Titus Stone Biography [1/2]

[MD9 139]

TITUS STONE: Journey to the VHLM

 

 

Titus Stone isn’t a household name by any means, but he has made a small splash in some circles with his recent decision to make the jump into the VHLM. This decision was quickly followed by a contract signing with the Saskatoon Wild, setting him up for the beginning of his first season of hockey on a large stage: and a season that will be rather short, all things considered. But it took a long time to get to this point, and his path was anything but obvious growing up.

 

Early Life

 

Hockey may not be the dominant sport in the United States, but Colorado is one of those states where you could almost believe otherwise. Between professional, college and various minor teams, it wasn’t hard to get into the sport. Coming from a middle-class, suburban background, Stone had all of the expected opportunities as a young hockey-player: sure, not all of his gear was brand new, but it was good enough and he had coaches interested in seeing him succeed. Even if succeeding at his level was ‘just having fun.’

 

That’s perhaps where Stone’s story is a little different from some of his peers in the VHLM.

 

The biggest obstacle he faced growing up was his own skill-level. He was always fairly good at hockey, make no mistakes about that… but he wasn’t good in any competitive sense. He could skate well enough and he read plays well, but every time he tried out for local competitive teams, he was met with rejection. There were a lot of ‘close, but not quite’ talks with the coaches he tried out for. It’s not like you need to be remarkable to play for those teams, but you do need to be a stand out.

 

And really, that extended rundown on his early hockey skill just helps to explain why instead of going through the usual hoops growing up, attending a school known for the sport and being sent to figure skating lessons or hockey camp, he instead was encouraged by his parents to focus heavily on his studies. For most of his time in elementary school and junior high, Stone was -- entirely thanks to pressure from his parents -- something of a bookworm. He was pushed to constantly be studying and constantly be learning with the hopes that it would yield good a good high school record, and accordingly, good offers and scholarships from major colleges.

 

Academic scholarships. Not athletic ones.

 

High School

 

All those years of study paid off for Stone, as though his high school experience was largely standard, he recorded top of the line grades in class after class. All except for one: mathematics. No matter how much he was coached on the subject, and no matter how many times he was assigned a tutor by his doting parents, he routinely came up short. Sure, he scraped by with Cs with the occasional low B. But when you’re being pushed to go far in the world of academia, that’s not always good enough. An arts degree would have suited Stone perfectly, but as many parents will tell you -- usually parents with no academic experience themselves -- there’s no money to be made outside of business or science.

 

Unfortunately, pressuring your child to study usually doesn’t lead to the kind of desire to learn that you’re looking for in an ideal student. So while he may have been putting up great grades, he privately had no interest in attending a college even if he did get a good scholarship offer. His performance on the ice was still rather pedestrian even up to his second year of high school, and so he set his sights instead on a much more achievable goal: community college.

 

His senior year in high school was, ultimately, when things would change for the better. Though he still struggled through arithmetic, he proved himself to be a rare, late bloomer as a hockey player. Despite playing recreational for his entire life up until that point, a strong showing in try-outs earned him a spot on his high school team. Perhaps predictably, his parents were happy for him -- right up until it started to chew into his study time and his grades started to decline. But while they may not have been overly happy, Stone was allowed to go ahead with the season on the promise that he would commit to his grades in his free time. He did that, and while his marks started to slip, he ended up with a fairly good B+ range card on the year… and the sort of showing on the ice that, remarkably, got him attention from the VHLM.

 

Perhaps the biggest asset Stone had gained from all of those years being pushed to study was a sense of discipline. Not on the ice, of course -- he was prone to get bad slashing calls from time to time. But while other students were risking their future careers with underaged drinking and other such vices, Stone kept himself clean and out of trouble. As a young man, forget about hockey for the moment, that might have been the best favour he could have done for his future self.

 

Year of Decision

 

If you’ve been following up until this point, it’s been pretty clear that Stone’s hockey career never really went the way he imagined, at least up until that final year of high school. Being scouted thanks to a sudden, break-out year should be enough to give you hope that you might be able to make it in the pros… but Stone wasn’t quite so confident in his own ability. Because of that, he did not enter himself into the VHLM draft, and instead took the year off and played another season of recreational hockey while he filtered through university offers and eyed those aforementioned community college programs.

 

The tipping point came when, around the halfway point through his rec season, a reporter for the Denver Post approached him for an interview. Pushing him for deep-seated reasons over why he had opted to skip out on a potential hockey career through the juniors, he began to… well, question the very questions he had for himself. In the end, he announced he would sign for a team and play for the balance of the season with whoever needed a defenceman.

 

It hasn’t been a typical road to the VHLM, but in the end, Stone made it. Now the question is whether he can do anything more than that.
 

[Plate 386]

This is actually a pretty decent article overall. It's nice and follows a simple yet direct career path throughout Stone's career. I liked how you made the article long enough to read and that there was enough meat to get the points across. This definitely gave Stone a relatable player personality.