EDMONTON — When Brett Larson, Nick Oliver and Mike Gibbons sat down for their first recruitment meeting as a coaching staff at St. Cloud State University in the summer of 2018, Larson, who’d just left a role as an assistant at the University of Minnesota-Duluth to become the team’s new head coach, already had a player in mind.
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“Guys, I’ve got one guy that I think we should go after as our first recruit. I’ve seen him a lot in Bantams, and his name’s Jack Peart from Grand Rapids,” Larson told Gibbons and Oliver.
Gibbons, who was staying on as a holdover longtime assistant coach on the St. Cloud staff, had already seen Peart play as well and quickly concurred.
Oliver, a St. Cloud alum who’d been hired by Larson after three years as an assistant and director of scouting with the Sioux Falls Stampede to round out the staff, was the only of the trio who hadn’t yet see him. It didn’t take him long to get on board with that plan either, though.
The following season, when Peart played his first of three years at Grand Rapids High and posted 21 points in 25 games as a freshman defenceman in Minnesota’s high school hockey circuit, Oliver saw exactly what was so obvious to Larson and Gibbons as early as Bantam. He was a first-class player in the state, and had rare smarts on the ice.
“You just watched his puck touches, and how he moved the puck, and how efficiently he could move it, and how he could run a power play, and it just looked natural to him,” Oliver said. “Some guys have that and some guys don’t and he’s a guy who just has those innate instincts and hockey sense to make those reads and make those decisions. That’s for Jack what makes him such a valuable player. He does everything very well. There’s few deficiencies in his game. The way he thinks the game offensively, the way he thinks the game defensively, the way he competes and brings it every shift — that’s what makes him such a valuable player.”
#mnwild draft pick Jack Peart with the great breakout pass to Veeti Miettinen and Zach Okabe then makes a great tip in goal off the pass from Miettinen, 1-0 @SCSUHUSKIES_MH !
— Alex Micheletti (@AlexMicheletti) February 12, 2022
Four years later, coming off a different freshman year, this one in college at St. Cloud, he’s mostly the same but his profile has become grown.
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Peart is still one of the state’s best 2003-born players. Only now he’s also a second-round pick of Minnesota’s NHL team. He’s also playing for Team USA at the world juniors — for the second time.
Peart’s hockey story starts a lot like that of many northern Minnesota kids.
The Pearts are big into three things: Hunting, fishing, and hockey.
Peart’s dad, Todd, was a coach at the local high school, got Jack his first pair of skates at the age of three, and coached him from the day he began playing youth hockey right through until Jack played at that same high school.
Both of Jack’s older sisters, Sadie and Maddi, played too, and Sadie is about to enter her senior year on Quinnipiac University’s women’s team (she was the Bobcats’ second-leading scorer last year).
After following his sisters and dad to rinks, Jack fell into hockey naturally and never looked back. In the winters, he always made the local team’s highest level. In the summers, he played baseball as an outfielder.
Eventually, after playing at the high school level in both sports as a freshman and sophomore, he made the difficult decision to stop playing baseball and pursue hockey when folks like Larson, and members of NHL clubs, began showing up around the rink in Bantam.
He chose St. Cloud specifically because of Larson. Before Larson was hired at St. Cloud, he’d actually visited Minnesota-Duluth when he was there.
“I loved Brett Larson. We loved him and the way he coached. So when he moved over, we took a tour of St. Cloud and loved the facilities and how close to home it was so that family could travel to a lot of games. So it was a combination of those two things, but really it was Brett,” Jack said.
After his freshman year, Peart was taken with the seventh pick in the 2019 USHL Futures Draft by the Fargo Force and was faced with a second difficult decision. Should he leave Grand Rapids for the first time in his life and join the Force in North Dakota, or stay and play out his high school career?
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Ultimately, he decided that he wanted to finish what he started at Grand Rapids High, with the kids he’d grown up playing on outdoor rinks with. He did, however, commit to playing for the Force as the high school schedule allowed.
After being named captain and posting 31 points in 27 games at Grand Rapids High as a sophomore, that commitment began with a five-game stint in the USHL in February and March of that year with the Force.
The following year, in 2020-21, Peart then split his time between Grand Rapids and Fargo. He posted 35 points in just 18 games at Grand Rapids to win the 2021 Minnesota Mr. Hockey award as the state’s top high school player. He also notched an additional 22 points in 33 combined regular-season and playoff games in the USHL, helping the Force to a Western Conference title and earning USHL All-Rookie Second Team honours despite having not even played the full year.
From afar, the St. Cloud staff got excited.
“He was good in high school, and he was good at Fargo at 17, which isn’t an easy transition to that league especially as a defenceman,” Oliver said. “With his poise and his competitiveness, he stepped in and really changed the dynamic of that Fargo team that year — a team that went all the way to a Clark Cup Final and Jack was a huge piece of that.”
In Fargo, he left the same impression on Force staff that he’d left on the St. Cloud coaching staff who’d recruited him years earlier.
“He is going to make (the Wild) look really smart. Elite brain. One of those kids that grows on you the more you watch him. The IQ side of the game comes so naturally to him,” said Eli Rosendahl, an associate head coach with Fargo when Peart first arrived there.
His play in Grand Rapids and Fargo, caught the attention of NHL scouts in advance of the 2021 draft, too. After beginning that year with a “C” rating on NHL Central Scouting’s players to watch list (indicating a “4th/5th/6th round candidate”), Peart rose all the way to No. 27 among North American skaters on their final list.
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On draft day, the Wild then took the Minnesota product with the 52nd pick, fulfilling his childhood dream.
“When I saw my name come up next to their logo, that was very special for me and my family. They’re the team we all watched growing up. So to be a part of that organization and staying in my home state has been really special for me,” Peart said. “And they’re great. There’s no pressure for me to leave or sign with them. It’s just whenever I’m ready, I’m ready. It has been awesome.”
Instead of going to the USHL for a full season post-draft like many other kids who take the high school route, Peart jumped right into St. Cloud last fall as a true freshman.
There, the Huskies got exactly what they were hoping for.
“Our schedule was third-hardest in the country and then all of a sudden here’s this kid who is really first year out of high school that’s got to go into Mankato early when they’re No. 1 in the country, and into Minnesota when they’re No. 5, and go into these places and play some of the best teams in the country right out of the gate. And what impressed me was that on Friday nights, he went through some ups and downs like any freshman would, but Saturday nights in those series he was always one of the best players on the ice,” Larson said on a phone call this week.
By year’s end, Peart’s 17 points in 32 games was good for fifth among college hockey’s 12 under-19 defencemen in points per game (0.53) and second among Huskies defencemen behind only senior and Lightning draftee Nick Perbix.
“This is going to sound a little cliché but he’s just a hockey player. The kid loves playing hockey, the kid makes plays, he’s smart, he can skate, he just doesn’t have a lot of holes,” Larson said. “But I think the biggest thing I like is just his intelligence as a defenceman, his ability to make reads with the puck, his ability to defend, his ability to run a power play. There’s just not a ton of defencemen out there with his skill set and brain. And then you add that to the fact that he’s a great kid, a humble kid, and I knew he’d be a great fit for this program.”
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The Wild liked what they saw last year, too. Matt Hendricks, the Wild’s assistant director of player development and a St. Cloud alum himself, was around the rink frequently throughout Peart’s freshman year to watch him play in person and meet with him after games to go over how he played.
Peart found Hendricks to be an invaluable resource.
On the ice, Hendricks became a fast fan of Peart’s game.
“I think there’s a higher ceiling there where he becomes more offensive than he even is now. Having gone the same route as Jack going from high school hockey to college, I’ll put it this way: It wasn’t nearly as easy for me,” Hendricks told The Athletic on a phone call Friday morning. “He seems to have a little bit more of a veteran game to him.
“He sees the ice very well, he’s got a very good brain for his age from the level of hockey that he came from, and if you were to take 20 top players from Minnesota high school hockey and put them on the ice, Jack’s going to stand out well above everyone else in terms of his hockey sense and his ability to read the game. He just kind of has that rink rat mentality where he’s just a hockey player. He just goes out there and if you want him to play 25 minutes he’ll figure out a way to do that.”
Off of it, Hendricks was equally impressed by the kid, too.
“He’s a very mature kid for his age. He’s very well liked,” Hendricks said. “If you ask anyone at St. Cloud about Jack, he’s extremely polite, he’s got great manners, their head equipment manager told me he’s just a fantastic northern Minnesota kid and the kind of kid who walks around the arena introducing himself to the employees. He’s just a very good small-town kid. But with big aspirations. I think Jack really wants to be not only an NHL hockey player but a very good and effective one for the Minnesota Wild.”
At 12:26 p.m. on a hot summer’s day in Edmonton, Peart has a cell phone to his ear.
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It’s Day 3 of the second edition of the 2022 world juniors, and after a 9 a.m. alarm, breakfast, a bus to Rogers Place, a morning video session, and some mobility work, he’s now back at the hotel trying to decide if he’ll take a nap today.
He doesn’t normally nap before games, but he’s thinking about whether he should squeeze one in before his pre-game meal and a trip back to the rink for Team USA’s second game of the tournament against Switzerland later in the day.
He won’t play against the Swiss, sliding out of the lineup to get Avalanche second-rounder Sean Behrens — taken seven picks after Peart was in the 2021 draft — into the rotation. But he’s in good spirits.
A year ago, he’d participated in USA Hockey’s world juniors summer showcase only not to initially receive an invite to the team’s December camp, then receive a late one when COVID-19 and injuries made a small handful of players unavailable. Eventually, he made the team out of camp and set up Team USA’s first goal of the tournament in what became their lone game before its cancellation, making a play at the point to open the scoring against Slovakia.
“That’s when I thought ‘Wow, this is what he does well.’ It was a big moment in his first real international game and he made a play like that,” Leaman told The Athletic on a phone call on Thursday while recalling that play.
So he’s proud to have made it here for a second time, when he wasn’t necessarily supposed to even make it the first (his parents and grandparents are in Edmonton to watch him too, and Hendricks will arrive in the city shortly to watch him).
“It was disappointing going to the camp in the summer and then not making the invitee list. But I just kept working at it and it was huge to get a late call to come try out for the team and end up making it. It was a lot of hard work and just keeping the nose down and then I got to where I wanted to be,” Peart said.
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And though Peart was disappointed by a couple of plays he made in Team USA’s second tournament opener, this one against Germany a couple of days ago, he ran the second power-play unit effectively and finished with an assist and a plus-1 rating in 15:08 ice-time, giving him two points in as many outings at the tournament.
The scratch wasn’t a slight, either. Leaman liked what he saw from him against Germany.
“He’s just got really good poise with the puck. He sees the ice very well. He’s a guy that, anything that you’re trying to teach or work on with the guys, he can pick it up quick. He’s an intelligent kid. I just think his puck skills and his poise with the puck are his strength,” Leaman said.
“He doesn’t go rushing into fires. He can read through layers of coverage and read through layers on the rush. And to make poised plays with the puck, you have to know where my pressure is and how to escape pressure and read the ice and know what all of your options are. He knows where his pressures are, he knows how to read the ice, and to me that’s cerebral.”
Peart, who says he models his game after Duncan Keith but learned everything from his dad, knows his opportunity will come again, too.
And when it does, he’s confident he’ll rise to the occasion.
“I’m a two-way defenceman with high hockey IQ who can move pucks and defend. I make the right plays and don’t try to do too much, but at the same time make the nicer play when others would make the simple one,” Peart said.
Larson and Oliver are watching from afar back in Minnesota and like what they’re seeing.
“As you put those teams together, as coaches you always talk about two things. You talk about what you see right in front of you, the tryout or a single game, and you talk about a kid’s body of work. And those sometimes can be different things,” Larson said. “And what Jack did is he played his way onto that team having huge games against some of the best teams in the country. And when USA Hockey saw him playing at that level against some of the best players in college hockey, that’s what solidified his spot on the team. I’m excited for him.”
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Though Oliver recently accepted a head coaching job offer (coincidentally with the Force), he and Peart bonded over their shared northern Minnesota roots and he plans to stay in touch and track Peart’s progress closely as a sophomore this fall.
Oliver calls Peart “wise beyond his years.”
“He’s got a great presence to him, he’s a great teammate, he’s not overly outspoken but he has personality and he’s just competitive,” Oliver said. “He’s competitive at everything he does on the ice and off the ice.”
In time, Oliver thinks he’ll be watching Peart play for the Wild.
“I think for him the one area he’s going to keep taking steps is with his off-ice, with his explosiveness and his footspeed,” Oliver said. “But when you look at his wrists and his hands, he’s kind of got that natural strength. Like when he passes the puck, even for me as a coach, you receive that pass and your hands are stinging afterwards because he can snap it and he’s got that natural pop off of the end of his stick with his forearms and how he can shoot it too. That’s probably why he played baseball so well for all of those years too. That’s the thing with a lot of those northern Minnesota kids too. A lot of them played three different sports so they’re pretty well rounded that way when they do decide to pick hockey. That will serve him well at the next level.”
Both Larson and Oliver are certainly glad they made him their first target back in 2018.
“We were happy with that one, that’s for sure,” Oliver said, chuckling.
Larson expects Peart to be “one of the best defencemen in the league this year” as a sophomore.
“I just always thought he was a special player,” Larson said. “So for me, with my first opportunity to become a head coach at this level, there’s certain guys that you’d like to build your program around and I knew that he was that type of guy.”
(Top photo: Rena Laverty / USA Hockey)
