No Days Off_My Life With Type 1 Diabetes and Journey to the NHL by Max Domi

Author:Max Domi [Domi, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Goodreads: 46136772
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Two weeks after the draft, I found myself in the dry Arizona heat, standing outside an arena called the Ice Den. When I walked into the dressing room, I couldn’t believe the sight of an NHL locker with my name on it. Even better, it was filled with a whole set of official NHL equipment. I was like a kid in a candy shop. My helmet, pants, and gloves—every piece had the NHL and Coyotes logos on it. As I laced up my skates for the first time, I felt like a pro.

The camp itself was fun and challenging at the same time. The point wasn’t to figure out who was going to make the team—that would come in training camp later in the year. This was a chance for us younger players to become familiar with the organization, the facilities, the staff, and each other.

I’d finally recovered since our Memorial Cup run, so I was ready to get going. At least, I thought I was. I had been gradually easing back into training the past few weeks, but we skated our asses off in that camp. Each night, I had only enough energy to shuffle back to my hotel room and collapse into bed, wondering if I would be able to recover enough to stand out the next day. And each morning, I would haul myself out of bed and get ready to go all-out again.

The coaching staff knew how to balance things out, though. They wanted to see we could work hard, but they also wanted us to know that the Coyotes weren’t just a team, they were a community. So they organized fun outings in the evenings for us to take part in. A couple of nights into the camp, the team even arranged to have me throw the first pitch at an Arizona Diamondbacks game.

I tested my blood sugar when I got to the park that night, and it was a little low. It’s just the nerves, I told myself. My palms were so sweaty—something that I dealt with frequently as a person with type 1 diabetes—that I could barely hold on to a baseball. How was I going to throw it?

The other guys on the team had come to the game, and they were chirping me nonstop. “Remember not to bounce the ball,” they said. “Don’t throw it in the dirt.”

“Excuse me,” I said to one of the Diamondbacks staff. “Exactly how far is it from the mound to the plate?”

“It’s a little over sixty feet,” they said.

That was way farther than I’d thought. I was so scared I would mess up that I asked the team’s backup catcher to come out so we could warm up my arm. We threw the ball back and forth underneath the stands for a while, and I gradually began to feel better.

But then we stepped onto the field. When I saw the distance for real, all I could think was, Holy shit, that looks far!

A PR

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