Mathieu De St. Phalle said that during the 2018-19 United States Hockey League season he realized he could be an impact player in the country’s top junior hockey league.
A check of the league leaderboard supported that notion. De St. Phalle, a forward, finished the year tied for seventh in assists.
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In the offseason, though, he said he questioned if he had worked hard enough and he wished he could redo certain shifts.
“That kind of led me to realize that I was overthinking a lot of stuff,” said De St. Phalle, who lives in Lake Forest.
De St. Phalle worked with a mental-emotional performance coach on breathing, feelings and visualization, among other things, during the summer and the results have been profound.
De St. Phalle led the USHL with 60 points — on 30 goals and 30 assists — when the league suspended all hockey activities Thursday due to the coronavirus pandemic.
His team, the Chicago Steel, also leads the league with 83 points. Chicago (41-7-1-0) has 15 more points than the second-place team.
“We were definitely happy with where we are at,” De St. Phalle said. “It’s definitely disappointing, but the way the message was portrayed to us, at least, it was just kind of a pause button. And nothing was set in stone where we knew the whole season was over. I think we still have that hope that we’re gonna be back in two weeks or a month or however long it takes.”
Until then, De St. Phalle said he plans to train on his own and follow a program designed by Bobby Lucas, the Steel’s director of performance and sports science.
De St. Phalle, who has also lived in Glencoe and Kildeer in recent years, also spent all offseason honing his skills away from the team. He worked with hockey-specific skills coaches and every two weeks he met with mental-emotional skills coach Pierre DeBar. De St. Phalle, who is committed to Wisconsin and graduated from an online high school, learned of DeBar from Badgers coach and former NHL player Tony Granato.
In short, DeBar said he worked with De St. Phalle to shift from feelings of doubt to feelings of confidence and courage.
“It’s about moving from depleting emotional states to renewing emotional states and you do that through breathing and specific, intentional exercises on changing the way you feel,” DeBar said. “And that’s separate from thinking. Feeling is a different experience than thinking.”
As a result of his work with DeBar — which has continued throughout the season — De St. Phalle said that he’s more positive and not as frustrated on the ice.
“There’s still times I get angry and whatnot. I’m human,” De St. Phalle said. “It’s definitely something that I’ve learned to control. It’s something I’m still working on. I think it’s gotten better and better and that’s the fun part of learning this stuff — you kind of see the improvements throughout the season.”
De St. Phalle also said the visualization exercises he has done with DeBar have made a big difference when he steps on the ice. He said he will visualize things as simple as sitting in his spot in the defensive zone when the opposing team has the puck and shoulder checking.
DeBar emphasized that they are first-person visualization exercises, drawing a distinction with film study, which shows players how they performed in the third person.
“Visualizing, and doing those repetitions in your head, so when you get on the ice, it feels like you’ve done it 40, 50 times,” De St. Phalle said. “It’s really amazing how it works. It’s something you really have to buy into. But the results are really incredible and it’s something that I’ve gotten pretty big on this year.”
Steel coach Brock Sheahan also praised the 5-foot-9, 160-pound De St. Phalle for the work he has done on the ice to transform himself from a playmaker to a goal-scorer. This season, De St. Phalle can score in a variety of ways.
“I remember at this time last year working on him pre-ice or after-ice skills session or after practice (and thinking), ‘Oh man, he like can’t hit a one-timer,'” Sheahan said. “And then if you watched our last game (a 6-5 win over Dubuque), the overtime-winner, he hammers a one-timer. He has spent a lot of time working on that shot.
“He’s spent a lot of time working on his shot off of a catch, like off of a pass. He’s gotten better off of a carry, like how he shoots when he’s entering the zone. He’s scoring in those ways and then he scores around the net. For a small guy to be effective around the net is unique. He’s got all these different layers to his game that he did not have at this point last year.”
Ryan Nilsson is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Twitter @Pioneer_Press
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