Weeks later, then-Maine coach Red Gendron, urged by assistant coaches, flew out between Black Bear games to sit down with Jeremy and his dad at a Sioux Falls diner. Related : How young players can make an impression in the NHL Here I was, thinking Anchorage or Fairbanks. “And I’m like, ‘Are you telling me Maine’s talking to you?!’ I only knew that Maine was a goalie hotbed … Jimmy Howard … Ben Bishop. “The whole thing was insane,” the proud dad recalled when getting the phone call from Jeremy. But now a dozen teams were after him, including the Black Bears. He felt Jeremy could land a college spot, maybe with Anchorage or Fairbanks. He had watched a lot of college hockey, for years attending every Alaska Anchorage home game as a team doctor. “I was like, ‘Dad, you can’t believe this right now!’ That was a special phone call.”Īll along, Ken Swayman tempered expectations. “Like a scene from a movie,” recalled Jeremy, beaming over the memory. Thrilled, he called home to Anchorage to tell his dad. It was just slightly more than a year after Kenai didn’t have room for him. I think that carried weight.”īy Swayman’s count, there were 12 Division 1 teams lined up outside the dressing room to talk to him upon the showcase’s conclusion. “At least five college teams were there that night, and they all wanted to talk to him when it wrapped up. “We were at the league’s preseason showcase in Omaha,” recalled Owens. Prior to getting to Sioux Falls, college teams had not shown interest. Swayman’s raison d’etre to play in the USHL was to secure a route to Division 1 NCAA hockey. He has this confidence about him, but balanced, in no way offensive.” “Yes, I remember that distinctly,” said Owens, these days a senior advisor with USHL Des Moines. Just as he had with Vanover, the now 17-year-old Swayman told Owens he would come there and win.

Scott Owens, his coach at Sioux Falls, knew about Swayman from Vanover, a longtime pal from Owens’s days as bench boss at Colorado College. But in both cases, just like the Miners, he quickly filched the No. The year in Colorado Springs was Swayman’s springboard to the USHL Sioux Falls, and ultimately to UMaine, arriving at both places as the goalie slotted to play the backup role. Jeremy Swayman caught this rainbow trout at Finger Lake in Palmer, Alaska, at age 4 or 5.

“It was one of those moments that my dad and I had to talk about, ‘Hey, is this game going to be a future for you, or are we going to have to come to reality?’ ” “So Kenai’s out and I had nowhere to go, there wasn’t another team in Alaska,” recalled Swayman, who played the previous season with South Anchorage High. All that after Kenai had tendered Swayman, securing his rights ahead of the league’s draft. Swayman was 16, facing a key development year, and Beauparlant wanted to go with a pair of older goalies. Essentially guaranteed he would play his 2015-16 season with Kenai, he was told by then-coach Geoff Beauparlant that it would be best if he came aboard the roster the following year. It was great!”Ī decade later, in the summer of 2015, father and son were on a plane home from Minnesota, a devastated Jeremy fighting back tears, his career somewhere between a crossroads and a dead end.Ī tryout camp with the Kenai River Brown Bears, a tier 2 junior team not far from Anchorage, turned out all wrong. “He’s around the guys, ninth, 10th, and 11th graders,’ ” recalled the senior Swayman, “and all of a sudden they’re his buddies … he wants to talk to his buddies.

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