ESG blurb: Ryan Connolly

Adam Patterson
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

It seems like yesterday that I was hearing about Arlington vs. John Jay high school hockey games in the "quarter-mile hallway" of Arlington in 2006. Come to think of it, I'm actually not that far removed. Three years later and I'm still in Poughkeepsie, interning here at the Journal. But when I spoke to Ryan Connolly on the phone, an evidently very talented John Jay hockey player who is on his way to the Empire State Games, I felt a flutter in my chest; I still hold the biases of the often intense rivalry, being a 2007 graduate of Arlington.

The hockey fan in me is telling me to ignore that feeling. As Ving Rhames said in Pulp Fiction "It's just pride."

Then I spoke to him, read his stat sheets, and his coach had plenty to say about him as well. And the more I heard, the better and better this young hockey player started sounding to my partially trained ears. He could very well be a hot prospect in his college career. Second after second, my animalistic Arlington pride was being overruled by numbers on papers, testimonies from his coach and himself, as well as my self-professed ability to judge someone's character.

I very well could have been back in the hallways as a freshman, hearing about him in the hallways the last period of the day before I watched him play. That's the kind of awe that high school athletes had on me in Arlington, and even if the Arlington fanatic in me is partially ashamed, at 21 years old, Ryan Connolly can still wow me as an athlete of his age.

To read the profile of Connolly, click here. Connolly photo by Journal assistant photography editor Lee Ferris

Adam Patterson is a junior at SUNY Plattsburgh, studying journalism. He is a 2007 graduate of Arlington High School.