By Christopher Tremblay, Staff Sports Writer

Having an older brother, as well as a grandfather, who played hockey a young Leah Medeiros was introduced to the sport, which she came to love in no time. 

“I loved skating and playing on the outside rink with my brother,” she said. “I enjoy the competitiveness of the game while learning and improving my hockey skills.”

It was around the age of 10 when she changed club teams (moved to the Lady Crusaders, which is now the White Hawks out of Worcester), that she realized that her hockey skills were those that allowed her to be competitive. By playing with the Lady Crusaders, Medeiros found herself getting better and learning more from her teammates and thus was ready for playing the Auburn co-op team in high school.

Originally, the Sutton native played center but was moved over to the wing for a time during her club days. When she got to high school she reverted back to playing center for the Rockets, which was well and good for Medeiros.

“I prefer playing center as it allows me to be all over the ice,” she said. “Playing high school hockey was something that I knew that I wanted to do ever since I was a young girl.” 

Not having a team of their own at Sutton, Medeiros knew that she would have to play for the Auburn co-op team which is made up of around nine towns from all over the area. 

“As a freshman coming into tryouts I knew a lot of the girls from club hockey, so it wasn’t all that bad,” Medeiros said. “I just wanted to go in and do my things, hoping to stand out to the coaches. It was very different than I was used to as the level of skating was high and much quicker, but I adjusted fast.”

After going out and giving it everything that she had, she was very excited and pumped when she was named to the varsity squad. That first year, she found that she had a lot of friends on the team and the older girls were more than accommodating in helping the younger girls improve their game at the high school level.

After her first year with the Auburn team Medeiros kept working on her game in an effort to improve her skills while being able to keep up with the older girls and their physical play.

The Sutton junior, who like her older sister also plays field hockey for the high school, Medeiros finds a skills that shared by both sports.

“Stick handling definitely translates in both sports,” she said. “It seems that the better I become in hockey, the better I become in field hockey.”

Medeiros is always looking to give 100 percent each time that she skates onto the ice and communicating to her linemates is key. She considers herself mainly someone who will assist on a play other than scoring. 

“I want to focus on improving my goal scoring to help the team,” she said. “But I find myself setting up goals more, although a personal goal of mine would be to start putting the puck in the net more.”

Coming into this season the junior was hoping that she could continue to keep connecting with her linemates and get the team into the tournament. Over the last two seasons playing with Auburn the team has managed to make the post-season; losing to Bishop Feehan in the first round of the Division 1 Tournament and then to Algonquin Regional  last year in the first round. 

Medeiros definitely wants to help get the Rockets deep into the playoffs this year while improving her own play. At the time of this writing, Auburn girls seemed to be working as a unit and had a 10-1-4 record.

Although she still has this year and all of next year with the high school team, the junior would eventually like to take her game to the next level and hopefully play with a college team. In order to do that she knows that she needs improving as a player in a sport that she loves more than anything else in her life.