Unlike most kids in New England, Ryder Shea didn’t grow up with a college hockey allegiance. Despite living in Framingham, Mass., just a 30-minute drive west of top Hockey East programs, he didn’t have a favorite Beanpot school, although he does still have his Boston University Jack Eichel bobblehead.
So when the University of Maine came calling last August, Shea, a netminder, was all ears. He drove to Orono, Maine, with his father, Dennis. He saw the campus and the rink. He saw what a normal Maine college student’s life is like. He talked to head coach Ben Barr.
Shea turned to his father on the drive home.
“Dad,” he said. “I want to be a Black Bear. This is where I want to go.”
But it was his first college tour. The family still wanted to leave open the possibility other schools would come calling.
Later that month, he was in Los Angeles visiting his uncle, who had a 6-month-old baby boy the family wanted to see. Jerry Buckley, his advisor, shot him a text saying that if he liked Maine that much, he should pull the trigger.
Shea did. He called Dennis, who wasn’t on the trip, to tell him those feelings he had on that ride home from Orono never left him. He told his mother, Tara, while they were in a grocery store in Los Angeles.
“She’s like freaking out in the middle of the grocery store,” Shea said.
It was a full-circle moment.
The stairs at Loring Arena in Framingham are steep. It’s one of the old, majestic barns in New England and when it opened in November 1963, safety on the steps didn’t seem to be a priority.
The stairs remained unchanged in 2008 when Shea’s older brother, Finn, was learning to skate at the melon-shaped arena. Off the ice, 2-year-old Ryder was running around the stands and coming dangerously close to those same stairs.
Tara couldn’t handle her 2-year-old on the steep declines, so she convinced Framingham Youth Hockey to let Ryder, who was technically too young to learn to skate, on the ice.
“I fell in love with it right then,” Shea said.
Learning to skate quickly turned into playing on a Framingham Mite team. It was there he discovered he liked playing goalie, but he was only a Mite — the team still rotated goalies, giving all the kids a chance between the pipes.
In his next year of Mites, he went out for a second team, the NorthStar hockey club. The plan was to play goalie for NorthStar and skate out as a player with Framingham.
Still, the family wasn’t in love with the idea of their son being a goalie.
“Ah, crap,” Tara remembered saying at NorthStar tryouts when Shea was stopping an overwhelming majority of pucks sent his way. “Now we’re going to have to do this goalie thing.”
Dennis always believed his son was born to be a skater. On top of that, goalie equipment was far from cheap. That, plus the normal expenses of hockey, takes a financial toll on any family.
So, Tara and Dennis set a standard — if Shea wanted to be a goalie, he had to pay for at least a portion of the equipment. Even at 9 years old.
When he was 10, he was convinced to try out for the Brick Invitational Hockey Tournament in Edmonton as a goalie, and to his surprise, he made it. He bought his first set of new goalie equipment to celebrate the occasion.
“I have a picture of him buying his pads with a wad of cash at the Bauer store,” Tara said.
Back then, Shea wasn’t old enough to have a job, so the money came from Christmas or his birthday.
“I’d appreciate it more,” Shea said of buying his own equipment. “Like, ‘All right, I can’t have my mom and dad go buy me a set of pads every month.’ I learned to appreciate money and save. I saved up a couple of birthdays and Christmas and I went out and bought myself a ton of new gear, a new stick, stuff like that, and that was exciting for me.”
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He bought used gear as well, buying helmets off of Craigslist and utilizing hand-me-downs.
Throughout his youth hockey days, he alternated between skating out as a forward and marking his territory in the crease. After his U-14 year, he knew he had to focus on one.
“I knew I was going to want to be a goalie,” Shea said. “I always did.”
As he got older, the shots got harder and tougher, which meant he needed newer and better equipment. Fortunately, as he also got older, he was eligible to work.
His first non-hockey job was at Sudbury Farms, a grocery store in Sudbury, Mass., where he worked for most of 2021.
“It’s given me a larger sense of pride in what I do,” Shea said of working at Sudbury Farms. “It’s kind of taught me to work hard all the time. You can’t really be lazy at a job every now and then. How to talk to people, talk to coaches. Talking to a boss every day, working with managers — you kind of learn how to talk to your captains, coaches, GMs, that stuff. It helps you learn how to talk to people in power and have respect for everyone.”
After a year at Framingham High School in 2020-21, which was severely impacted by COVID-19, Shea had a goal in mind: to play hockey at a prep school.
“My parents had always talked about using hockey to get the best education,” Shea said. “Use hockey to get places.”
St. George’s seemed like a place he wanted to go. Fortunately for him, it had two senior goalies graduating when Shea was in the thick of his search for a new home. After touring the picturesque Middleton, R.I., campus, he was blown away.
“It was unreal,” he said. “It was just a feeling that I knew I wanted to come here. I was excited to come here.”
His first hockey campaign at St. George’s was a success. He posted a 2.21 goals-against average and a .921 save percentage. It helped earn him a spot at USA National Camp. It also helped him land a commitment to Maine.
But his most impactful moments at St. George’s were still ahead of him.
Now Shea works at Stop It Goaltending as a shooter and junior instructor. It is far from the only way in which he influences the next generation of hockey players.
Shea and St. George’s teammate Troy Hayes sat nervously in the dressing room last fall.
“We’re here,” they said to each other. “We might as well go all out.”
The hockey buddies were not preparing for a game but for something neither had ever participated in before — a play. Both had roles in “Radium Girls” — a story by D.W. Gregory that follows the efforts of Grace Fryer, a dial painter in the late 1920s, as she fights to earn justice for her fellow workers who became sick with an unknown disease.
Naturally, you must be wondering how two veterans on the St. George’s hockey team got here.
Shea received a text from a girl in the play saying there weren’t enough boys in the production.
“I don’t get the point of going to a boarding school and not using every aspect of it,” Shea said. “Why not try something new?”
Off he went to tell Hayes he would be participating in the show with him. Shea earned the part of Tom Kreider, the fiance of Grace. Hayes played Dr. Von Sochocky.
The day before the show, there was a text in the hockey team’s group chat saying “Front row: mandatory.” When Shea walked on stage for the first time, he looked out to see the entire hockey team in the first row. Behind them was the rest of the school.
“All right,” Shea thought to himself. “Here we go.”
The only difference was the nerves. While Shea knew how to get in the zone for a big hockey game, how to perform on stage was something he had never experienced.
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But like in hockey games, Shea was fully prepared. The theater director had a connection to then-St. George’s hockey coach Jeff Dwyer and organized a rehearsal schedule for Shea and Hayes that worked around their strength and conditioning program, as well as their split-season hockey.
“They crushed it,” Dwyer said of the performance of Shea and Hayes.
First, there was theater. Now Shea is learning to play the guitar.
“It’s honestly helpful for hockey,” Shea said. “Having all these different experiences and stuff like that, it all kind of connects back to hockey.”
Another experience that’s been helpful for Shea is being a prefect for freshmen, living in the first-year dorms and helping new students acclimate to life away from home.
“It’s a lot different for a lot of kids,” Shea said. “We’re there to help them through all these challenges they’ve seen and are going to see and help them with the academic piece and social piece.”
He’s not the only player from the hockey team who’s a prefect — Jake McIntosh (Duxbury, Mass.) and Hayes are in similar roles. The hockey team typically doesn’t have three of its representatives leading the freshmen, but this year is different, according to Dwyer. It speaks to the group.
“He’s in that freshmen dorm and it’s unbelievable to see the way he brought those guys into the mix and the way he spends time with them and answers questions for them,” Dwyer said.
It’s clear the 16-year-old has become quite the leader.
“He is,” Dwyer said. “In every sense of the word.”
When Shea was growing up, Dennis made a habit of paving off the backyard into a year-round place for his sons to skate. In the summer, it was a roller hockey rink. When the temperatures dropped, an ice rink.
“We spent a lot of time in the backyard shooting pucks,” Shea said.
But that ice surface came in handy most when COVID-19 began to wreak havoc on the world in early 2020.
He began babysitting three young kids and teaching skating lessons on the backyard ice sheet. Now, those kids are all on their own youth teams.
“They call and they send their schedules,” Tara said.
Recently, when Shea returned home on winter break, he went back out the front door almost as soon as he came in — he had two of their youth hockey games to attend.
“He goes to all their stuff,” Tara said. “He’s really great with kids.”
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The desire to help out young hockey players followed him to St. George’s.
Earlier this season, Shea approached Dwyer with a simple request: He wanted to help out with youth hockey in the Middleton, R.I., area, even through his busy schedule.
“He has time for everybody,” said Dwyer, whose 5-year-old daughter was among the kids Shea would tutor in hockey skills development on Tuesday nights.
In Shea’s own game, he opened the 2022-23 season by scoring a goal (yes — a goalie goal) in the team’s first scrimmage against Academie Saint-Louis.
“What a heads-up play,” Dwyer said.
After that, Shea split time with fellow junior netminder Matthew DellaRusso throughout the season. St. George's went 8-12-0 in its 20 games starting on Jan. 2, preventing Dwyer's team from making the playoffs.
Shea plans on returning to St. George's in 2023-24. He was drafted No. 81 overall by the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders in the 2022 USHL Futures Draft. He's in no rush to go — he wants to hang a banner at St. George's before departing for eastern Iowa.
His next order of business will be USA Hockey's National Goaltending camp in Plymouth, Mich., which is set to take place this weekend.
His passion these days, along with learning guitar and helping out at youth hockey practices, is the future of St. George’s, a place he feels strongly about. He rolls through the selling points of the school: the culture, the college hockey commits and the success — both from the past, the current and the future.
“If I’m a kid looking at prep schools, I’d have my eye on St. George’s,” Shea said.
He compares the feeling he got touring St. George’s to the sense he got as he was shown around the University of Maine — they felt like natural fits.
It’s been a unique path for a unique individual. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
