What's the problem with humility? Carl Corazzini will tell you. He’s been trying to rid his star player of it for a year.
Will Manchuso is, on one hand, the type of person who doesn’t want anyone talking about his recent commitment to Dartmouth. He walks around like everyone else, incredibly willing to take feedback, and “probably,” says Corazzini, his coach at St. Mark’s, “the nicest human being in the world.”
He also is, potentially, the best player in prep hockey right now.
And, says Corazzini, “He doesn’t know how good he is.”
Therein lies the struggle for Manchuso ever since his arrival in Southboro, Mass., last fall. He is not an arrogant kid. He grew up the eldest child of a single mother and, unlike many of his peers, he didn’t have a relative who played hockey for real. He’s here now because of hard work and the rallied support from those around him — “my grandparents, my aunt, my uncle, everyone pitched in,” Manchuso says.
His mother, Trista, explains: “It’s really important for him to be well-grounded.”
All of this is utterly at odds with the things Manchuso can do on a sheet of ice. Corazzini, who played in the NHL, insists Manchuso has every tool to play at the highest level of pros. He’s a powerful skater with a wicked shot, great on both the forecheck and the penalty kill, who is 6-foot, 185 pounds at 17 years old. If anyone should believe they’re the best, it’s Manchuso.
The focus, then, for his upcoming junior year and whatever happens before college hockey, is getting Manchuso to actually believe it.
The story of Manchuso’s lone season at Concord-Carlisle High (Concord, Mass.) in 2023-24 is quite different from that of his first year at St. Mark’s. Rian Murray, the Patriots’ seventh-year coach, speaks of an unstoppable forward who scored 35 goals and 30 assists, who returned to train with the team during St. Mark’s winter break and was a man among boys. Corazzini talks of a player who was cautious by default and selfish only when he needed to be.
The difference there is a pretty good illustration of what Manchuso is and what he can be. He was the guy in the MIAA, and he played like it, leading the Patriots to the state quarterfinal as a freshman. He can be the guy in the NEPSAC, too — he can be the guy on any team he plays on — but his confidence wasn’t always there as a sophomore, when he finished with 12 goals and 21 assists in 33 games. All of this, given the quality gap between public and prep school hockey, is understandable.
“In the MIAA, there are definitely players that are prep-level players, but you have maybe two or three of those guys per team,” Manchuso says. “When I got to St. Mark’s, I realized every shift, you’re lining up against someone who can really play hockey.”
There were difficult weeks last season. The first couple, naturally, were confronting, “and it being so challenging,” Manchuso remembers, “I kind of got in my head and thought maybe this is a little too hard, or maybe this isn’t going to be like the performance I thought I could have.”
Trista remembers another daunting stretch in February, during exam season at St Mark’s. Manchuso takes his academics seriously (Dartmouth, after all) and was feeling overwhelmed with everything. He played a couple of poor games and, as Trista recalls, wanted to come home. Then he went out and scored a hat trick in a 6-1 win at Berwick on Feb. 21.
“After he texted me and was like, ‘You’re right, I gotta get out of my head,’ ” Trista says.
Amidst those glimpses of how dominant he can be, Manchuso still was a rigidly pass-first player last season. This wasn’t inexplicable nor even uncommon — Caiden Pellegrino, a junior forward at St. Mark’s who just committed to Providence, was the same way. Manchuso attributes this, in part, to falling in love with pretty backdoor passes as a young hockey player. He also is honest that being a shot-first player is just hard. It takes arrogance.
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“Playing with new players is a big part of it,” he says. “You don’t want to be the guy that’s shooting the puck every time.”
The problem is that Manchuso’s shot is so dang good. Corazzini is in awe of it — the way it comes off his stick, the torque he can generate with just a wrister. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone shoot a puck like him,” Corazzini says. He spent last season telling Manchuso — and Pellegrino, for that matter — that they need to establish their shots, not just to score goals themselves, but to open up lanes and opportunities for teammates. As it turns out, there is a selflessness to being selfish.
Corazzini also wants Manchuso to be more assertive with his feet. He is a fast, powerful and fluid skater, who Murray remembers completely dusting a Lincoln-Sudbury defenseman for a solo breakaway goal during his freshman year in the MIAA. “Takes three strides and is gone,” the C-C coach recalls. At St. Mark’s this past season, however, Corazzini noticed Manchuso had a tendency to actually slow down when he received the puck in the neutral zone, such was the forward’s conviction to look up and find a pass.
“What I want him to do is when he catches that puck initially, to play his fastest and make everyone respond to his pace,” Corazzini says.
This is the feedback Manchuso is constantly receiving from his coach. In short, he needs to be less humble. It’s a critique that, ironically, Manchuso is humble enough to understand. Corazzini reminds him constantly what he is capable of — at practice, on the phone, over text, in the hallways.
“That’s super important for me,” Manchuso says. “A lot of the confidence I have is through him.”
Corazzini was there to see it. Will Manchuso deciding that he was the best player on the ice, and establishing it from the jump. Will Manchuso forcing everyone else to play at his pace. Will Manchuso scoring a boatload of goals. Will Manchuso doing everything Corazzini had asked him to do.
This was at the Mass. Hockey Festival, no less, one of the more important showcases of Manchuso’s young career.
“You could just see a different player,” says Corazzini, who coached at the event in May. “That feedback was starting to sink in.”
He was one of, if not the, best 2008 birth-year forward at the festival, running away with an invite to USA Hockey’s Select 17 Camp. Manchuso lit it up in Buffalo in July, too, finishing tied-fourth among all players with nine points. He didn’t make USA’s Hlinka Gretzky roster — though he probably did enough in Buffalo to put himself in the conversation — a result that Trista admits did disappoint him.
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Still, at Mass. Festival and Select 17s, Manchuso got over a hump he’d never gotten over before. Now, the hope is that he stays there.
“This summer was huge,” Manchuso says. “It was the first time I really played well in front of the best of the best. And I kind of showed myself, like, even when the best guys are out there? I can still dominate.”
