L.A. ON ICE
Heart in his skates: A San Diego man’s path to the NHL
Chad Ruhwedel’s love for hockey has sustained his playing career against all odds.
By ETHAN INMAN
Imagine for a second, driving from Los Angeles to San Diego during rush hour.
Sounds tough, right? It’s like something you may do once for something really important, perhaps a concert or a San Diego Padres game or SeaWorld.
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Now imagine doing that every single day, both ways, just to get to your sports team’s practice.
Yeah, oof.
That’s what Chad Ruhwedel did in high school to be able to play hockey.
Ruhwedel was born in the Scripps Ranch area of San Diego to his father, John Ruhwedel, and his mother, Robin Ruhwedel. Robin grew up in Chicago and avidly rooted for the Chicago Blackhawks. A young Ruhwedel credits his mother’s passion for the Hawks as the reason he developed an affinity for hockey.
And as soon as he strapped on a pair of skates, he was hooked: He was going to play hockey any way he could.
He grew up playing for programs such as the San Diego Jr Gulls and La Jolla Jaguars. His high school in Scripps Ranch didn’t even have an ice hockey team. No matter — he played for their roller hockey team. Nothing was going to stop him from playing hockey.
Which is why, when he was presented with an opportunity to play for the Los Angeles Jr. Kings — a prestigious youth hockey program that has provided the only consistently successful pipeline for youth hockey players to prepare for a legitimate shot at professional careers — there was nothing that was going to stop him from jumping at the opportunity.
Ruhwedel sacrificed an almost unthinkable amount to be able to play for the Jr. Kings. Every day after school, while he could have been doing homework or hanging out with friends, he immediately drove to L.A., practiced for several hours and returned home. He’d leave when school got out at 3 p.m. and would return home around midnight. He missed out on traditional high school activities, including his senior prom.
But he gained a shot to extend his career at the next level. He was drafted to the USHL by the Sioux Falls Stampede.
He played well enough in his first year in Sioux Falls to earn interest from colleges like Northeastern, but chose to be patient and returned to Sioux Falls for a second year.
That patience paid off, as he received a full-ride, Division I scholarship to play at University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2010.
He played at UMass Lowell for three years, and gained national recognition for his defensive prowess in his final 2012-13 season. That year, he earned Hockey East First Team All-Star honors and an American Hockey Coaches CCM All-America First Team distinction, as well as the New England Hockey Writers Association’s Bob Monahan Award for Defenseman of the Year.
And yet, after all that, Ruhwedel went undrafted in the NHL draft.
That may have been enough to discourage many people into retiring. Countless hours spent in the car on the 405 Freeway all to get zero calls on draft night is crushing.
But Ruhwedel would not have made it to DI collegiate hockey with a defeatist attitude. He’d always loved the game too much to quit and wasn’t going to, no matter what anybody said, even the NHL.
So, he stayed ready and ended up being signed as an undrafted free agent by the Buffalo Sabres in April 2013. He finished out the rest of the season with the NHL club and played seven games.
That determination truly was one of a kind: He became the first NHL player ever from San Diego when he first set foot on the ice for the Sabres.
He split parts of three more seasons between the Sabres and their American Hockey League affiliate, the Rochester Americans. At the end of his contract in Buffalo, he signed with the Pittsburgh Penguins, where his career really took off.
In his first season with Pittsburgh in 2016-17, he helped the Penguins win the Stanley Cup. During his traditional “day with the Cup,” he brought sports’ most tradition-filled trophy back to his community in San Diego.
Seven seasons later, Ruhwedel is still with the Penguins.
He currently plays with Long Beach native Matt Nieto, who I wrote about in the very first edition of this column.
He’s not a superstar. He plays on the Penguins’ third defensive line and has only 13 career NHL goals and 36 career assists in 12 seasons.
But he’s still playing. And that’s really all a 17-year-old Chad Ruhwedel, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic somewhere on the 405 because he was madly in love with the game of hockey, could have asked for.
We all could use a heart like his for what we love.
