San Diego product shining on ice for UMass Lowell
By Chaz Scoggins, [email]
[email protected][/email]
Updated: 12/27/2011 06:49:03 AM EST
LOWELL -- Hockey is generally regarded, and to a certain extent still dismissed, as a regional quirk in the wide world of sports. The game is populated primarily by players born and bred in the northernmost parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
Well, meet sophomore UMass Lowell defenseman Chad Ruhwedel, who, when it comes to geography anyway, is truly the All-American boy.
Born within hailing distance of the Mexican border in San Diego, Ruhwedel (pronounced Roo-wee-dul) grew up in Southern California, played junior hockey in the Midwest, and has now brought his game to the East, where he is leads Hockey East defensemen in overall scoring with 13 points in 14 games.
Living in sunny San Diego, Ruhwedel did all the things Southern Californian kids are known to do. He surfed, played beach volleyball, and golfed, as well as playing the more traditional sports.
So how did he end up playing ice hockey, especially since his dad, John, spent most of his childhood in Saudi Arabia where Chad's grandfather worked in the oil industry and where a single drop of water is hard to find, much less a frozen drop?
"My mom (Robin) grew up in Chicago watching the Blackhawks, so she was instrumental in getting me to skate to see if I would like it," Ruhwedel says. "I started when I was four or five and fell in love with it, and the hockey followed."
Ruhwedel's growing passion for hockey was cause for his friends and classmates at Scripps Ranch High School to
look at him askance.
"Yeah. The majority of the kids at my high school played football, basketball and baseball," he says. "I even played some basketball and football growing up but decided I liked hockey the most and stuck with it."
As soon as he graduated from high school, Ruhwedel left for the Midwest to play two years of junior hockey in the USHL. As hard as it might be for hockey fans in the Northeast to believe, he wasn't the only Californian playing hockey in America's Heartland.
"California has produced a lot of good hockey players over the last 15 years," says Norm Bazin, UMass Lowell's coach and a former assistant coach and recruiter at Colorado College. "I actually had a camp in Los Angeles for five years.
"We had eight or nine of them at Colorado College, and Western Michigan has, I believe, six of them right now. But most of them stay out west for whatever reason, maybe because of the proximity to home. So there aren't that many here."
Wanderlust played a part in Ruhwedel's decision to play for UMass Lowell.
"I'd played juniors in the Midwest and liked it, and if the schools had been a good match for me I would have stayed there," he says. "But I always wanted to try to the East Coast and the Boston area. I'd lived on the West Coast and in the Midwest, and I figured I might as well try the other part of the country."
In addition to Hockey East, UMass Lowell also had the academic reputation he sought.
"I knew I wanted to do something in business, management or finance, and they have a good business program," says Ruhwedel, who made Hockey East's All-Academic Team as a freshman last year.
Read more:
http://www.lowellsun.com/...ci_19624561#ixzz2QJb3Q3pH 
