Once Overlooked, Webster Groves' Mayfield Now Headed for NHL

After the New York Islanders made Scott Mayfield the 34th player selected in the 2011 NHL Entry Draft, ESPN noted the 6-foot, 4-inch defenseman’s “rise from obscurity.” This is an underestimation that the Mayfield family might more accurately describe as being blindsided.

By now, the old home videos have been dug out of storage, but the earliest footage of Mayfield on the ice reveals no hint of any professional athlete in the making. No magic slap shot, or vicious check on some unwitting sibling, are present. Mayfield, as a four-year-old at family skate night at the Webster Rink, simply dropped to his knees and licked the ice.

“One thing I can’t stress enough is that none of us ever planned on Scott getting a college scholarship or being drafted in the NHL, or being a professional hockey player,” said his father, Andy. “It was always just for fun.”

With obscurity so deep that even his own family didn’t see through it, Mayfield spent most of his local career nowhere near the radar of St. Louis hockey’s elite. Taking to the sport at age 5, he spent 10 years on the side stages, with every season cast to the St. Louis Amateur Blues AA teams and never overcoming that hump for the AAA echelon.

“Not making those higher teams was not by choice, I definitely tried every year. I just was never ready for that next level,” Scott said. “Hockey was always something I loved to do, but for fun. Just something I did around town with my friends. Some of my favorite AA teams, we travelled to the Kirkwood ice to play, not the east or west coast.

“Now some kids who were in AAA above me don’t even play hockey anymore, and here I am still loving hockey. It definitely was a positive for me. I’ve never been burned out on hockey, ever.”

Mayfield's casual, just-for-fun approach to the game makes some of his eventual life decisions—his biggest-to-date coming at 15-years-old—all the more astonishing. He caught his break when previous AA coach Don Moorhouse became coach at the AAA level and offered the sophomore his first opportunity. The boy ran with it.

Building off of the exposure from just one season at the highest level, Mayfield began talking with schools at the end of his sophomore year. By the end of that summer, he had signed with the University of Denver, his father’s alma mater and a school close to his elder brother at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

And, as if the transition of hockey from "fun" to "serious" needed to move any faster, Mayfield was picked up by the United States Hockey League and landed with the Youngstown Phantoms in Ohio. The opportunity meant leaving St. Louis at 15 years old, finishing his junior and senior years of high school with a billet family 10 hours away.

“It was a pretty difficult decision, and it all happened very quickly,” Andy recalls. “Scott really wanted to go, but he still did his homework. He discussed it with his college contacts, some mentors around the hockey community here. And he got different opinions; some thought he should stay and some said go.

“But he made the final decision, and we supported it. We felt comfortable with that.”

Chalk one up to seizing the day. With a line of AAA coaches who were sure Mayfield offered “no chance,” but a university program who felt confident with their assessment of his skills, the high school junior left home, and his hockey life exploded.

In the past two years, Mayfield has obviously convinced professional scouts he's no longer playing around. Aided by a stint on the fourth-place U.S. team at the 2009 Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament in Slovakia, he earned a reputation as a rangy, fluid skater with good transitional ability and a physically imposing frame likened to Chris Pronger.

“I just recently talked to my coach and assistant GM at Youngstown about how I almost told them ‘No, I wasn’t ready,’” he said. “Now I look back on it, and I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t believe that I almost said no to this opportunity, and I’m so happy I went through with it. I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t.”

Probably not with the Islanders. But to be sure, perhaps Andy should check the old home videos and see if Scott really was licking the ice at the Webster rink. Perhaps he was kissing it.