Hilltop Happenings

“Young team”…”new faces”…”youth movement”…”transition year” – conversations about this winter’s varsity hockey program are peppered with such phrases. Makes sense. After all, the team’s top five scorers are all underclassmen, four of whom have completed only one trimester on the Hilltop. Early in the season, “growing pains” was part of the lexicon, too, but that descriptive has fallen into disuse: Salisbury’s current 20-3 record and its ranking atop the USHR Prep Hockey Poll for eight straight weeks – and counting – can have that effect.

The calming presence and unflappable poise of veteran Luke Krys, one of the Knights’ two senior captains, can have that effect, too. A defenseman, Krys was one of three current or former Salisbury players listed in January’s NHL Central Scouting Midterm Rankings. [Ed. note: Former standouts Tyce Thompson and Johnny Beecher were the other two ranked players.] Last season, Krys played a key role in Salisbury’s 24-2 regular-season record and the team’s tournament run to the Elite Eight Championship Game, a 3-2 loss at the hands of Kimball Union Academy.

In this season’s opener against Taft, Krys surprised many Salisbury hockey followers by scoring two goals. Both came on express deliveries from the blue line – but that was not the surprise. What caught fans’ attention was that those two goals were two more than he had scored in the entire 2017-18 season. With four games left on the regular schedule, Krys has seven goals, and his 20 assists are just one fewer than team assist-leaders Nick Capone and Justin Hryckowian, both forwards with consummate play-making skills.

How to account for Krys’s emergence as a scoring threat? Turns out there is a simple explanation.

“In the fall of my fifth-form year, I did mountain biking,” Krys recounts. “One afternoon, as we were speeding downhill, the student in front of me hit a divot and crashed. I slammed on my brakes and went flying over my handlebars. I landed on the trail, which had grassy patches but was also strewn with rocks. The impact knocked me unconscious.”

It must have been quite an impact: Krys did not regain consciousness until some time later when he awoke in the ER at Sharon Hospital, where he learned he had broken his wrist, the first time he had ever fractured a bone.

The accident had an even more profound impact. “I had been skating for the Buffalo Regals during the fall ‘split-season,’” Krys explains. “The accident occurred in early October, so I missed eight weeks of the Regals’ season. In addition, doctors did not allow me to participate fully in Salisbury’s pre-season. For the first week or two, I was limited to skating only. I never did get the full strength back in my wrist,” says Krys ruefully. “It basically affected my stick-handling and shooting my entire junior season.”

Hence the grand total of zero goals last year. “The wrist issue affected my general confidence as well,” Krys adds, perhaps helping account for his modest assist-total of seven in 29 games.

Despite the season-long ramifications of that small divot on the mountain trail, Krys played in every game of Salisbury’s drive to the tournament final and was an integral member of head coach Andrew Will’s defensive corps. As he pursued his dream of playing Division I hockey, though, the team-oriented Krys realized that he would have to demonstrate to prospective college coaches that he could be a significantly stronger offensive contributor than his 2017-18 numbers might reflect.

Last spring, Krys began regular work-outs with a strength and skills coach, focusing on skating and stick-handling. It was not until mid-summer, however, that he felt his wrist had regained full strength. Those college coaches started to sit up and take notice this past fall when Krys, as a member of the Rochester Coalition, led the league’s defensemen in scoring. Full recovery had taken an entire year, but he was back.

Krys grew up in a hockey family. An older brother, Chad, is currently an assistant captain for perennial D-I power Boston University. Chad Krys played for Team USA in the U-20 World Championships during the 2015-16 season. A younger sister, Aerin, is a standout field hockey player at Ridgefield (CT) high school.

Krys’s pedigree extends further. His father captained the BU team in his senior year and went on to play five years in the American Hockey League for the Providence Bruins and the Syracuse Crunch. He wound down his professional career with a three-year stint in the European leagues, lacing up for the Iserlohn Roosters and the Rosenheim Star Bulls of the German Hockey League.

And for good measure, Krys’s mother was a two-sport varsity athlete back in high school, starring in both field hockey and lacrosse. “She has a background in nutrition,” Krys further notes. “Her knowledge in that area has been a key resource in my development as an athlete.”

Pedigree notwithstanding, Krys’s early introduction to hockey gave no indication whatsoever that he would develop an affinity to the sport. He hated it. “My family moved to Connecticut in 2004,” recounts Krys, “and I joined a youth program in Ridgefield called the ‘Ice Mice.’ I hated skating. My mother forced me out there. My brother,” he notes, “had been good at hockey from an early age. I wasn’t.”

Krys considers himself a “late developer.” Indeed, it is surprising that he stuck around the rink as long as he did, testimony, perhaps, to his mother’s persistence. “I did not enjoy the game for a long time,” he states. “In fact, I’m not sure when I started to like it, but definitely by the age of ten.”

By that time, Krys’s father had found his way back on the ice, coaching Chad Krys’s U-10 team. When Krys himself turned ten, he was welcomed into the Squirts program by his father. “It was not easy playing for my dad,” Krys acknowledges, “but obviously he knows a whole lot more than I do. I could see that he noticed things that were very helpful to me when he pointed them out.”

As he progressed, Krys came to value his father’s critiques more and more. To this day, he counts on his father’s willingness to review game tapes and point out areas for improvement. “There’s no question,” Krys says now, “that he’s the reason I’ve gotten where I am today.”

There is another reason that Krys feels fortunate to have his father in his life. On 9/11, Mr. Krys, a bond trader, had stepped out of his office for a cup of coffee – on the 63^rd floor of the second World Trade Tower. While he was preparing his coffee, the first tower was hit. Mr. Krys joined others in the nearest elevator. Minutes later, he was out of the building and making his way safely from the area, ahead of the collapse of the first tower and subsequent attack on the second.

Krys has had another guide through his development as a young player, a man by the name of Tommy Nolan, who served as Krys’s youth coach from ages 9 to 16. “He has had a major impact on my hockey career,” declares Krys with sincere appreciation, “since he’s been along my side the whole time. He is a coach who truly cares about his players,” Krys emphasizes. “He has helped me a ton throughout my career as a player, not only as a coach but also as a role model. I have had opportunities to play all over the country under Coach Nolan, and his son Owen has been one of my teammates my whole life. To this day, I continue to skate with Owen in the summer, and I keep in touch with his dad, Coach Nolan.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          While Krys’s progress has certainly and significantly benefited from mentors such as his parents, Tommy Nolan, and the staff at Salisbury, his quiet, modest demeanor belies a strong work ethic coupled with fierce determination. His return from the wrist injury is one reflection of those traits. His success in the classroom is another.

During the winter of his sophomore year, he decided that he wanted more rigor in both his hockey and his academics. That decision led him into the world of New England prep schools – specifically, Millbrook, Milton, and Northwood. Salisbury only came into the picture when recruiters from St. Lawrence and the University of New Hampshire directed him to Coach Will.  St. Lawrence, in particular, had Krys high on its wish-list going back to the Beantown Showcase, a tournament the previous summer at which Krys had stood out in front of virtually every U.S. college program and a number of NHL representatives. Phone calls were exchanged between Krys and Will, and before long the coveted recruit was Hilltop-bound for the fall of 2017.

In his fifth-form year, Krys achieved Honors all three trimesters. This past fall, he reached High Honors for the first time, a standing he has maintained through the winter trimester. Krys cites math as his favorite subject area and AP Statistics as his favorite course. He plans to pursue finance when he heads off to Brown University for his college career. “The academics are, of course, world class,” Krys remarks appreciatively of the Ivy League school’s sterling reputation, “and having such an academic opportunity was why I ultimately decided on Brown.”

When asked about Brown’s hockey team, Krys is similarly enthusiastic. “The hockey program is on the rise,” Krys affirms, “and I really like the new assistant coach who recruited me. He’s brought in some outstanding players [including former Knight star Matt Holmes, who has spent this year playing junior hockey for the Chilliwack Chiefs of the British Columbia League, where he is among the leading scorers], and I am excited to be joining a program that I have seen get better and better over the course of the current season. Both academically and athletically, Brown is a great opportunity for me.”

Krys hopes to keep playing hockey for as long as he can, wherever the sport takes him. Among the professional players he admires and whose approach to the game he has modeled is Brett Pesce, a Westchester native who plays defense for the Carolina Hurricanes. “I’ve skated with him at the SoNo Ice House in Norwalk [CT],” notes Krys. “He’s a really nice guy, very down-to-earth, and he’s been supportive of my progress and aspirations.”

Krys’s favorite player is Los Angeles King Dion Phaneuf, who captained the Toronto Maple Leafs during his tenure there. “He plays smart,” says Krys of the veteran defenseman. “He’s not overly flashy but still produces offensively.”

Talk to any Salisbury coach – Head Coach Will, Rudd Rink mainstay Matt Corkery, defense coach Will Leedy – about Krys’s contributions, and you will notice something: the very phrases that Krys uses to talk about the players he admires are the same ones his coaches use to describe the Knights’ co-captain: “a truly nice guy,” “down-to-earth,” “supportive of his younger teammates,” “knows what to do with the puck,” “doesn’t try to be flashy,” “an important contributor at both ends of the ice as well as off the ice.”

Evidently, imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery but, most definitely in Krys’s case, can also be a key element in the path to maturity, achievement, and leadership.

- Procter Smith