George Young misses having Sunday dinner with his family.
His parents are pretty handy in the kitchen and George appreciates all the homemade cooking he got used to growing up in Stephenville Crossing.
He misses hanging out with some of his close friends.
Being separated from his girlfriend also makes it tough to be away from home.
It’s all part of the sacrifice he’s making in his desire to play college hockey in the United States.
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The 19-year-old son of George Sr. and Tracy Young left home two years ago to play hockey on the mainland. He spent last season playing for the Ottawa West Gold Knights of the CCHL Tier 2 hockey league, an affiliate of the Nepean Raiders of the Canadian Central Hockey League.
This season, he found his way to the Hearst Lumberjacks of the Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League, where he plays a defensive role and is one of the team’s top penalty killers.
Young didn’t make the cut with the Raiders this season, but the general manager of the team put him in touch with Lumberjacks coach Marc Lafleur and eventually a deal was struck for Young to join the team.
Young has his moments where his mind wanders back to his family and friends. But he said going away to play hockey was something he wanted to do for a long time and he knew it meant being away from people he cared about for extended periods of time.
He was never going to be the guy who was willing to stick close to home when he finished high school and find a job close to home.
He wanted to be able to explore and travel, to find out what was going to be the next chapter in his life and he wanted hockey to be something that he continued to do.
“I’ve never been pushed. It’s always been my own desire to go away and play hockey,” Young said Tuesday afternoon.
Young is enjoying life in Hearst. The team draws about 800 fans a game and they are pretty boisterous, so he loves the environment. He likes the players he shares the ice with and heaped praise on the coaching staff for creating an atmosphere to learn and have fun with the game.
He has met some nice people, as the team is connected to the community in a big way. The players went to a local store at Halloween and passed out candy. The players just participated in the Christmas parade in town.
He has every reason to be happy, so he’s glad he joined the team. It’s a community where French is the first language, and he’s looking forward to being bilingual — something he sees as an added bonus of being a Lumberjack.
He’s able to form a few sentences in French now and he picks up words from time to time in conversations with the guys.
“It’s actually better than I expected. I took French a bit in school, but I wasn’t very good at it,” he said.
Life would be better in Hearst if he could have Jigg’s dinner from time to time. For now, that’s not in the picture, so he will just have to take an extra helping when he joins his family around the table during the holidays.
