CHILLWACK — Mitch Topping is the baby of the family – the Chilliwack Bruins family that is.
For most 15-year-olds, walking into the Bruins locker room for the first time, and being surrounded by a group of big, burly 18-, 19- and 20-year olds, would be like the first day of school, not knowing a soul, not knowing where to go, not knowing who’s a friend or a foe.
But not for Topping. For the Red Deer product, walking into that locker room was like walking into his bedroom. Cozy.
“It’s a very close-knit group here,” said Topping, the youngest player on the team, who’s now 16. “I’ve never been a part of a team like this before . . . there’s no real difference between me and the guys who are 17, 18, 19 and 20. The old guys treat the young guys with respect and the young guys treat the old guys with the respect . . . a lot of these guys are my best friends.”
Topping isn’t your average teenager, though.
At 15, the kid, who was selected by the Bruins eighth overall in the 2008 Western Hockey League, stepped onto the ice like he owned it.
“Most kids his age, when they get the puck on their stick, they’ll throw it away right away,” said Bruins defenceman Jesse Craig, 21, the oldest player on the team. “But Mitch showed so much patience and poise. At such a young age, that’s rare.”
Topping’s confidence scored huge in Craig’s eyes.
He took the kid under his wing, making sure he felt comfortable on the team, and making sure that his confidence never faded.
“You don’t see a lot of kids these days with the hockey smarts Mitch has,” said Craig. “In this league, maintaining a high level of confidence is so important . . . helping him fit in was the right thing to do.”
Being from an athletically-minded family (his mom was a competitive swimmer, and his dad played professional rugby in Australia), Topping dabbled in several sports, including soccer and gymnastics, before being drawn to hockey.
“I came home from gymnastics one day and said ‘I want to play hockey,’ and that was that,” he recalled.
Topping laced up his first pair of skates when he was four years old, and glided, stick-free, around the outdoor rink that was located across the street from his family’s home in Red Deer.
For the most part, the hobby came natural to him.
But when it didn’t, he forced it into being.
“I’m a bit of a perfectionist,” he said. “Whenever I fell over, I’d get so mad and try it again.”
When he saw the older guys playing shinny on the boarded rink nearby, he knew that’s what he wanted to do.
“It blew me away,” he said, remembering the moment clearly in his head. “I remember thinking ‘How can I get to be that good?’”
Topping has spent the majority of his young, hockey career in a leadership role, captaining both his bantam AAA team in Red Deer and the Central Thrashers in the 2008 Alberta Cup, a prestigious tournament for high-level, graduating bantam players.
He’s also been a captain at home to his younger brother, Joel, who is among the top prospects for this year’s WHL bantam draft.
“It was different coming here, because I was always the older brother at home,” said Topping.
But in the Chilliwack Bruins locker room, he was adopted by 22 older brothers for him to look up to.
kbartel@theprogress.com