![]() “The thing that really stood out was he just didn’t want to take the easy path.” “When he did decide, he was just all in,” Eklund added. He’s a very organized person, except for his laundry.” He’d say, ‘Watch for this now,’ and - boom! - it would happen. I started watching games, and he would tell me what I was looking at. “People looked at him like, ‘Who are you?’” Krisztina said. When Kiesewetter devoted his athletic attention to hockey full time, he was 12. “(The coaches) chuckled and were like, ‘No, that’s Tommy Kiesewetter.’ I just remember him standing out, because he was just so much bigger than everybody else.” “I remember going on the ice saying, ‘I think that kid’s out there in the wrong hour,’” he said. Kiesewetter was in the under-10 age group with the Cape Cod Canal Sharks when Eklund first saw him. He also started MassCrease, a goaltending school in Massachusetts, and volunteered his time to hockey organizations. In the last 15 years, he coached at Harvard, at Boston University and now with the New Jersey Devils. The highlight of his four-year professional career was starting for the Lightning in Montreal on Nov. Goaltender Brian Eklund was selected 226th overall by Tampa Bay in 2000. At the same time, it gives me tremendous pride. I have zero hockey background, but my kids converted me.” “I don’t know what is in the water in Siberia, but Bobrovsky and Tarasov are from there, and when Tom started playing hockey, he immediately went to the net. “This is why I say I didn’t have a choice” in Thomas’s decision of hockey over swimming, Krisztina laughs. It’s also the home of Florida’s Sergei Bobrovsky and highly regarded Columbus prospect Daniil Tarasov, who just made his North American debut for AHL Cleveland. The city he’s from is called Novokuznetsk. ![]() Thomas joked that some of his teammates call him “Vlad” or “Moscow.” On the back of his mask are American and Russian flags. We’ve talked about it from the very beginning. We met him for the first time at 10 months and were able to adopt him at 13 months. “He was abandoned at birth, taken to the orphanage within two days. ![]() “And we thought a family of four would be really great for everybody,” she said, so they went back for Tom, who was born in 2005. “We were just delighted to become parents,” Krisztina said. They adopted their first child, son Teddy, from Russia in 2002. She showed great character and courage in a battle with cancer, but, as a result, could not bear children. A significant challenge emerged as their relationship grew. That’s where she met classmate Eric Kiesewetter. from her native Hungary in the mid-1990s to take an MBA at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “I’m glad that she saw it my way,” Thomas says. (Thomas is a lean six-foot-six.) But he said, ‘Mom, I’m a goalie, don’t you understand?’” “I held on to the swimming, because the way he is built, he could have gone anywhere with swimming. “I resisted him going full-speed into hockey,” she says, with a laugh. His mother, Krisztina, loved watching him in the pool. But, like Roy, “I really didn’t like going to swim practice, and I always found myself so excited to get on the ice.” A talented swimmer, he still holds seven long-course records in the breaststroke and one in the freestyle for the Cape Cod Swim Club. “That someone like Patrick Roy also had a path like me.”įour years ago, Kiesewetter made a choice. “It was really cool when I read that,” 16-year-old Thomas Kiesewetter says, from his home in Massachusetts. From Patrick Roy: Winning, Nothing Else by Michel Roy He loved to compete, but he wasn’t crazy about swimming. In fact, around age six, he was one of the best breaststrokers in his age group in the province…. Patrick turned out to be good at the breaststroke. Buffalo’s Adams considering almost everything.
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