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skyrrhawk · 03-11-2024, 07:03 PM

Sophomore Slump

Celeste Desjardins

Quebec City Citadelles

…or Comeback of the Year?

It’s not really the right song to pick, even if the title is apt. Maybe put it on in the background while you read this. I don’t know. It’s on an album by a band whose only sports related songs are baseball; hockey probably isn’t even a blip on the radar for the guys who wrote Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet and sing about the Cubs breaking the curse.

But we’re not here to talk about music, or baseball, or Pete Rose, or the Cubs, or curses.

I lucked into the position I’m in now. I was a two-sport athlete right up until the time I had to make a decision, and that decision landed me back across the northern border in Quebec City, not quite two hours from the very-not-large town my great-great-grandparents left so many years ago to move to the States.

It was easy enough to figure out how to navigate. My family still speaks at least some French, so that wasn’t really a barrier. My new teammates were all just as new to the area as I was, and honestly, I had a leg up with not having to handle the language barrier. And we meshed really well! We still do. The numbers speak for themselves.

And when the season started, the numbers started racking up. My first point was my first goal. The puck lives in a pocket of my suitcase. But we lost that game to Colorado after my goal tied it up. It was the second game of the season. But even with that we were winning more than we were losing, at least a little. It’s not really like baseball, where .500 is the end goal. You have to be better than that. And we weren’t, really. We lost in five to Detroit. And I went home.

They don’t tell you that home feels different. Or that you feel like you’ve changed, but nothing around you has. When I went back to Lewiston after that Game Five, I wasn’t the same kid who left, but the city was exactly the same as I had left it. Bates, the Colisee, Holy Cross, the Basilica, all of it the same, right down to the Dunks on Main. And that was upsetting enough on the front end.

And then I won the Anrikkanen.

Shit really didn’t feel the same after that.

There I was, rookie of the year. But to all my aunts and uncles and cousins, I was exactly the same as I’d ever been. My high school classmates teased me, but otherwise we didn’t talk about it. It was like it didn’t really exist.

It’s weird. The whole thing feels like a blur. The record-setting season, the commentary on it from folks online, the playoffs knockout, the award.

Going from being a fourth-round stretch pick in the J to being drafted second overall to Manhattan, right behind my number-one-overall teammate.

I mean, all I was doing was playing hockey. Good hockey, with people I liked. It just worked out well. Jeff and Ryland are the best lineys a rookie winger could have possibly asked for, and I was so excited to get back to practice and back to work with them for another season.

So I get back to QC. My nameplate’s up in the locker room, C. Desjardins. All around me- S. Solberg, F. Solberg, J. Hunziker, R. Murphy, J. Tymer, L. Roze, A. Smokes, R. O’Beirne, S. Pawn. No more Net Man (though, honestly, I’m not sure we’re ever free of Net Man). New rookies, which was weird to think about, because I still felt like a rookie. (Fredrik, Supah, and Demir absolutely stepped up their game and killed it. So did Anna, once we got her.) Our goalies? Rookie tandem. Kind of an insane thing to be entering a season with. (Lukas and Ju-gong were absolute beasts. Just stone cold killers. It was incredible to be able to watch every day!)

And we clicked. It was like the offseason hadn’t happened. Practice felt incredible. My passes were picture-perfect, tape to tape. My shots were on target, bar down in the top corners or skipping right through the five hole. Everything was working exactly the way it should.

So when the season started, we were ready.

As a kid, my uncle was my soccer coach. He’d played collegiate varsity and to me at seven, eight, nine years old? That basically made him God. And on the way home from practice sometimes, when I was complaining about a teammate’s inability to understand a drill that was as clear to me as the glass in the living room windows, he’d stop me and he’d say Cel, when you’re on a team, you have to make each other better.

I didn’t get it, then. I thought he meant that I should be trying to help my teammates see the game the way I do. That’s not it at all. I think what he meant was that you and your teammates have to complement each other and be able to see where the faults in each others’ game is. You have to be able to make up for what your teammates lack. And we were doing that. My God, we were doing that.

We just kept winning.

I couldn’t tell you how, or why. I couldn’t tell you what it was that we were doing, or what gaps we were seeing in the armor of the rest of the league. Sure, I can look at the stats. They’re all right there. They’re good. They tell the whole story.

Right?
Well. No. They don’t tell the whole story. They do, on paper, sure. They tell you how the season went, how every player on the team performed, who struggled, who didn’t. That we had a monstrously successful season and then fell short.

The part of the story that the stats don’t tell is the part where the title of this entry comes in: the Sophomore Slump. And I know that people will call that a ridiculous statement. I know that people will look at this and say, Desjardins is a crybaby, Desjardins has an ego, what a pretentious little freak, can’t get used to not getting boosted by their teammates, blah, blah, blah. Seventy points isn’t a slump, people will say. It’s more than a point per game. (I’ve done the math, I know- it’s 1.06 repeating, call it 1.1.) Shut up about your sophomore slump, that’s more points than some players see in their whole J career.

But the problem here is that I was beating myself up about it. I was agonizing over it. It wasn’t good enough. That’s the problem with coming right out of the gate as hot as I did as a rookie. Nothing I’ve done since has lived up to it. (I know that’s not a lot, and there’s a lot of career ahead of me. But.)

I tried to take it easy. I tried to keep to my routines and not let the brainworm get in. But before long, I realized that the video essays I usually watched had turned into tape, and pranks at practice had turned into studying my teammates’ failures in drills and asking Coach to film my own drills so that I could pick myself apart, too. It felt like I was slamming my head against a wall, unable to fix what was seemingly going wrong.

Playoffs weren’t better. Like I said before: we lost. Embarrassingly.

So I looked forward to the World Juniors. My first appearance there wasn’t great. Team NA’s leadership struggled with what to do with me, I think, and there wasn’t much to note about the tournament. Aside from the fact that I had an awful time, played horribly, and came back to Quebec to beg my coaches and GM with the Citadelles to please never put me on the penalty kill. (I know my strengths. It’s not the PK. I should not ever be on the kill, and I’m at peace with that.)

Being with USA White was better. A lot better, actually. Except for the part where I played the exact same number of games as I did with Team NA the previous tournament. And the part where I destroyed the mental of my own QCC teammate by lighting him up for a hat trick in the first game of the round robin. (Sorry, Ju-gong!) I had twice as many points with USA White. Ryland was named captain of the team, I got an A, we were still playing the same line. And my center for the tournament was, again, somebody I know and have played with- shoutout Fenix, it’s always great to be on your wing. We made a great team, backed up by an honestly pretty sick six. (All my teammates killed it, not just the ones I’ve specifically mentioned here.)

And we lost. To Team Norden. It was a murder, honestly. I couldn’t get shit on net until the last minute, in a lost cause of a game, a pointless unassisted goal. Like a vanity project. I blacked out. I don’t remember scoring. I do remember snapping my stick on the boards on my way into the tunnel. I think if I’d had anything other than the tunnel vision that I had at the end of that game, I would’ve struggled a lot more coming back to my team after the tournament. Like, I won’t lie and say I don’t resent my teammates a little bit for making it further in the tournament than I did. And there were so many of us on USA White that I just ended up feeling like I let them down. Just like during the season.

As I write this, we’re ten games into the new season in the J. My junior season in the juniors, if you will. And I’m still not happy with how I’m playing, where my numbers are. Ryland’s not my liney anymore, the result of reshuffling after Jeff’s callup to the Show. If you look at the leaderboards, I’m not at the top of any of them.

That’s not totally true. I’m third, as I write this, in shots. Sixty two. And how many of those have gone in? Seven. Eleven point two nine percent. The puck luck is gone. And the Sophomore Slump clearly still doesn’t want to let me go.

I don’t know if the Anrikkanen is cursed. Maybe it is. That’s a lot of information to go digging after, and I don’t want to do it, or make myself feel worse. But it’s hard to not feel like I’m letting down my current teammates, let alone the team that burned a second overall pick on me. Did I deserve that? I don’t know. It’s like an unstoppable force and an immovable object: my ego and competitive drive versus the reality of my current stats.

So I’m trying to be realistic. I’m trying to be a benefit to the team. If that means I have less points, I need to be okay with that, as hard as it is. But at least it’s made easier by the fact that I love my teammates, and we’re all just trying to build each other up. It’ll be hard to leave that behind when we move on to the Show. To Calgary, Tampa Bay, Buffalo, Chicago, Winnipeg, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Manhattan.

It’ll be okay, though. It’ll be tough, but it’ll be okay. There’s a lot of time left.

CODA.

So I wrote this what feels like forever and a day ago and just.. never sent it off? So before I do- soon- I’m adding this kind of end of season update. I mean, I even said I wrote all this when we were ten games into the season, and now it’s playoffs. I ended up four points short of 100 for the regular season. We had the first-round bye. The new World Juniors rosters have been announced.

And so I know that maybe the whole point that I started out with here is irrelevant. Or maybe it isn’t, because the sophomore slump is clearly real, and my own dejection about it was clouding my view of my actual skill and ability. Because that’s all it was- a slump.

It’s been really interesting to look back at what I originally intended to submit, because it’s like a time capsule of my mental state at the beginning of the season. Not good. And now that it’s good again, that my stats are back on the upswing, it’s a lot easier to look forward to the future.

The future where I get to raise the Cup with my best friends, where I get to be back on a Team USA line with Ryland and Shadow with Bog and Peanut at my back for another chance at gold medal glory. The future where I still have a shot at blowing up team records, to leave my name behind inked on plaques and banners in the halls of the Videotron Center.

Nobody’s ever really a ghost in sports, you know? Nobody’s ever really gone. So maybe I’ll make good on that Anrikkanen win and go big. Or maybe I won’t, and I’ll just be another name in a list of legendary draft busts in sports, somebody who only comes up when it’s time to remember some guys, as the saying goes.

And I’m just some Franco kid from Lewiston. That’s really something to think about, isn’t it? How many notable athletes have come from my hometown? I can probably list them. Bill Carrigan, three-time World Series champ and Boston Red Sox player-manager. Joey Gamache, featherweight boxer. Rick DiPietro, who I really don’t think I need to say more about.

Maybe Céleste Desjardins will be next to that list. Maybe it’ll be like DiPietro, with a Wikipedia addendum calling me a notable draft bust. Maybe it’ll be like Carrigan, noting wins of the biggest trophy attainable in my league. But there’s a lot of time between now and then. How should I know what’s going to be written in my Wikipedia infobox or next to my name on a list of Lewiston’s notable people?

And I think of my uncle, looking at me and saying Cel, you have to make each other better. And I know he’s right. And I know we do. That’s the secret sauce, you know? It’s not the weird goalie habits or teammates (mostly) lovingly bullying each other over silly superstitions. It’s not the insane collaborative team pregame playlists or weird shrines in stalls or pranks pulled on the bus. It’s the fact that we just like each other.

I get to show up every day and be out on the ice with my best friends. With the people who have seen me at my best and my worst throughout my journey up to this point. And it’s been an honor to play with them for three seasons, and I’m excited to be looking ahead to one more.

So.

To the future.

To escaping the sophomore slump.

To Quebec City.

To us.

[2542 words]

Le Thrill · 03-11-2024, 07:15 PM

Greatest bust of all time

*Puppy* · 03-11-2024, 07:16 PM

Loved the read, let's reflect on a cup win next time around!

***HabsFanFromOntario*** · 03-11-2024, 07:26 PM

Senior year quantum leap incoming

Tsunny · 03-11-2024, 07:46 PM

Wow... Just wow. I'm absolutely lost for words. Such a great article. Though i must make one thing clear. You're one of the best players i have played with and I'm happy to share the same line with you for one more season. Anyone who calls my best friend, Celly a bust will have to face the consequences of one or two sticks being broken in half on their head.

Ps.: Sorry about the World Juniours. I didn't want to approach you after the game as i knew you were not happy.

- Sonja S.

*NaomiMannequeen* · 03-11-2024, 08:36 PM

I don't see a bust in front of me. I see a player who's perservered through hardships, heartaches, ups and downs of all kinds. I see a teammate who uplifts the team with pranks, hype highlight reel plays and knowing what to say when I don't. I see an alternate captain deserving of their A on their jersey for all that they do to help make this team what it is. I see a friend who uplifts my spirits and makes me want to be a better person everyday. Thanks for being my teammate Céleste! Let's win the four star back to back, alright?

- Frøya Solberg

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