By Jim Mason/OJHL Communications
NIAGARA FALLS, ON… Ryder Cali would be on the all-name team in any hockey league.
But the kid from Penetanguishene with the cool handle is making a name for himself simply with his play early in the Ontario Junior Hockey League this season.
Cali, who just turned 16 this month, and his Milton Menace are one of the big stories at the OJHL’s Governors’ Showcase presented by MilkUP in Niagara Falls, ON this week. They won both their games, including a 5-1 victory over the previously unbeaten Trenton Golden Hawks Tuesday.
A video production crew included a Cali discussion in a taping session in the Gale Centre lobby today.
A first-round pick of the Soo Greyhounds during this spring’s Ontario Hockey League U16 draft, Cali made a verbal commitment to Harvard University and signed with Milton this summer.
A rep from the Ivy League school – one of 160-plus college, NHL, OHL and U SPORTS teams reps scouting the Showcase – huddled with Cali following Tuesday’s game.
Cali’s story is straight out of a Netflix or ESPN doc.
Born in Switzerland and raised in the Cayman Islands, he didn’t start playing ice hockey until his family moved to Ontario when he was seven.
(His mom, Toronto native Fiona McLeod, played NCAA hockey at St. Cloud State and professionally in Switzerland. Dad played soccer.)
And when most of Cali’s current teammates were skating in AAA leagues, the highest level of youth hockey, he played at the BB level for Penetang, as locals call it, until his U14 season.
It’s simply meteoric.
He has 12 points (6 goals/6 assists) in the Menace’s first seven games, good for a fourth-place tie in the OJHL’s scoring race. He’s the only 2008-born player in the top 75 in a league where players can be up to four and a half years older than him.
“He’s a great talent but you’ve got to protect and guide those great talents,” said Milton Head Coach and General Manager Dan Del Monte, who has known the Cali family and helped advise Ryder for the past five years.
Del Monte, a long-time youth hockey coach in Ontario circles, gives the scouting report on his phenom:
“First and foremost, he’s genetically gifted. He’s a 16-year-old kid who’s 6-foot-2, 200 pounds. So that always helps. He also has a very high skill level. But what a lot of scouts and coaches like about him is that he is so defensively aware as a centreman. At that young an age it is kind of rare. He plays a very mature game for a young man.”
“Early in the year, he’s obviously already exceeded expectations. No matter how old you are, when you are a young player there will be an adaptation period to the physicality and speed of our league and I think he’s handling it well.”
Cali credits his quick adjustment to Jr. A to summer skating sessions he took part in with local OHL players back home.
“It’s definitely a faster pace of hockey (in the OJHL) and the players are stronger,” he said.
And he was already used to riding buses through Ontario as a member of the North Central Predators when he did make the leap to AAA. And Milton’s management and ownership group has provided the Menace players “anything we could ask for,” Cali said.
Why did he choose the OJHL?
“I thought for my development, the college route would make me the best player I could be,” he told the OJHL. “And it extends the period you have to make it to the professional leagues,” he said. “If you can go to school and have a backup plan by getting a degree… it seemed like a no-brainer to me.”
Not that Cali lacks brain matter. He sports a 97-per-cent average in Grade 11; certainly good enough to get him into Harvard.
The three-day, 24-game OJHL’s Governors’ Showcase presented by MilkUP runs through Wednesday, Sept. 25, night at the Gale Centre in Niagara Falls.
