Day 1 of the U.S. National Team Development Program’s Evaluation Camp in March was a practice session, scheduled before a grueling run of games over the next four days, which helped decide the final U-17 roster. The 40 players invited were split into groups of forwards and defensemen. Members of the latter started blasting shots from the point, eager to prove themselves in the biggest job interviews of their lives.
Then there was Christian Semetsis.
“Barely lifting the puck off the ice,” he said.
The left shot from Mount St. Charles was nursing a particularly nasty sprained left wrist he’d suffered in the Northeast Pack playoffs in February when he arrived in Plymouth, Mich. It was killing him. His shot wasn’t the only problem — he couldn’t hit anybody, either, and even the push-ups during off-ice training sessions hurt.
Back in Long Island on New York, Tony Colombo received a text. “Every time I come to one of these things I (expletive) suck,” Colombo recalled it reading.
Colombo, a coach, trainer and “second dad,” told Semetsis to call him later that night. Semetsis obliged, then started unloading. He’d spent the entire day trying to do what the other defensemen were doing: walking the line and shooting from the point. What scouts like, Semetsis had told himself, were defensemen with big shots.
“Listen,” Colombo told Semetsis. “You know me. I’m as honest as they come. And I’m going to tell you straight up. If you think you’re making this team because of your shot, you ain’t making this team.”
Colombo coached and trained Semetsis, 15, for eight years with the Long Island Royals before his lone season at Mount. On training days, he’d put the kid through the wringer, then watch him skate two more full laps with the Zambonis before exiting the rink. On game days, he’d watch a one-man breakout that never lost energy. He once kept Semetsis on the ice for an entire third period.
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The wrist was not the problem.
“You’re making this team because of your skating ability,” Colombo told Semetsis. “And last I checked, your legs ain’t (expletive) broken. So show off your goddamn legs.”
Semetsis listened. And he will live in Plymouth beginning this fall.
Steve Rizer, the director of the Royals, was asked for an NHL player to compare Semetsis’ play style to.
“Kind of like a Cale Makar,” he said.
All right, maybe not as shifty as Makar, admitted Colombo, who knows the Smithtown, N.Y., native’s game better than anyone. Still, Colombo’s comparison? “Quinn Hughes.”
The evaluation of Semetsis is not complicated. Sure, he’s certainly got an all-around skill-set. When his wrist is healthy, Semetsis can indeed score (33 goals over the past three seasons), and Colombo and Mount St. Charles coach Jim Creamer agree Semetsis has a legitimate, and improving, defensive game. But those are merely secondary tools in a box featuring a sledgehammer.
“One of the best pure skaters I’ve ever been around,” Creamer said.
It’s the reason Semetsis made the NTDP. Realizing no one could keep up with him, Semetsis made a point to avoid shooting from Day 2 on. He called Colombo again every night, and his former coach could hear his confidence rising by the day. On Sunday morning, before the camp’s final game, Semetsis got the call up to the office. His parents, Pete and Jen, were in the room when he was told he’d made the U-17 roster.
“I felt like the best player in the world,” Semetsis said.
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And in a world dominated by offensive defensemen like Makar, Hughes and Lane Hutson, Semetsis sure fits the mold. He excels moving north to south, as opposed to the lateral quickness and agility of Hutson, but regardless, the result is opponents being left behind. Semetsis’ highlight reel from his 2024-25 season at Mount is littered with clips of the 5-foot-10, 157-pounder gliding, goal line to goal line, around multiple opponents before firing at the net from a tight angle or dumping off a centering pass. The sheer speed isn’t the only thing, either.
“There were so many times he would rush the puck, blow by guys and take the shot, and it would miss wide and get rimmed around the boards, and you turn and he’s the first guy back,” Colombo said. “How does that even happen?”
So dangerous are Semetsis’ ventures forward that Colombo and Rizer, at one point, had to tell Semetsis he was being too conservative. They wanted their star defenseman bombing forward even more.
At Mount for his 15-U AAA season, Semetsis finished with 49 points in 59 games, seamlessly integrating into an ’09 group that repeated as national champions. Semetsis, the youngest son of two police officers, played through the wrist injury — which included torn tissue — for the entire national tournament.
“We clearly knew what we were getting,” Creamer said. “But then you’re with him day in and day out, and you see how he competes and how he works at it, and that, combined with the skating, is what’s got him to where he is.”
And that would help answer another burning question — where in the world does Semetsis’ raw speed and skating ability even come from? Rizer reckons it’s genetics, while Creamer says it’s just a god-given ability, and those two things likely are part of it. But Creamer also speaks glowingly of Semetsis’ work ethic, and Colombo remembers a kid who’d take every possible opportunity to skate at Superior Ice Rink (the home of the Royals), even if it meant joining in on training sessions with 5- and 6-year-olds.
Jen and Pete Semetsis say they’d have to bring dinner to the rink on Wednesdays, when Semetsis skated from 1-5 p.m. before a 7:30 p.m. practice. And on Thursdays, they say, Semetsis’ alarm was set for 4 a.m., so he could be at Superior by 5 to skate for two hours before school. Jen thinks this routine started when Semetsis was 10 years old. And during the COVID-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020, she said Semetsis and his two older brothers roller-skated up and down the steep hills around their neighborhood. They strapped on ankle weights for the sake of it.
The result is a rapid skater, yes, but also one who never seems to get tired. Once, during a game in his penultimate season (13-U AAA) with the Royals, a frustrated Semetsis stayed out for a five-minute shift, only coming off after the Royals conceded. Colombo called him out later in front of the team, then forced Semetsis to keep his feet moving in a drill for a full five minutes. Semetsis wavered — the only time Colombo has ever seen him complain — but a year later, in the 14-U AAA N.Y. state championship game, Semetsis played the full 15-minute third period.
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“I tried coming off,” Semetsis said. “And he wouldn’t let me.”
“He knew he could, and I knew he could, too,” Colombo said of the long shifts. “It was just to get him to understand it’s not going to fly everywhere you go.”
It probably won’t in Plymouth. Not that Semetsis couldn’t do it.
“Would definitely be really hard, especially with how fast the game gets as you move up levels,” he said. “But I could definitely do it.”
