Stephanie Grossi’s emotions were still running high. Two weeks had passed and nothing changed. Two weeks since the worst loss of her career and she still hadn’t moved passed it.

Anger fueled her this offseason. After a gut-wrenching overtime loss in the College Hockey America championship, Grossi remembered the pain.

“Going from that high back to low of losing,” Grossi said. “… Any time, a tough workout, a tough skate. You’re like ‘This year I want to win’ and you can feel … what it felt like to lose. And you never want to feel that again.”

It took over two weeks for Grossi to become proactive. Throughout the summer, she improved her shooting stance, getting shots off her front foot. She worked on shooting quicker and stickhandling less.

Grossi’s discerning vision of the game solidifies her aim to reach the highest level of play. Since she was 5, she has taken the initiative to get ahead. Throughout her career, her play has repeatedly raised the levels of teammates. The Orange has never won the CHA but received five of the six first place votes in the preseason CHA coaches poll.

Grossi could be the player to lift SU somewhere it’s never been.

“It’d be nice to see her continue on the path of leading our team in scoring, being a first-team College Hockey America all-star, lead us to a championship,” SU head coach Paul Flanagan said.

Grossi accomplished all but one of those feats in her sophomore season. Thirty-six points led all Syracuse scorers and earned her a CHA nod, but what sticks with her is where last season reached its screeching halt.

In the season-opening exhibition against the University of Montreal she displayed her reworked shot. Down 2-0 in the second period, several feet of space opened up in the defensive zone. She released her shot quickly. It careened off a defender’s stick and bounced into the net for the Orange’s first goal in an eventual 3-2 overtime loss.

“She’s actually kind of upped (her role) where she’s an assistant captain and I think just kind of assuming a leadership role as well,” Flanagan said. “… She’s a dynamic player.”

In high school at Shaftesbury Prep in Winnipeg (Canada), Grossi had the same abilities. Shaftesbury Prep head coach Eugene Kaminsky recognized that immediately. Pressed with taking over a start-up hockey program, he had to identify key players to lift the program off the ground

“You could see right away that she had a knowledge of the game,” Kaminsky said. “Unfortunately the only drawback to her was her size … to Stephanie’s credit she used that as an advantage for her to be able to work harder to get to where she needed to get pucks, use her other skillsets.”

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Grossi arrived at Shaftesbury to further progress in skill development and face off with the best competition in Winnipeg and Manitoba, Canada. Before long she was the program’s cornerstone player, setting the school’s records at 88 points and 51 assists in two seasons.

Around a similar timeframe, Grossi helped thrust another program, the Manitoba Under-18 team, into the national spotlight in Canada.

Compared to Ontario and other provinces, there were less players at their disposal and the talent pool was not as strong.

To compensate for that, Grossi empowered her teammates. Some players such as Justine Fredette (Connecticut) are now playing at the Division I level, too, and Kaminsky credits that to them learning from Grossi’s habits.

“That was a big moment for us,” Grossi said of Manitoba’s Under-18 team. “We lost and got silver but that was really special, just getting to the gold medal game.”

During Grossi’s recruitment to Syracuse, Flanagan didn’t realize the full potential of whom he was scouting. He received regular recruiting tips from assistant Brendon Knight. He traveled to Calgary in Alberta, Canada, watching Grossi play three times in two days.

As with Kaminsky, the hockey mindset she possessed protruded immediately to Flanagan. With most incoming players, he recognizes an inability to learn and consistently execute a defensive system. Grossi, meanwhile, knew where to be and when, helping the team bring the puck out of its zones, Flanagan said.

A year later, Grossi stepped into Syracuse’s lineup and just over a month into her collegiate career she recorded two assists in the program’s first ever win over 10-time CHA champion Mercyhurst.

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“I knew she was a very smart, real cerebral player who had real good skills,” Flanagan said, “… I knew she’d make us better but I never knew that she would be someone who we would just really rely on.”

Entering her junior year, she is that player.

Before ever playing in a hockey game at 5 years old, Grossi told her parents she wanted to spend a year power skating. That set up one of the fundamentals she would need to evade defenders and create offense.

There’s a change in gear Flanagan sees in Grossi that others don’t have. While her straight line speed isn’t elite she’s “as fast as anybody” in terms of lateral quickness, Flanagan said.

The Orange was 11-15-10 in Grossi’s first season. She has since become a foundational player for the program. She kills penalties, takes faceoffs, and the offense relies on her scoring load.

“She sees things,” Flanagan said. “She doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head. I’m still looking for a player that does, but she senses and can see things that kind of keep her out of harm’s way.”

With Grossi, every situation on the ice centers around recognition. She routinely slides to the ice at the precise moment needed to interrupt an opponent’s shot. That hockey mindset, firmly engraved in her as a Winnipegger, combined with the extra fundamental focus she sought out distinguishes her. She finds ways to take advantage of the game, Kaminsky said.

She expects this team to be in the CHA championship, but her ultimate goal is the NCAA title game. The pinnacle of hockey is what she has fought to climb her whole life. And she wants to carry Syracuse with her.

Published on October 4, 2016 at 12:24 am

Contact Bobby: rpmannin@syr.edu