of how it was scored? It doesn’t matter.
“It went in,” Dan laughed.
Things would write much differently later, with the Guelph Storm’s 2013 first round pick (12th overall) pocketing his first OHL point in his first career game on Sept. 20, 2013. His first OHL goal wouldn’t take much longer, coming just over a month later in a 7-1 victory in Peterborough on Oct. 30, 2013.
Impressively making the eventual 2014 OHL Champion squad as a 16-year-old, McFadden would go on to record eight points (one goal, seven assists) in 42 games in 2013-14.
Now a veteran on a young Storm roster, McFadden has maintained the same mindset – on and off the ice.
“It’s remembering where you came from,” the five-foot-eleven, 180-pound blueliner explained, adding that being from a small town like Kincardine, Ontario makes it that much more important. “You always come back to your roots, and keep in mind all the people back home and everyone who supports you. That’s something my parents always made sure I had in mind.”
Undoubtedly an attitude that reflects in McFadden’s character off the ice, but on the ice as well, with individual success coming in visits down Highway Six when the Storm and the Owen Sound Attack square off.
“That’s always an easy game to get up for,” McFadden said of playing in Owen Sound, a short drive from his hometown of Kincardine. “You know you’re playing in front of a bunch of family and friends, so it’s always nice to bring a good game there.”
With most of his success coming in the first round of the 2015 Playoffs that saw the Storm drop the Attack in a 4-1 series, McFadden registered one goal and two assists – including a shorthanded game winner that was legally batted out of midair. A style that the offensively flared defenseman has repeated this 2015-16 season, slowly making it one of his own.
“For a little bit,” McFadden laughed when asked if he had played baseball growing up. “But you work on little things like that, and sometimes you’re just lucky when it happens in a game.”
A humbled attitude in check, a tell-all sign of the person McFadden has always been expected to be, in skates and off.
“We didn’t like any show boating, we always wanted everything to be kept modest, and to be kept real,” Dan explained. “He’s a pretty good kid that way.”
