Kyle Rancourt Story

April 12, 2011

Rachel Lenzi

When Joanne and Eric Rancourt took their son, Kyle, to his first hockey game, they noticed something unique about the two-year-old. While some toddlers would get fussy or hold more of a fascination with the team mascot, Kyle Rancourt was captivated by the players on the ice, and he paid full attention to the flow of the game. 

He began skating months later and began playing hockey when he was 5 years old. But only a few years into playing hockey, Kyle was at a crossroads – a place that people don’t reach for years. Hockey wasn’t fun. Skating up and down the ice was hard work. In his second year of playing mites, Kyle battled asthma and he and his family wondered if playing hockey was worth it, or if he should leave the sport. But a coach needed a volunteer to play in goal and Kyle was the first to volunteer.

“He tried it,” Joanne Rancourt said. “And he loved hockey again. He wanted to play, and that was it.”

He was only two, but the game hooked Kyle in. And in five years as a goalie, the game has sustained him through the difficult times that his family has endured. 

A 10-year-old from Gardiner, Mass., Kyle will attend the Tim Thomas Hockey Camps this summer – he will take part in the camp in August in Marlborough, Mass., his second camp in two years. But hockey has provided a family bond, not just for his immediate family but through his parents and grandparents. When Joanne was young, she and her father watched Bruins games, and Eric coached and played hockey, his love for the game encouraged by a youth hockey coach who took an interest in seeing him develop as a goalie. 

“There’s something about hockey, it brings everybody together,” Joanne said. “You don’t think about anything else in that time you’re watching a game. It’s very relaxing.”

Yet his family has struggled, and when Kyle needed something to hold onto, hockey became Kyle's salvation. His father is a Gulf War veteran who nearly died on the operating table during major surgery. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer. As a result, Kyle has had to grow up quickly, but he also discovered the importance of having a release.

“It means a lot to me,” said Kyle, a fourth-grader who plays for Winchendon Youth Hockey in Massachusetts. “It clears my mind of all the stuff that’s gone on."

With her husband limited physically as a result of surgeries, including procedures to remove part of his spine and a rib and a surgery that nearly took his life, it was up to Joanne to keep Kyle active, even after her own diagnosis and treatment. She scheduled her own doctors appointments around her son's hockey games and practices, a decision that some would see as an alarming sacrifice. But to Joanne, it was to provide for her son.

“I was recovering from my last surgery right before camp and I thought, ‘I want to get him to camp,” Joanne said. “I argued with my doctors about treatment and I said, ‘No, we’re not doing this. I have to bring my son to hockey.’ I was more stressed about hockey and how the impact of my diagnosis would affect hockey.

“But Kyle had to grow up a lot.”

Yet like many youth players, Kyle created a vision for himself and his future in the sport. He talks about where he wants to play college hockey, and continuously talks about what he learned at his first Tim Thomas Hockey Camp last summer.

“I liked that they worked on a lot of things that me and other kids weren’t doing right, and they taught you how to do it right," Kyle said. "They really helped me out. It made me happy, really happy. Just to learn the stuff I wasn’t doing right and to correct it, and to do it a lot better.”

At the camps, Kyle not only met other goalies, but met college and professional hockey players who served as camp counselors – people he could relate to on a certain level.

“He saw it and thought, ‘I can be that kid,’ ” Joanne said. “It gave him more of a drive. He really started thinking about high schools and about colleges.”

And his experience has already helped fulfill one of his mother’s hopes for him - that his journey through hockey has impacted him in a good way. Likewise, Kyle believes that the involvement of his parents and grandparents, not just in the game but as a collective group - a team, if you will - have aided him in finding his lifelong passion for hockey. 

"It makes me happy," he said. "It makes me feel good to see my family doing that, being involved.”

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Rachel Lenzi covers hockey for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram