What would Morgan Rielly do?: How to become a Maple Leafs leader - Sportsnet.ca

When Rielly emerged from the dressing room, he looked more refreshed than stressed. If you arrived late, you would have thought that he was just arriving, not already done for the day and the summer. He said goodbye to the staff in the gym and the trainers he’d worked with. He’d be flying east on Labour Day, to Toronto.

This afternoon, though, he was going to fly in a different direction, up to Savary Island — a 40-minute helicopter ride; no time for the ferry. There he’d join his parents, Andy and Shirley, who had already checked into a friend’s place.

The schedule meant a lot of packing and unpacking and repacking and time in the air would take up the last days of Rielly’s summer, but he wasn’t about to leave for Toronto a few days early. Every year it’s the same, squeezing out as much time as he can in his hometown. “I guess there are a lot of places I could go in the off-season,” Rielly said over a plate of eggs and sausage in the gym’s cafeteria. “I just want to decompress and I feel the difference when I’m back here, literally when the plane touches down. That’s one of the best feelings I know. I’m not stressed here. It’s my comfort zone. I act differently between the two places, Toronto and Vancouver. The pace of life is different here — maybe it has something to do with the Leafs’ season but that’s only one of the things in the mix.

“The main reason I come back here, though, is family. We’re close. I spend a lot of time with my parents. We’re a small family but we’re really close and I think it’s important to spend time together.”

In fact, Rielly’s parents had dinner at his house two nights before. When he became a home-owner after signing his second contract, he bought a place just 10 minutes from where he grew up and from his brother Connor’s place. He likes the simplicity and continuity. He’s single, has no obligations over the summer beyond preparations for the winter. He can determine what he wants to do and when and where he wants to do it. He’s going to put in the work at the gym, going to skate with a regular cast that comes out, going to see some friends who go back all the way to grade school, going to rinse and repeat as he resets. The irony is plain: He had to go away to become a player at all; has had to adapt to another city far from his comfort zone to become an elite player; and it seems likely that pattern will hold over the course of his adult life — someone who, at a glance anyway, passes for a homebody will always find himself pulled from home.

from Sports - Latest - Google News https://ift.tt/3321dvA
via IFTTT
October 06, 2019 at 06:57PM