Max Shear and his teammates enjoyed a banquet with their adversaries from Canada, then “the last game was the next morning and we went right back to trying to kill each other,” he said with a laugh on the phone on Wednesday night.
There were modifications and some different rules to accommodate the fact that all of the players on the ice are blind, but in the end, it was just hockey.
That meant there may have been a little bit of trash talk between players from neighboring countries, the action on the ice was full of spirit, and in the end, the faster team used that advantage to sweep three games between the U.S. and Canada at the second Team USA Blind Hockey Classic in Fort Wayne, Indiana last weekend.
Shear, a 17-year-old senior at Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake High who became legally blind when he was 10 because of a brain tumor, was in the middle of it all, and thoroughly enjoyed playing in the Classic, even if the Canadians outscored the Americans by a combined 19-3 to win three games in three days.
“I think I fit in just fine,” he said. “I try to listen as much as possible and not really try to take control a whole lot. Before all the games, I figured out the past couple years how to control my nerves. It’s too big of an issue for me.
“It was more of a mindset going into it that I was going to have the most fun playing hockey that I’ve had in awhile. That’s how I went in, and that’s how I came out of it. I felt like it was a great weekend.”
“It was extremely fun,” said Max’s mom, Holly. “We were so proud of him and the way that he played, and with everybody. I did prepare and had some Kleenex in my bag, but I didn’t need it, because he just looked so calm and collected out there. It looked very natural when he first came out. In fact, the first game, he was the first one on the ice.”
Max Shear was playing Squirt-level hockey with the Schenectady Youth Hockey Association as a 10-year-old when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
He survived three surgeries in a span of 2 1/2 months, but the peach-sized tumor and excess cranial fluid damaged his optic nerves.
Shear meets the standard of legal blindness based on under 20/200 vision that corrective lenses can’t help.
He still loved ice hockey, though, and in 2019 was introduced to the version of the game designed for blind players. The primary difference is a larger puck made of metal that contains ball bearings to create a rattling sound the players can follow.
His big breakthrough came this year, when he attended tryouts as a skater for the U.S. Blind Hockey Team in Minneapolis and Buffalo and made the team, just in time to play in the Classic.
Despite being the youngest player on the team by eight months, Shear played a regular shift in Fort Wayne.
“You might say I got a little too much ice time,” he said. “How it worked out was I ended up being on the first penalty kill, and the first game it seemed like I played at least half the game.
“They were drawing everything [penalties on the U.S.], mainly because it seemed like they were diving a lot or they were just really light on their skates, which led to at least a couple.”
Canada won the respective three games by scores of 7-1, 5-1 and 7-1.
Besides the U.S. team frequently playing short-handed because of penalties, it didn’t take long for Shear to notice that Canada simply moved faster than the Americans.
“I enjoyed just the speed of it,” he said. “They’re just that much faster than us. It gives us something that we can shoot for and also brings you back to my younger days of playing youth hockey. At least for my age, it was relatively fast.
“It [penalties] definitely hurt us. We didn’t have much offense 5-on-5 anyways, so putting us on the penalty kill didn’t help. But the whole team’s getting better. The last time we played, I think the scores were like 10-1, 11-1, and this time they were only 5 or 6 to 1.”
Shear didn’t score any of the Americans’ three goals, “but I kind of prevented quite a few,” he said.
“Very first shift, he got a two-minute tripping penalty,” Holly Shear said. “And in the second game, on the second shift, he got a two-minute tripping penalty. So we were kind of waiting for the third shift of the third game, but he managed to stay out of the box.”
Max also managed to stay in bed much longer than usual the morning after the Shears got back from Fort Wayne, despite his desire to follow his usual school routine on Monday.
The family drove from Glenville to Erie, Pennsylvania, and broke the 11-hour drive into two legs over two days last week, but Max’s parents, Holly and Dave, took turns without an overnight stop on the way back.
“Max wanted to get home and go to school,” Dave said. “He didn’t want to miss another day of school, so we figured it out. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s do-able. We’ll have to rotate drivers, four hours on, something like that. And we did get here around 1:30, 2 o’clock in the morning [Monday]. The only problem was at quarter of 7, when he was supposed to get up to go to school, he was still lights out. And he slept ‘til, what, noon?”
“He wasn’t the only one that slept ‘til noon,” Holly said.
The family will have some busy hockey trips again next year, when the U.S. team will reciprocate with their Canadian counterparts and play in Toronto March 24-26. Then there’s the Disabled Hockey Festival in St. Louis the following weekend.
They’re likely to again see many of the same families of Team USA players, who traveled from all corners of the country for the Classic in Fort Wayne.
And Max will get to don his Team USA uniform again.
“Maybe there was a little more weight [playing against Canada], but I knew there wasn’t a big chance that we would win,” he said. “It just seemed the games were a hell of a lot closer than they were a couple years ago. It was just exciting to me that we’re heading in the right direction.”
“I still see him enjoying the game, I still see him skating fast,” Holly said. “The only thing is every once in awhile he doesn’t know where the puck is. That’s everybody that plays blind hockey. It comes with the territory. But to me, he seems like the same old kid going out and doing the best that he can and shining.”
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