John Ryan Burns was an extremely shy 10-year-old.
He was quiet, used his closest family members as something of a shell to the outside world, and couldn’t do many things on his own.
You can’t blame him. It’s not easy being a 10-year-old in a wheelchair.
But getting out of his chair and onto the ice changed everything for John Ryan. He was taken out of his comfort zone, had to trust himself, and found confidence.
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Four years later his mother, Deena Martinez Burns, said discovering sled hockey was one of the most important moments in her son’s life.
“That amount of things it did, he is a totally different child than he was four years ago,” Deena Martinez Burns said. “He’s completely different and I owe it a lot to the sled hockey, and Tyler Seguin for having that connection to open the door. Just everything that happened through this, it’s amazing.”
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Tyler Seguin’s first goal was always to reach the NHL.
He wanted to win the Stanley Cup, which he did as a rookie with the Boston Bruins in 2011, he wanted to play in the Olympics, and he wanted to be recognized for his work on the ice.
But he also began to realize there was more to being a professional athlete. During his time with the Bruins he noticed the work that veteran players Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron put in away from the rink. How they were involved in growing the game and reaching out to the local community.
“I started noticing little things,” Seguin said. “I saw (Bergeron) had a suite upstairs or Big Z would meet with little kids after the game. I always thought that was quite cool, but maybe I didn’t get it right away.”
Something changed for Seguin on Dec. 28, 2012, when one of his childhood friends, Derrek Moseychuk, was paralyzed in an automobile accident.
“When I had the personal thing with my best friend growing up, getting hurt and being a quadriplegic,” Seguin said. “That was the first thing that really touched me. And I wanted to do something. Not only for him but seeing the struggles that he went through trying to recover. I thought if I could find an opportunity to give back somehow that’s where I would start.”
Moseychuk’s injury hit close to home for Seguin, who was playing for Team Canada in the 2012 Spengler Cup during the NHL lockout when the accident occurred.
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Moseychuk was driving with Jordan Merante and Andrew Czuchnicki when their car hit black ice. The car spun out of control and rolled off the road.
“There is this place back home in the offseason that we’d go to almost every Thursday when we were growing up,” Seguin said. “So I’d been in the car on that road countless (times where they happened to be driving. The same drive we do a thousand times. Lost control of the car, a little ice, it slipped and that was it.”
The NHL lockout ended soon after the accident. Teams started training camp on Jan. 13 and games resumed on Jan. 19, meaning Seguin was back with the Bruins while Moseychuk was still early in his recovery.
Boston reached the Stanley Cup Final that season, falling to the Chicago Blackhawks in six games, and Seguin then spent most of his summer at the hospital with Moseychuk.
“We were there all the time. And we’re young guys on Saturday night and we’d normally be out at the bars, but we’d actually be out at the hospital and we’d go out across the street,” Seguin said. “There was actually a place across the street, we’d go sneak up on the roof of the next-door building. We weren’t supposed to sneak him out, but we’d sneak out there for hours and just hang out on the roof.”
That same summer Seguin was helping Moseychuk sneak onto roofs, he was traded to the Dallas Stars in a stunning July 4 deal.
Within the first two weeks of the trade, Seguin had already started to lay the groundwork for a community outreach program that would be called Seguin’s Stars.
“It was in my mind that offseason before I got traded to do something with Boston and get the ball rolling,” Seguin said. “So then once everything happened I got traded here, I immediately said, ‘Hey I want to do something, I want to get involved.” And with the tragic accident of one of my childhood best friends, it was a lot easier and I was able to put it together and I knew what I wanted to do and it started with quadriplegics and disabled people in wheelchairs.”
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Seguin connected with the local sled hockey team, the Dallas Sled Stars. He donated a suite for each home game, took part in a sled hockey clinic with Stars captain Jamie Benn, and later competed in a charity game the following summer.
“It was awesome, we kind of got super lucky,” Taylor Lipsett, one of the organizers for the Dallas Sled Stars, said. “We had just met with the Stars, thinking how we could partner with them and how we could grow sled hockey in Dallas. That was two months before Seguin got traded here. He wanted to get involved in the community and he had his friend that got injured and the Stars said ‘Hey, we happen to know some guys that you should meet.”
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Sled hockey can be expensive.
Ice time isn’t cheap and there are high equipment costs. For members of the disabled community, finding the cost to cover a recreation activity isn’t the easiest thing.
That’s why it doesn’t cost a dime for the members of the Dallas Sled Stars.
“With the disabled community there are a lot of expenses involved,” Lipsett said. “Wheelchairs and mobility equipment, but also ongoing medical bills and surgeries and doctor visits and medications, and you name it. Everyone has a different story and something different going on. Kind of the consensus is typically people don’t have a lot of extra money, so we wanted to make it as affordable as possible and available to everyone to come play.”
Through both fundraising efforts and grants from the Dallas Stars Foundation, all of the costs are covered. Ice time, equipment, even travel and lodging for tournaments outside of Dallas are covered.
“If someone wants to try sled hockey in DFW they can do it,” Alfredo Corona, the team president, said. “We have the sleds, we have the ice time, and we accept everyone. If they want to try it out, they can come out and join us every week.”
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Partnering with Seguin helped the program grow, Corona said. It gave more visibility to sled hockey in the local market, helped raise more money, and overall the profile of the Dallas Sled Stars improved in DFW.
Seguin’s involvement also helped introduce more kids to the sport, and Corona said at a typical practice at the Dr. Peppers Stars Center in Famers Branch, there is a good mix of adults and children on the ice.
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Deena Martinez Burns first heard about the sled hockey program and Seguin’s Stars from a friend that had attended a Stars game early in the 2013-14 season.
“I had heard about sled hockey, vaguely, but I thought my son needed to be older,” she said. “I didn’t know about any of it really, and when I was told about it my friend helped me get in contact with the Stars.”
With those conversations, John Ryan was signed up for sled hockey and attended a Stars game in Seguin’s suite. He was nervous at first, but his mom told him he had to try it three times. If he didn’t like it after his third practice he’d be allowed to quit.
By the third time, he was flying around the ice.
“When he first got in the sled he had to have his mom there or his sister. And they had to help him out in every single aspect,” Corona said. “Then within a few times being on the ice he was pushing them away and he wanted to do everything himself. It brought him out of his shell.”
Sled hockey can have that impact. In most disabled sports, including wheelchair basketball, there is still the comfort of a wheelchair. In sled hockey you have to eschew the chair and move out of your comfort zone, it’s a breakthrough that Lipsett has seen with quite a few members of the Dallas Sled Stars.
“That’s honestly what the biggest goal of the program is all about. Getting not just disabled kids, but getting disabled individuals around people that are like them,” Lipsett said. “Getting them out of their wheelchairs or their crutches, whatever they may be using. Get them onto the ice and be independent and show them they can do things they never thought they could do. Or do things that others may have told them they could never do something like this.”
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Lipsett went through it himself. As a child, he was told he would never play sports. He was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, more commonly known as Brittle Bone Disease, and spent almost half his childhood in body casts.
But sled hockey became his release, and he was quite good at it. Now 31, Lipsett is a two Paralympic Gold Medalist in the sport, winning gold in 2010 and 2014, and at next month’s Paralympics, he’ll be providing color commentary during NBC’s coverage of the games.
“I’m amazed what I’ve been able to do with this sport,” Lipsett said. “I was told as a I kid I would never play sports, now I’ve won two gold medals for my country.”
Lipsett and the other members of the Dallas Sled Stars became role models for John Ryan, who as a 10-year-old was starting to think about how he wanted to go to college and what that meant for someone in a wheelchair.
“He started talking to me about things he wanted to do after high school, what colleges, and things like that. And in my mind I started panicking, thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I only have eight years for you to become independent and for you to be able to do that,'” Deena Martinez Burns said. “So as a parent you really start thinking about it, and he was very dependent on me at the time. Going to sled hockey and being all around of those guys, how independent they are, they went through pretty much everything John Ryan was about to go through.”
The adult members of the Dallas Sled Stars became a sounding board for the family, and John Ryan would ask them how they handled certain things as a disabled adult living on their own. Seemingly simple things, like how to get in and out of your own car with a wheelchair, became lessons for the family.
“It was actually cool because I don’t really meet anyone like me in a way,” John Ryan said. “There is no one that really gets what I go through, so that was cool. I learned and how they lived by themselves, and going to college, which I always knew I wanted to do that. But I never actually knew how to do that.”
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Now 14, John Ryan hasn’t been on the ice much in the past 18 months. With central core disease, a form of muscular dystrophy, he has back surgeries to help his growth, but the program has had a lasting impact on the family.
“I really don’t know where we’d be without everyone in that organization,” Deena Martinez Burns said. “It was a life-changing thing, and we’ll get him back on the ice soon.”
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Seguin’s Stars has evolved in the past couple years.
In addition to working with the Dallas Sled Stars, Seguin now works with Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Club of Collin County, and After School All-Stars.
It’s been a rewarding experience for Seguin, who was recently named the Stars ambassador for Hockey is For Everyone, a month-long initiative across the NHL that supports inclusion and acceptance in hockey.
“It’s an honor to get the privilege to be the face of it,” Seguin said. “Since touching down in Dallas, I’ve tried to get the community into loving hockey, it’s been a passion for me. I think hockey is for everyone, so I’m excited to get the call.”
The Stars will hold their Hockey is For Everyone night on Friday against the St. Louis Blues. It’s a big moment for the franchise.
Last season the Stars more or less forgot about the event. While they had scheduled a Hockey is For Everyone game and had a team ambassador, it was Curtis McKenzie, and the night came and went without much celebration.
The team didn’t use pride tape, like most NHL teams do, during warmups. They played a couple of videos with players delivering the Hockey is For Everyone message from the You Can Play Project, but it came off as the Stars doing the bare minimum.
When asked about it at the time, Stars president Jim Lites said it was a “hectic week,” which wasn’t much of an excuse for a league-wide initiative.
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This season the Stars are trying to make up for it.
There is a plan to use rainbow Pride tape to honor the LGBTQ community, and the sticks will be auctioned off with proceeds benefiting the You Can Play Project. The team is also encouraging different groups to attend the game, make signs and make the night a celebration that it wasn’t last season.
“Our sport needs to be inclusive of every aspect of life,” Stars coach Ken Hitchcock said. “I love these initiatives. I love Hockey is For Everyone. I love the initiatives we do with the military and for various charities. Anytime we can create a sense of family, I think that’s the best part of our sport.”
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