Opinion: Falcons’ Ehn still making believers

Let us go back a few years, a little more than a decade ago, to get some understanding of Eric Ehn.

Ehn had just been cut from his Triple-A hockey team. The young Ehn, maybe 10 or 11 years old at the time, walked out of the building with Alice, his angry mom.

“Oh, I was mad about it,” Alice said from the Ehn family home in Dexter, Mich. “But Eric patted me on the back and said, ‘Mom, it’ll be all right. I think there’s a tryout in Detroit tomorrow. Can we go?”

That was Ehn, pronounced “eeen,” then. Adversity never fazed him. That’s been Ehn throughout his hockey career.

The Air Force Falcons’ junior center had been cut from teams. He was told he was too small, too slow and too untalented. And there were those who told Ehn he wasn’t good enough to play at the next level, no matter what that level was. Ehn was even in Junior B hockey, about as close to hockey purgatory as one can get. He was a 16-year-old then, playing with men on a “team of misfits” he said with a chuckle.

“It was a pretty low level of juniors,” Ehn said. “That was like a second option for me. But it was pretty good for me because you can be 21 in that league, and I was 16. So, imagine trying to push around someone four or five years older. It’s not going to work. So, that helped me out with strength and winning pucks when you shouldn’t. I had a couple of good years there and made it to Junior A. It was kind of a blue-collar way of working my way up.”

Ehn is still blue-collar, which showed in his two assists in Saturday’s 3-0 Atlantic Hockey Association victory over Holy Cross. There was Ehn on the boards fighting for the puck on one play and laying out to block a shot on the next.

The same player not good enough for the next level a decade ago is one of college hockey’s best players today. Ehn leads the NCAA with 62 points, including 24 goals. On March 15 he should be one of the 10 players considered for college hockey’s highest individual honor, the Hobey Baker Award.

If Ehn were going to college about 12 miles south at Colorado College, few if any would question his stature as one of the NCAA’s best. Still, even without scoring another point, Ehn has earned the right to be one of the three players at the Frozen Four in St. Louis when the Hobey Baker Award is given.

These days, nobody is looking past Ehn, who also leads the nation in points per game with 1.67.

“No heart. Too small. Too slow. It was always something,” Ehn’s father Bill said. “Not good enough. Not ready. Always something. I’m happy for him now.”

Ehn was never the biggest, fastest or strongest. He studied hockey, always trying to find the best and most efficient way to make a move or score a goal. Ehn’s hockey intelligence, vision and his unwillingness to quit, help him compensate for tools most deem necessary to be a hockey star.

“It’s not always the most talented person who makes it places,” Ehn said. “It’s the person who’s willing to survive the longest.”

For Ehn, surviving was simply handling the adversity.

“A lot of kids get crushed when they don’t make Triple-A midgets,” Air Force coach Frank Serratore said. “He’s a very resilient young man to continue to be told every year that he’s not going to be able to play at the premiere level the next year then find a way to not only get there but to excel.”

Columnist Milo F. Bryant can be reached at 636-0252 or

milo.bryant@gazette.com.