The hand-painted masks – one he wears for Boston College, the other for Team USA — hide the fact that Thatcher Demko’s still only 18 years old. A prodigy with the puck.
Demko was the youngest player in NCAA Division I hockey a year ago, a teen who’d distinguished himself as one of the world’s best young goaltenders before he skated onto the ice as a freshman for powerhouse B.C. Before the end of the 2013-14 school-calendar year, he’d been a starting goalie in the Frozen Four and the first collegiate keeper taken in the National Hockey League draft, going 36th overall to the Vancouver Canucks.
Just geographically speaking, it’s noteworthy enough that hockey’s already taken Demko to tournaments in such faraway, winter-bound places as Russia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Sweden, plus nearly every province in Canada.
Wherever he goes, too, people invariably get around to that eye-opening look at his bio. Specifically, his hometown.
“That’s probably the most-asked question I get, like, by every reporter,” said Demko. “”San Diego? Really?””
Really.
The one in Southern California. The one just north of that other U.S. border.
Anymore, though, a local at even that level of hockey is not that much of an aberration. Born a December baby at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital, raised in Scripps Ranch and developed as a hockey player at the Ice-Plex in Escondido and San Diego Ice Arena in Mira Mesa, Demko’s by no means the first local product to play the sport on a professional or D-I basis.
To the contrary, when Boston College goes for its sixth straight championship of the legendary Beanpot Tournament in February, three of the four teams will have a San Diego County player on its roster. Travis Moy, who’s known Demko since they were 3-year-olds in pre-school, is a center with Harvard. Nikolas Olsson is a freshman forward at Boston University.
Among the UMass-Lowell opponents in BC’s season opener was Robert Francis, a San Diegan who transferred from Western Michigan. Nebraska-Omaha has two locals in Austin Ortega and Grant Gallo. More are on the way, too.
“There’s a great number of elite young players coming out of here,” said Brenton Demko, Thatcher’s father. “That’s really something when you consider there are only five (ice) sheets in all of San Diego County. I’ve been to places in Minnesota where one building has eight sheets.”
Even if he was from the Iron Range or Thunder Bay, Moose Jaw or the hockiest little town in Canada, Thatcher Demko would be considered a wunderkind of his game. Having left home at 15 to pursue his hockey career with the Omaha Lancers of the U.S. Hockey League, gone 31-9-3 with six shutouts as a 16-year-old with the U.S. National Development Team’s under-18 squad and accelerated his academics with independent study to graduate high school a year early, Demko was still a freshman when rated the No. 1 goalie by the NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau heading into the 2014 draft.
“I’ve had it in my mind that I wanted to play in the NHL since I was a little kid, maybe seven years old,” said Demko via phone from Chestnut Hill, Mass. “It wasn’t until recently that I’ve learned how hard it is to be an NHL player, but I’ve always had that certainty about becoming one. I mean, I knew I’d be in the NHL, and it didn’t matter how I got there.”
Actually disappointed not to be taken in the first round, Demko was not disappointed at all to be returning to B.C., where his rights can be held by the Canucks until he graduates. Vancouver recently signed All-Star goalie Ryan Miller to a three-year contract, which could make for fortuitous timing for Demko, who said he’s “not necessarily in a rush” to leave Boston College.
For a college player, indeed, Boston is hockey’s equivalent to basketball’s Tobacco Road. Everywhere you go around town, there’s an arch-rival.
“It’s just a great city for college hockey … definitely like being in a hurricane,”said Demko. “BU is less than five minutes, Harvard is 15 minutes away. UMass-Lowell is 30 minutes away. The Beanpot is an enormous deal back here. Twenty thousand fans a game. Crazy.
“The student sections get pretty harsh and I get the brunt of it on the road. But that’s the fun of it.”
As a child, Demko found his fun where others couldn’t. In the nets.
Demko first got the hockey bug from his father, a native of Ontario, Canada, whose parents moved the family to San Diego in 1982. Despite his Canadian roots, Brenton didn’t actually skate until after he’d graduated Mira Mesa High and enrolled at the University of British Columbia, also in Vancouver.
Brenton married a former volleyball player, Danielle, who gets a lot of the credit for their only child’s athleticism. They’ve been divorced since Thatcher was two years old, by which time the boy already had inherited his father’s abiding love of the Los Angeles Kings, all of whose games made it onto the Demko television in Scripps Ranch.
“When he was two days old, he had a mini Kings jersey on,” said Brenton. “As soon as he could talk, Thatch would point to the TV with his plastic hockey stick and puck and say, “I want to do that.’ We tried him on rollerblades and he had a hard time getting it. We took him to a skating rink and he absolutely hated it because he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t like staying close to the wall and didn’t like holding my hand.
“’He took a hiatus from it for about six to eight months, then tried it again and went to Mini-Mite classes at SDIA. He played other sports – soccer, Little League – but his passion after that was for hockey.”
Though he became a pretty good skater, the coaches of one of Demko’s youth hockey teams had a rule: Every practice, somebody different on the team would be the goaltender.
“Thatch kept volunteering every time,” said Brenton. “We’re like, “No, Thatch, you’ve got to let others play it.’ There was one kid who was deathly afraid of playing goalie and probably would’ve quit hockey if we made him play it. Thatch took his turn. Then he kept wanting to play goal more and more.”
In the entire history of the NHL, according to Hockeyreference.com, there’s only been one California native to play goalie. John Blue of Huntington Beach manned the nets for the Sabres and Boston Bruins over an eight-year career spanning the 1980’s and 90’s.
Moreover, given the ability to play youth sports like soccer on a year-round basis in San Diego, it stands to reason that those athletes who do give hockey a try would lean more toward playing center or forward, free-wheeling positions Demko did play in roller-hockey. In fact, as much as he always was tall for his age and now towers over the net at 6-foot3, Demko’s athleticism and skating ability often are cited as his greatest attributes in goal.
Others would say it’s what lurks behind the mask.
“I don’t remember too much about the decision-making process, what made me decide to be a goaltender,” said Demko, whose 33 saves Friday night helped the sixth-ranked Eagles (2-1) to a 5-1 win over Colorado College. “I was just drawn to the pressure of the position. Games are won and lost at the goaltender position. I wanted to be in that position.”
Larry Cahn, then hockey director of the San Diego Jr. Gulls, could tell that much when Demko was only 11 years old. Because he preferred to keep goalies in their age group, Cahn actually had to thwart Demko’s constant attempts to play with older teams, though it was clear to Cahn what a talent he had on his hands.
“Thatch was 13 when I told somebody I thought he’d play in The Show (NHL), mostly because of his work ethic,” said Cahn, who now runs a rink in Vacaville. “He’s bright, so bright, and he’s got that mentality. He was one of those kids who wanted to be The Guy.
“His personality wasn’t like that. He was actually pretty shy. So it wasn’t about getting the attention. It was more about making a difference for his teammates.”
As have virtually all of the hockey players from San Diego who’ve advanced to the college or professional ranks, Demko had to give up the usual semblance of teen life and leave home before he was old enough to drive to play juniors.
Demko was only 12 years old when teams from Detroit and Canada first suggested he move north to attend prep schools that fed into hockey clubs, overtures his parents staved until he simply outgrew San Diego as a player. As it was, Demko’s ninth-grade experience consisted of a lot of online schoolwork and independent-study classes through San Pasqual High, that in between twice-a-day practices.
After a brief time playing for a Triple-A team in Los Angeles, Thatcher had decided to accept an offer to play for Omaha, a Tier 1 club. He was 15.
“Probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do,” said Brenton Demko. “You do so much to prepare your son and yourself for the day he makes that big step, but when it actually happens, it’s like a punch in the gut.”
That he’d made the right call has become apparent enough. Demko’s play with Omaha caught the attention of the U.S. national-team development program in Ann Arbor, where he attended Pioneer High and traveled the globe to play under-18 tournaments. Demko was in goal for two wins against Sweden and one over Finland at the Four Nations tournament, recording a total of 73 saves, and started all seven games as Team USA took the silver medal at the 2013 IHF World Under-18 Championships.
Moreover, Demko went 8-2-1 as a 16-year-old tending goal in games against Division-I teams like Michigan and New Hampshire as part of the Team USA schedule. In order to get into B.C. a year early, Demko returned to San Diego for the summer and immersed himself in academics.
When it came to the NHL Draft, Demko brought the dichotomy of San Diego and hockey with him. Joining him in Philadelphia were two of his buddies from Marshall Middle School, Louis Denson and Christian Prince, neither of whom had ever so much as seen Demko on skates in person.
“Once we got there, it was like a whole different world that he lives in,” said Denson, a student at Miramar College. “As a kid from San Diego, it was like nothing I ever thought I’d see, but it’s his world. Thatcher’s a great guy who’s on a weird adventure. But it’s a very cool one.”
DEMKO FILE
Name: Thatcher Demko.
Born: Dec. 8, 1995, in San Diego.
Size: 6-3, 195.
Sport: Ice hockey.
Position: Goaltender.
College: Boston College.
Resume: At the age of 15, Demko went 9-3-0 for the Omaha Lancers of the U.S. Hockey League. Selected to the U.S. National Development Team at the age of 16, he played for Team USA’s Under-18 squad and went 30-9-4 in 2012-13. With a 16-5-3 record his freshman year at Boston College, Demko was rated the No. 1 goalie available for the NHL Draft of 2014, whereupon he was chosen 36th overall by the Vancouver Canucks.
Did you know?: Demko has a different and elaborate designs for the facemasks he wears with Boston College and Team USA, each designed by him and his father, Brenton. The American flag is painted onto the front of his national-team helmet, with the names of famous battles (Iwo Jima, Bunker Hill, Yorktown) noted on the red and white stripes in front, with Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves on the right side and a “Support Our Troops” icon on the left. Among the tributes on the back are the names of Jack McCartan and Jim Craig, goaltenders for the Olympic gold-medal teams of 1960 and 1980, respectively. The helmet he wore for B.C. last year included a bald eagle and a “Boston Strong” tribute with runners silhouetted in the colors of the Stars and Stripes.
![](https://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?q=Volt on LinkedIn: West Virginia University on Instagram: "Summer sunrises are *officially*…)