Player Spotlight: Nick Deakin-Poot
By: Stephanie Coratti, guelphstorm.com
It’s an easy answer when it comes to who got Nick Deakin-Poot into the game of hockey.
“Me,” Richard Poot, Nick’s dad, laughed. “We got him skating around four years old and we went from there.”
“In kindergarten, there would be a day-on-day-off, and he would bring me out every single off day,” Deakin-Poot said of his dad, adding that he’s the biggest motivation to his career even now. “That’s where I learned how to skate.”
A year later, officially starting hockey at the age of five, skating was almost a fine tuned skill.
“Hockey came around and he was a pretty good skater already,” said Cindy Deakin, Nick’s mom.
From there, Deakin-Poot pushed through minor hockey, becoming an OMHA Champion along the way – a memory that really sticks out for Cindy and Richard.
“It was fun for them obviously, and the wins were memorable, but there’s just so much,” Cindy explained of looking back on her son’s career in minor hockey. “For anyone who has a kid who’s made it as far as an OHL Draft, there’s so much… all your time, money, effort, attention, the good friends, everything. There’s a lot, a lot of stuff there.”
“When you’re parents,” Cindy continued. “It’s all so encompassing.”
That feeling didn’t change, instead, would become all that much sweeter when Deakin-Poot was drafted in the third round (54th overall) by the Guelph Storm in the 2015 OHL Priority Selection.
“Wow,” Cindy said when asked of the experience. “Sometimes you just can’t put things into words. It actually seems out of body, it’s a little surreal – I’ve heard that word used and I think it’s pretty appropriate.”
Moving outside of the accomplishment itself, when it came down to the team, it was nothing but pleasant shock.
“Guelph picked him and it was more like, ‘What? Wow!’” Cindy recalled, adding that being from nearby Georgetown, Ontario was a factor that came as a nice bonus. “We were like, how blessed are we that he’s going to be 35 minutes away?”
“Living the dream and within reach,” Cindy said.
Now a 16-year-old rookie in the Storm line-up, standing at six-foot-four, 201-pounds, skating remains that very same fine tuned skill even with size almost near impossible to ignore.
“I’ve always been a big guy,” Deakin-Poot explained of the biggest challenge he’s faced through his career. “I would always get those ‘big guy’ penalties, that’s been the biggest thing.”
With an intimidating structure on the ice, Cindy and Richard attest that it’s the exact opposite off of it.
“He’s not perfect, he is a teenaged boy,” Cindy laughed. “But things come back to us – we would hear of him doing things in his class, finding out he’s helping special needs kids get comfortable, inviting kids to sit with him, and we’d never hear about it from him.”
“He’s very humble,” Richard offered.
Character that evidently made the move into the Ontario Hockey League all that much easier, even if it wasn’t expected.
“We found out he was actually going to make the team at 11 in the morning on Labour Day Monday, and he had to start school in Guelph the next day,” Cindy explained of her son making the Storm roster. “The transition could have not gone smoothly, but it did and that really, to me, speaks a lot to the billet family themselves, and to Nick that he was just able to move right into things.”
“He’s surprised us a little,” Cindy continued. “He moved right in so easily and became comfortable right away – as soon as we saw he relaxed, we did too.”
While for Deakin-Poot, despite starting out as a rarity to make the line-up, it was always about the team.
“I just want to contribute to the team as much as possible,” he explained. “Just help the team as much as I can in any way they need me.”
Undoubtedly a natural team player, something Cindy says tops the list of her son’s accomplishments.
“It’s on and off the ice,” Cindy explained of what she’s most proud of. “He’s always concerned with how that’s going to better his friend, or his team.”
“It’s always the other guy, and the whole picture.”
