By Jeff Howe

How Stålberg Rose From The Unknown

Viktor Stålberg was never the traditional underdog story. He wasn’t too short or too slow. He wasn’t laughed at by coaches or written off by scouts. But that’s because, to some extent, they just couldn’t find him.

The Vermont junior forward has scored 20 goals this season, second in the nation, and he’s playing like the offensive juggernaut the Catamounts haven’t necessarily had since they entered Hockey East four years ago. Twenty-eight games into the season, he’s nearly doubled his point production from his first two years on campus, and he is a Hobey Baker candidate who came from nowhere.

Well, to be more precise, he came from Gothenburg, Sweden, but there aren’t many around the Division I level who could have answered that trivia question in late 2005. In fact, Stålberg was so far under the radar he actually just assumed he’d come to the United States to play Division III hockey like a lot of his friends.

“I was playing in a junior league, the second under-20 league in Sweden,” Stålberg said. “A couple went over to Johnson & Wales in the Providence area. I kind of made up my mind that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t get any attention anywhere. I was probably the best player on my team, but that was a big difference from the big-time leagues, too. My mind was kind of set on going over to play D-III somewhere. I ended up having a good year my last year there and got traded to the first-league team there. I had a good year, and that opened up a lot of doors for me as far as getting the D-I schools involved in the recruiting process.”

Those doors took a good beating, though. Stålberg had long since made up his mind he wanted to play college hockey in the States, but without any outside attention, he basically served as his own marketing manager by calling athletic departments to pitch his game.

“It’s obviously hard to get any serious attention when that’s the approach you’re taking,” he said.

But he got some help from his academic advisor, a man by the name of David Gabriel, who sent out a mass e-mail to American colleges on Stålberg’s behalf. It included Stålberg’s primary stat line — goals, assists and grade point average. Vermont coach Kevin Sneddon happened to be one of the few — if not the only — who responded. It wasn’t so much that Sneddon had a sixth sense for Swedish hockey recruits. More than anything, his response to Gabriel’s e-mail was a direct result of a completely unrelated event that happened when he was a freshman at Harvard in 1988-89.

“We took a trip over to Finland as a team,” Sneddon recalled. “I sat next to this woman who asked me questions about Harvard for pretty much the entire flight. She was traveling with her son who was playing a Pee Wee hockey tournament. I remember looking over at him and thinking this kid’s feet could barely touch the floor. He was a little guy. I kept in touch with them. As a family, they kept in touch with me. I think it was my junior or senior year [when Harvard assistant coach and recruiting coordinator] Ronn Tomassoni came to me and said, ‘Hey, you know that player that you’ve been in touch with is breaking all the records in the BC junior hockey league?’ And his name is Paul Kariya. Paul chose Maine but came to Harvard to visit. I’ve always had that in the back of my mind that strange things happen, and you just don’t ignore a [recruiting] tip. From that point on, I’ve always said that as much as humanly possible to respond to them all because you never know.”

In a sense, if Harvard’s hockey team never traveled to Finland two decades ago, or if Sneddon sat in a different row on the plane, or if Paul Kariya’s mother simply stopped writing, there’s a good probability Stålberg never winds up at Vermont. Anyway, after Sneddon did a little more research on Stålberg, he decided to send associate head coach John Micheletto to scout Stålberg for about a week in December 2005. After returning to Burlington with a strong report, the Catamounts’ coaching staff brought Stålberg over for an official visit, and he committed mere days after his arrival.

Stålberg turned down Clarkson and Ohio State in the process, among other schools. Soon after, the kid no one paid any attention to was rejecting even more callers. A run of injuries to a professional team in Sweden caused it to seek out Stålberg and ask him to sign a contract, but he went against the grain and declined, a move that really put him on the map.

“I turned it down and got a little publicity in the papers back home,” Stålberg said. “I think that was a big thing. NHL scouts started figuring out that this guy probably wants to play college. The phone started ringing off the hook. Different schools had never even seen me play and said, ‘We want you to come here.’ I think that was the big thing, just turning that down. That publicity I got from not going pro as opposed to other guys who would have jumped at that chance definitely opened some doors.

“Vermont was actually one of the first teams that responded before that process even happened. … They were always pretty involved keeping in touch with me, and they were one of the only teams that came over. That was the biggest thing for me coming here [to Burlington]. They were really involved in the recruiting process. They really wanted me, as opposed to a guy who called and said, ‘Here you go, you’ve got a 100 percent scholarship,’ but had never really seen me play.”

Stålberg hasn’t had to make many adjustments to the American culture, which he claims is more hospitable than in Sweden. When he was 11 or 12, his family vacationed in the United States, going to New York City — where they took him to Madison Square Garden to see Wayne Gretzky and the Rangers — and Disney World. And during the summer before he went to high school, Stålberg visited a family friend in Spokane, Wash., for a month. Stålberg’s father, Eddy, was part of an American exchange student program years earlier and remained in contact with one of his friends, who became a golf pro and had a son the same age as Viktor. So he took advantage of that connection, came to the States and hit the links for a month, the type of trip that would make any golf guru salivate.

“That was probably good for me [in the long run], getting to know some American habits and the culture,” said Stålberg, who added he got his handicap down to about 5 when he was 14 years old. “That definitely helped me out.”

Stålberg’s transition to America off the ice was fairly seamless, but it was a whole new ballgame at the rink. The Swedish game is much different, with more of an east-to-west feel that had an emphasis on longer possessions and sound puck movement, especially with larger ice sheets. There is hardly any dump-and-chase or cycling low in the zone, and there’s little emphasis on being able to fight through any traffic. Defensive systems are more complex in America, too. These were all things Stålberg battled as he went from a player who scored 33 goals and 31 assists in his last season in Sweden to a freshman at Vermont who had seven goals and eight assists.

“I’ve been a scoring threat my whole life,” he said, “but I just hadn’t found a way to get it done my first two years here at Vermont.”

At 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, Stålberg wouldn’t be effective if he couldn’t outmuscle bigger defensemen. As games wore on during his first two seasons, he began to wear out, and his consistency issues plagued him. So he made the commitment last summer to return to Burlington two months earlier than usual to work out with Justin Goulet, the team’s strength and conditioning coach. Stålberg added more lower-body muscle to shore up his puck-possession skills, and he increased his stamina for those late-game situations. As it stands, he’s assisted on two game-winning goals and been on the ice for five, and he’s scored one game-tying goal and been on the ice for three.

“I don’t think you ever know if a player is going to score 20 goals for you,” said Sneddon, who won his 100th game on the Vermont bench last weekend. “We just had a feeling from what we saw last year, knowing what he was willing to do this summer to try to be the best he could be coming into this season, we just had a feeling that good things were going to happen. We certainly didn’t know if that would translate into scoring 20 goals, but we felt he was going to be one of the top players in Hockey East for sure.”

His 20 goals are the most in Hockey East, and he’s third with 35 points. He is also a Toronto Maple Leafs draft pick, and his frame is NHL-ready. Stålberg and Sneddon understand the Leafs will come calling in about a month and a half, and this will be a much more difficult offer to turn down. But for Stålberg, it’s not unprecedented.

“I decided not to go pro when maybe I had a chance to before coming over here,” Stålberg said. “To this day, I think that was the best decision of my life. There’s no doubt about that.”

He has to make that call once more, and it would be hard to argue with either decision. But this time around, there seems to be no cause for concern. Because now, Viktor Stålberg is on the map, and they know where to find him.