… but they will never take what we’ve created.

From time to time I’ll post links to some of the stories I’ve written. The first story I’ll post is about a really great kid from a really great family who is in his second year of playing college hockey.

What struck me about Derek Army the first time I met him, at Christmas of 2007 at the Maine High School Hockey Invitational, was his effervescence. How he communicated and engaged with people, a byproduct of not only the number of times he moved around the country because of his father’s line of work – his father is now an assistant coach with the Colorado Avalanche – but also the curiosity he had (and still has) about meeting and learning about other people.

”I think with all those moves, he knew how to come across to people,” said Nate Gadbois, a sophomore forward for Scarborough and a teammate of Army’s with Casco Bay Youth Hockey. ”He knows how to treat his teammates and he knows how to act around the rink. He knows how to win games and how to keep himself in control on the ice. Me and Army, we always played on the same line so he’d go out and he always played to the next level. It made me want to compete that much more, to keep up him when he was my teammate.”

http://www.pressherald.com/archive/old-tricks-in-the-old-neighborhood_2007-12-26.html