» Matthew Chasse-Article - Harrington College of Canada
Get Adobe Flash player
    Translate to:

Matthew Chasse-Article

REPRINT FROM: Wednesday January 26th, 2011

St. Lambert ‘s Matthew Chasse making his mark at College Harrington du Canada

By Mike Hickey

Two years ago St. Lambert native Matthew Chasse decided to move away from home in an effort to improve his hockey career. The former bantam AA player made the move to Oka to attend College Harrington du Canada, a private school that combines elite hockey with strong academics. Halfway through his second year at Harrington it appears that Chasse’s decision has been a good one.
In a recent trip to Boston Matthew joined the school’s college team and more than held his own against older, more experienced competition at the EJHL showcase.
“In the first game he was feeling his way playing against players three and four years older than he is,” said Martin Daoust, the director of the school’s hockey programme. “In the second game he was feeling a lot more comfortable but he ran out of gas in the final game which is to be expected since he was the youngest player in the tournament.”

The trip to Boston reminded Chasse of previous American sojourns when he and the St. Lambert Red Wings bantam teams played in tournaments in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Chasse has good size, the 16-year-old is 6’1” and weighs close to 200 lbs., and has impressed scouts on both sides of the border with his strength and shot. “He is big for his age and has a very strong upper body,” Daoust said. “He is strong on the boards and possesses an accurate wrist shot. If he improves his leg strength and skating ability he could become a very good player.”

Certainly the Harrington hockey programme is geared towards individual improvement and that fact is one of the reasons Chasse and his family made the decision for him to attend the boarding school. The hockey season is 10 months long and is modeled after programmes being used by Canadian Olympic and National Team athletes under the guidelines and annual planning regimen endorsed by Hockey Canada. The Harrington athletes are trained in all elements of personal and team development: Mental Preparation Training, Nutritional Preparation Training, Physical Conditioning and Training, Technical Skills Training, Individual Tactical Training, Team Tactics and Concepts. Within those parameters players work on power skating, puck control, individual skill development and tactical game development.

While Harrington teams participate in Tier I and Tier II intercity leagues across the city of Montreal and its surrounding area, the school has an agreement with Hockey Quebec that any Quebec-born player can not play Tier I Midget hockey. As a result Chasse plays Midget BB where he is one the league’s better players. To date he has amassed 25 points (17 goals and eight assists) in 20 games and is tied for the league lead in goals scored.

Each Harrington team from Peewee to Midget plays exhibition games, league games including playoffs and tournaments for a total of over 50 games and an added benefit to Chasse is the fact that he augments the Midget schedule with exhibition games with the College team as he did three weeks ago in Boston.

Another advantage of the Harrington experience is exposure to different cultures. Matthew’s teammates included players from such diverse countries as Russia, Austria, France, Japan and the United States.
Chasse is not the first South Shore player to attend Harrington. Other local players who previously attended Harrington include St. Lambert native Antoine Audet and Brossard’s Alexander Savard. Audet graduated from Harrington this past spring and presently play hockey at Loomis and Chaffe Prep School in Connecticut while Savard is now a member of the Notre Dame College Hounds, the Saskatchewan hockey programme made famous by Father David Bauer.

Chasse plans on spending one more year at Harrington and then it will be decision time once more. His options will likely include playing in the Quebec Major Junior or Junior AAA circuits, staying at Harrington and playing for their collegial AAA team on a full-time basis and there is always a possibility of attending an American prep school.
For his part, Daoust would like to see him stay at Harrington for another three years.

“If he continues to improve his lower body strength and play collegial hockey with us he could play college hockey in the United States in either the Division I or Division III level,” Daoust said.