[metaslider id=8181]
CURTIS HENRY
Sports Editor
“Yeah, the [NHL] lockout really couldn’t have f***ed me any worse.”
Blunt and explicit. Those are the only ways that John Cullen knows how to go about things. These are exactly the words that he used to describe the 2012 NHL lockout that essentially ended his hockey playing career and any thought he had entertained of becoming a professional goalie.
Cullen’s road to playing competitive hockey began at the age of four when his dad taught him how to skate. He instantly fell in love with being on the ice, and has been involved with hockey as either a player or a coach over the past 21 years. He associates his rise and success in the sport entirely to his father and brother, who played involved roles in his development as both a player and a person.
“I owe so much to my parents and my family for always supporting me,” Cullen said. “They’ve always been there for me and I really can’t say enough about them.”
Growing up in Hamburg, Cullen is directly a product of the hockey culture in Western New York. He’s seen ice time in different arenas all over the U.S., in Canada and even as a part of the Team USA Juniors squad that took the ice in Slovakia and the Czech Republic as a part of the 2008 under-18 Memorial of Ivan Hlinka tournament. He has spent ice time under the the instruction of Sabres legend Lindy Ruff. He’s even been featured as a player in EA Sports’ NHL ‘11 video game.
Yet, none of it came easily for Cullen.
Cullen’s first adversity came in high school when trying out for the St. Francis junior varsity team. The school was noted for their hockey program, and carried five squads for each tier of ability. The best of the best played first team, next tier played for the second team, and so on. During Cullen’s first season, he was assigned to the fifth team at St. Francis.
“That was my first wakeup call, basically being cut from the JV teams in high school and put on that fifth team,” said Cullen. “My brother had set the standard before me, having played [division I hockey] at Quinnipiac. I had big shoes to fill and I didn’t get off to the best start.”
Even Cullen himself couldn’t have written a better script for the next few seasons of his hockey career. Within two years, no one would recognize him as the struggling 14-year-old who had been relegated to the bottom of his high school’s hockey totem pole.
By the end of his junior year of high school, Cullen had been named player of the year for the Rochester Empire Junior B league. He had received an invitation to the U-18 national team tryouts in Minnesota, as a part of the top 200 prospects nationally. It was there that he was extended an invite to play with the top 21 prospects in Europe a few weeks later.
The kid who was tossed aside as an afterthought at St. Francis had just become regarded as one of the best two youth goalies in the nation. Not a bad turnaround.
The next stop after his first international bout was, of all places, Cleveland.
En route to Chicago to start working out and practicing for the Chicago Steel, a member of the United States Hockey League (USHL), Cullen received what he says is the most important call of his life.
“I was on my way to Chicago with my parents to pursue the USHL, which is a big deal. It’s about the best you can do in the United States in a non-professional league,” explained Cullen. “But we’re on the I-90 about to pass Cleveland and I get a call from the Niagara Icedogs. They want me to come play for them, and I just didn’t know what I was going to do.
“Me and my parents pull off the 90 right there in Cleveland and we sit down at this little diner right off the interstate. We sat and talked about my future playing hockey and what was best for me. It’s crazy how much that hour talking with them changed the course of my life.”
It was at that point that the Cullens decided to reverse course and start the journey back to Niagara for John to begin his Ontario Hockey League career.
His OHL career began with a few hiccups, but despite his lack of traditional size as a goaltender (he measured about 5’11 and weighed in at about 175 for the duration of his time in the OHL), his aggression in net saw him become one of the best goaltenders in the OHL. His approach, described by scouts as “stop the puck at all costs,” was simple — but effective.
Cullen was traded three times in his first three full seasons in the OHL, bouncing around between Niagara, Kingston and Sarnia. It was in 2010 that Cullen’s career would take a turn for the worse.
“The first time I hurt my knee … It was nothing terrible. I tweaked it. It was sore, ya know? I didn’t think much of it,” said Cullen.
That tweak was actually a slight tear in Cullen’s left meniscus, an injury that is by no means a career ender. However, due to the timing of the injury, it went undiagnosed for months.
The tweak had occurred just as Cullen was being shopped from Kingston to Sarnia. Upon his arrival to Sarnia, he had foregone an MRI in lieu of having the team administer cortisone shots.
“I got to Sarnia and they gave me a cortisone shot, and I was like ‘Woah! I feel really good.’ Of course I wasn’t really good, and my knee just slowly got worse and worse. In hindsight, I would’ve had my knee scoped and taken a few weeks to make sure I was 100 percent. Who knows, maybe I’d still be playing,” Cullen said.
Instead, he kept playing. And rather than having his play suffer from the growing severity of the meniscus tear, Cullen began playing the best hockey of his life.
Months after suffering the initial injury, Cullen was traded to the Windsor Spitfires to essentially back-up first-round NHL prospect Jack Campbell. What ensued was a competition for ice time in net, a competition that saw Cullen quickly seize the lead. His 11-game stretch at the end of the 2010-11 season while playing for Windsor was easily the best of his life. A .924 save percentage and a 2.17 goals allowed per game average in Windsor both would have ranked at the top of the OHL league leaders in 2010-11 for Cullen, and his dominant performance had him in position to start for the Spitfires in the first round of the upcoming playoffs, a series that would be played against the Erie Otters.
Just before playoffs were set to begin, Cullen reached a breaking point during preparation for one of the team’s final regular season games.
“I remember it like it was yesterday. We were warming up against Plymouth, and I went down into a butterfly for just a routine save. Nothing out of the ordinary… and it was just this horrific snap that I felt in my knee,” he said. “It wasn’t just the pain. It was the fact that my knee was stuck in this bent position. It was locked at an angle and I couldn’t move it.”
Teammates would help him off the ice, but the outlook wasn’t good for Cullen. Countless months and cortisone shots after the initial tweak to his knee, Cullen’s meniscus had finally given out; in spectacular fashion, nonetheless.
That led to the first of three surgeries. The first was to remove the medial half of Cullen’s meniscus; the damage was so severe that it was no longer salvageable. Despite the severity of the injury and the surgery, Cullen’s recovery was quick enough to get him into a position to accept an invite to the Sabres’ summer camp less than four months later.
Although still competent in goal, it was obvious that the injury was a huge bludgeon to Cullen’s potential and ability to succeed on the ice.
“It was frustrating. That’s all I can say,” said Cullen. “Having to get back on the ice and match up with NHL prospects in the immediate aftermath of that injury — it’s frustrating.”
Immediately after the Sabres camp, Cullen would undergo his second surgery on the same knee in less than six months. It was becoming apparent that the window of opportunity to play the game he loves at the highest level was closing. Though he would stay and play for Windsor for the entirety of the 2011-2012 season, a dip in his save percentage (.892) and spike in goals allowed per game average (3.89) indicated that he was no longer the force he had been a season prior.
The lockout of 2012 — and a third surgery on the same knee — effectively ended Cullen’s career. The lockout was the toughest pill to swallow, as for the start of 2012 there was a huge turnover in where people were playing. NHL players, out of work and unable to stay away from the game, took to playing overseas in different leagues in Europe. Some played in the AHL as well, meaning that different players shuffled into different leagues. Cullen was among those affected by the mass shuffling of talent.
“It was tough. I wanted to go out on my own terms, but I kind of got forced out,” he said.
The third surgery to his battered knee was the nail in the coffin for his playing days.
“I had a doctor say to me, ‘Hey. Do you want to be able to walk your kids to the end of the driveway to get them on the school bus?’ And that was really confusing to me, I didn’t have kids. I didn’t have a thought of kids at that point, in 2012 or 2013,” Cullen said. “But they just sat me down and said ‘Well, if you ever want to have kids and plan on walking them to get on the bus, you need to stop playing hockey.’ And that was really tough.”
Cullen’s love for the game led him to Fredonia, where he has spent chunks of time as the team’s goaltending coach ever since 2013.
Under the wing of coach Jeff Meredith, “Cully” has found his new niche as a coach for the Blue Devils. In an interview done last year, Meredith emphasized the importance of having a guy like Cullen in the locker room.
“Cully’s energy is unmatched and it’s so good for our team,” said Meredith. “I’m pretty sure the guy wakes up in the morning and brushes his teeth with Red Bull.”
Cullen’s admiration for Meredith is obvious as well. He says the hockey culture in Fredonia, despite being a D-III program, is unlike anything he has been around prior.
“Coach Meredith is like a father figure to me, in a lot of ways,” said Cullen. “The cliché of a team being a family is thrown around a lot and it sounds dumb, but one thing I can say with certainty is that coach [Meredith] has created a family here. It’s a great group, and everyone in the world stresses so much about wins and losses. That’s what we’re all here to do: win games. But at the end of the day, we’re a family here, and that’s just as important”
Cullen has recently begun a family of his own, as well. His daughter, Hadley Harper Cullen, will be enjoying her first birthday later on in the week.
“I never understood it before, when people say that their kids are their whole world,” said Cullen. “But the day she was born I got it. My world was no longer about me. It wasn’t about hockey. It was her. She’s the best thing to have ever happened to me.”
What Hadley’s future holds is far from decided, but Cullen was quick to laugh and add “I just hope she likes hockey, that’d be great.”
Cullen intends to graduate this year with a major in journalism and a minor in athletic coaching. On the campus that he’s come to know and love, he sang high praises.
“I’m where I’m at today because of all the people that have helped me at Fredonia,” said Cullen. “Guys like coach Meredith and Elmer [Ploetz]. They’ve helped me so much, along with fellow students here and people in the athletic program. I just can’t thank everyone I have to, or thank them all enough.”