A Season Off The Ice

Gabriela Espos­i­to

Novem­ber 11, 2021

 

The 2019 to 2020 hock­ey sea­son was the longest time defense­men Roman Kinal had ever been off the ice.

Just months after sit­ting out his entire sopho­more sea­son due to blood clot­ting, Kinal came back to dom­i­nate the fol­low­ing sea­son, earn­ing him an alter­nate cap­tain title as a junior on the 2021 to 2022 rink.

Dur­ing pre­sea­son train­ing, the then sopho­more had felt a tight­en­ing in his left arm. Accord­ing to him, the sen­sa­tion was sim­i­lar to that of a post-work­out “pump.” After a pre­cau­tion­ary ultra­sound, doc­tors found sev­er­al clots in his left side due to an extra rib.

Unlike the nat­ur­al ark of a healthy rib, Kinal’s addi­tion­al rib was straight, caus­ing immense pres­sure on his veins and arter­ies. Accord­ing to his doc­tors, the rib had been there for a while, but the dan­ger of it had only just become symp­to­matic. Doc­tors told Kinal that he was lucky they found it when they did.

“My first thought when I found out the sever­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion was ‘am I going to live?’,” Kinal said.

After the relief of know­ing he would sur­vive, Kinal won­dered how he would do so with­out hock­ey. A surgery to remove the prob­lem­at­ic rib left Kinal on blood thin­ners for eight months, sen­tenc­ing him to a sea­son off the ice. Accord­ing to Kinal, the inabil­i­ty to play was the hard­est part of the recov­ery process. And not only would he lose the abil­i­ty to skate, but the sense of struc­ture and pur­pose that drove his entire life was sud­den­ly gone.

“Hav­ing that every­day sched­ule of prac­tice and work­out may seem like a grind when you’re in it, but as soon as that’s tak­en away from you, you feel lost. So the most chal­leng­ing part of the injury was the men­tal side of it for sure,” he said.

As a per­son who spent more of his life skat­ing than walk­ing, learn­ing he wouldn’t be able to skate for those months was unimag­in­able to Kinal.

Kinal grew up among the shat­tered mir­ror of lakes and rivers which make up Water­ford, Mich. Look­ing up the south­east town, it’s not a won­der how Kinal was drawn to hock­ey. Water­ford adver­tis­es it’s L.L. Bean meets Hall­mark-esque char­ac­ter, describ­ing on it’s web­site the many win­ter activ­i­ties offered by the lakes, such as skat­ing, snow-mobil­ing and skiing.

How­ev­er, his home town’s ameni­ties were not the only influ­ence on Kinal’s career. His dad played at North­east­ern— now, a Hock­ey East rival of the Huskies— from 1983 to ‘87.

“My dad start­ed coach­ing me when I was eight, but it was nev­er forced,” Kinal said.

Grow­ing up as a Kinal, was grow­ing up as a hock­ey fam­i­ly. Win­ters meant look­ing for­ward to when the lake out­side their house froze over.

Kinal received much of his ear­ly coach­ing from his dad on nature’s rink. Accord­ing to Kinal, it was his dad who first began to notice a nat­ur­al defense­man in him.

“He noticed that at a young age I was doing some real­ly good things, defen­sive­ly, so he kind of sug­gest­ed it at one point,” Kinal said.

Like in many sports, there is some nat­ur­al dis­po­si­tion which defines hock­ey play­ers’ tal­ent and dri­ves them to a cer­tain posi­tion, accord­ing to Kinal.

“It’s the way you see plays and it’s the way you’re able to break up the oppos­ing team’s offense while hav­ing a good stick… Your abil­i­ty to be in a good posi­tion all the time,” he said.

Since his dad first spot­ted that in him, Kinal has grown in defense from high school hock­ey, the NAHL and USHL, to UConn. Dur­ing his pre-col­lege gap year, play­ing for the Dubuque Fight­ing Saints of the USHL, he ranked fourth among the team’s defensemen.

His promise quick­ly earned notice from the East and in 2018 the Ice Bus picked him up. With Cavanough’s recruit­ment rep­u­ta­tion as a pipeline of tal­ent, Kinal didn’t disappoint.

The young Husky quick­ly made him­self at home on the new ice. As a fresh­man, Kinal was the only rook­ie to see action in 34 games, end­ing the sea­son with sev­en points on one goal, six assists, and 29 blocked shots, rank­ing ninth among Hock­ey East rookies.

His quick rise dur­ing his first year, made the fall to bedrest all the more bru­tal at the start of the sec­ond. Giv­en Kinal had nev­er dreamed of a life out­side of hock­ey, his sud­den loss of iden­ti­ty was shocking.

“I nev­er thought about giv­ing it up. There’s no piece of me that I thought I was­n’t going to play hock­ey,” he said.

At the time of his injury, he had not yet decid­ed on a major. How­ev­er, dur­ing those eight months, he had to turn his focus to suc­cess in recov­ery and school. A month after get­ting out of the hos­pi­tal, Kinal remem­bers being on the phone with his mom and express­ing how dif­fi­cult it was to cope with his new reality.

“She told me to ‘find the pos­i­tives’. Instead of me think­ing ‘why me’, I shift­ed my think­ing to ‘how can I ben­e­fit from this’. I was able to do real­ly well in school, find a major that I am real­ly inter­est­ed in. I was able to watch every game from the stands, which taught me a lot about how we as a team can be bet­ter, and I was able to point out ten­den­cies of the oppos­ing teams,” Kinal said.

Accord­ing to Kinal, Coach Cavanough sparked his inter­est in stocks which led him to declare eco­nom­ics as a major. Though Kinal doesn’t see him­self stop­ping hock­ey any­time soon, he imag­ines that invest­ment bank­ing might be a career he’d be inter­est­ed in.

Dur­ing this time, Kinal had dai­ly recov­ery ses­sions with one of the team’s train­ers, Ed.

“I remem­ber being in our train­ing room every­day ask­ing our train­er Ed, ‘when can I skate?’ I knew it was a long shot, but I just had to ask every time I saw him,” Kinal said. “My body felt good enough to go out and skate, but I was on blood thin­ners, so they had to be extra cau­tious with me because the slight­est fall or bump could cause inter­nal bleeding.”

Kinal said he thinks it was in Feb­ru­ary when he heard the response he’d been pray­ing for. Ed told him he could skate for only 10 min­utes. Kinal raced to get his gear on.

“I had so much emo­tion. Skat­ing around and hav­ing the wind hit your face… there is noth­ing like it,” he said.

But the end of one part of recov­ery meant the start of anoth­er dif­fi­cult comeback.

“Though it felt amaz­ing to be out there, I knew I had a lot to work on. I was so out of shape and lost a lot of strength,” Kinal said.

For 10 to 15 min­utes each day, train­ers helped Kinal become re-acquaint­ed with the ice. He had nev­er tak­en this much time off and the dif­fer­ence he felt get­ting back on it was painful, both phys­i­cal­ly and mentally.

“It was like ‘jeez can I even play at this lev­el again?,’” Kinal said he remem­bers thinking.

In the moment, the process of regain­ing strength and skill seemed impos­si­bly slow to Kinal. How­ev­er, the months lead­ing up and into fall of 2020 wit­nessed the rapid resur­gence of an underdog.

Kinal came back stronger as a play­er and a per­son. His first sea­son back, he played in 16 games, end­ing the sea­son back with six points com­ing on a goal. He blocked 12 shots and picked up two assists, help­ing the Huskies secure wins against the Uni­ver­si­ty of New Hamp­shire and Boston College.

His unde­ni­able val­ue on and off the ice got him vot­ed in as alter­na­tive cap­tain for the cur­rent sea­son. In the 2021 pre­sea­son press con­fer­ence, Kinal shared a say­ing among the team, “Iron sharp­ens iron.” The proverb means that indi­vid­ual growth and group strength are con­tin­gent on one anoth­er. With­out his injury, Kinal wouldn’t have been able to bring his unique per­spec­tive and wis­dom as a play­er who observed the sea­son off the ice.

Though the Huskies fell, bru­tal­ly, a cou­ple week­ends ago in their back-to-back week­end games against Ohio State, Kinal scored his first goal of the sea­son that Fri­day. Since then, the Huskies have rebound­ed with three more wins, their best start ever (6–3‑0) in the nine sea­sons under Cavanough.