'He refuses to be denied' | Looking back on Gilbert's journey from local youth hockey to the NHL

Dennis Gilbert sits at his stall in the Buffalo Sabres dressing room, the latest stop on a journey that started a few miles north in an Amherst backyard. With precise detail, he rattles off the hectic daily schedule that helped propel him to this moment, back when his current situation was little more than a childhood dream.

In the car for school at 6:30 a.m. Back home and in bed at 11:30 p.m. Do it again the next day.

“Looking back on it, it seems outrageous that I was doing that every day for years,” Gilbert says. “But my siblings and I, that’s how we all were.”

With the Sabres celebrating Youth Hockey Day during their game against the New Jersey Devils on Sunday afternoon, Sabres.com revisited Gilbert’s days split between high-school hockey for St. Joe’s Collegiate Institute and minor hockey with the Amherst Knights – early drives and two-a-day practices that propelled him to the NHL.

6:30 a.m.

Dennis Gilbert Sr. comes home from his night shift with the Buffalo Police Department and immediately drives Dennis Jr. to St. Joe’s, where he meets a few of his football teammates for an hourlong workout ahead of the school day.

Once the bell rings, it’s off to classes until 2:30 p.m.

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Richard Crozier graduated from St. Joe’s in 1994 and spent 15 years coaching the school’s federation hockey team. He is aware of the preconceived notions that one might attach to a player who graduated from a private school – that, in some way, it might have come easily.

“They couldn’t be more wrong,” Crozier said. “Dennis busted his ass for what he got. I’m really proud of him.”

Crozier coached Gilbert during his Pee-Wee Major season with Amherst, then again when Gilbert joined the federation team at St. Joe’s as a sophomore. In neither instance was Gilbert the outright best player on his team – at least not at the start.

“To suggest at St. Joe’s that he was our best player by a mile, that’s not true,” Crozier said. “It’s just not true. There were really good players on those teams. We won a state championship. But what separates Dennis from, I guess anyone who I’ve ever really worked with, is how determined he is.”

Crozier recalls the team traveling to Saratoga, New York for an annual tournament about a month into Gilbert’s sophomore season. The team was carrying seven defensemen and, in an attempt to give the group a jolt, Crozier decided to scratch one for a game. He and his coaching staff took the easy way out by selecting Gilbert – the tall, lanky, youngest one of the bunch.

“We look back at that all the time and we laugh,” Crozier said. “What were we doing? I will say though, he was pissed off. He did not like sitting in the stands. And when he came back from that, he was just so determined.”

Gilbert worked to become one of St. Joe’s most oft-playing defensemen by the end of his sophomore season. He took over games during his junior year, which ended with a state championship victory in which he scored a power-play goal.

By the time his junior year ended, Crozier knew it was time for Gilbert to move on. He spent his senior year of high school playing for Michael Peca with the Buffalo Junior Sabres.

“He was our best defenseman by the time he ended with us,” Crozier said. “He climbed up the depth charts pretty quickly and won a state championship. It was like, ‘OK, Dennis, it’s time for you to go.’ He went on and he did some great things. And yeah, every step of the way we’ve obviously been paying attention.”

3 p.m.

Football practice immediately follows the conclusion of the school day. After two and a half hours in his role as starting quarterback for St. Joe’s, Gilbert drives home and completes his homework – no exceptions – before he can head back out with his hockey bag in hand.

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Dennis Gilbert Sr. coached football for 33 years, including 10 as the varsity coach at St. Joe’s. He’s a firm believer in the benefits of allowing kids to play multiple sports rather than homing in on just one – an opportunity he and his wife, Kim, gave to their three children.

Dennis played soccer, baseball, lacrosse, track and field, football and hockey at various points of his childhood. He stuck with lacrosse, hockey, and football into high school. His younger siblings – brother Patrick and sister Shannon – followed suit as athletes. Mom and Dad did what it took to get the three to their events, even if it meant one being at a tournament in Toronto and the other in Chicago.

“I tell the kids all the time, you get one chance to do high school,” Dennis Sr. said. “Play them all. Get the most out of it as you can.”

Dennis took that to the extreme during his junior year. By then, he had been offered a scholarship to play hockey at Niagara University. His father cut him from the football team to avoid an injury that might jeopardize his future.

“The first couple weeks, they won the games, but I thought I could help,” he recalled. “So, I convinced them to let me play. I ended up coming out and I started Week 5 through the rest of the year.”

As prominent as athletics were in the Gilbert household, academics came first. On one occasion when he was nine years old, Dennis had not completed his homework before it was time to leave for practice. At the instruction of his parents, he called his coach personally to inform him he would not be attending, and why.

“He made the call, and it never happened again,” Dennis Sr. said. “And almost more importantly , it never happened with his younger brother and sister, because they knew the table was set.”

The focus paid off. Following his season with the Junior Sabres and a subsequent year in the USHL, Gilbert decommitted from Niagara and was offered a full scholarship to play at Notre Dame, where he would spend three successful seasons and continue to evolve into a third-round NHL draft pick.

“That was my dream school, and if I wasn’t doing that stuff in high school, I would have never had the chance to go there,” Gilbert said. “So, that’s one thing that I definitely took from it, the balancing of different phases of your life, and it taught me that from an early age.”

10 p.m.

Once homework is done, it’s time to hit the ice for practice with Amherst. Hockey has been Gilbert’s favorite sport since he first put on skates at three years old, leaning on an orange Gatorade cooler to maintain balance on the rink his father had built in the backyard.

He’s home from practice around 11:30 p.m. and quickly off to bed, another early start awaiting him.

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Gilbert was shuffling from the weightroom to school to sports at an age when the average high schooler might have been roaming the mall or playing video games. His parents recall him willfully skipping school dances to attend hockey practice. It was a sacrifice, but it didn’t seem like a sacrifice, because he was doing what he loved.

Kim Gilbert still has the hard-covered book that Dennis made for a school project in the third grade, all about how he would grow up to be a professional hockey player, a common dream that slowly materialized as a feasibility over the course of his youth career.

It didn’t come easily. Gilbert and his father drove to Syracuse annually to try out for national camp but never made the cut. He played his youth hockey for Amherst rather than the Buffalo Regals, the elite program at the time. (His favorite memory, alongside his state championship with St. Joe’s, is upsetting the Regals in the state tournament when he was 13 years old – “It was like Miracle on Ice at the time,” he said.)

Rejection drove him to work harder. More shots taken. Extra ice time with his brother’s team. Early mornings, late nights.

The first time Dennis Sr. recognized that his son could have a future in hockey came during a tournament when Dennis was 14. Amherst was hosting nationals and losing their opening game badly against a team from Los Angeles. In the final minutes of a blowout loss, Gilbert laid out to block a slap shot.

Dennis Sr. thought it was a reckless decision, given the circumstances. But after the game, he was approached by two college coaches whom he had never met. One of the coaches asked what he thought about his son’s game.

“I said, ‘Well, I didn’t like the fact that he laid out to block that shot at the end. It’s a wasted play, he could have been done for the tournament,’” Dennis Sr. recalled. “The coach says, ‘That (play) is why I’m talking to you right now.’”

Dennis was offered his first scholarship by Niagara that summer. He kept getting better, rising to Notre Dame and then onto NHL Central Scouting lists, and finally to the third round of the draft. He’s continued to adapt his game since turning pro, carving out the physical, dependable role he currently plays for the Sabres defense corps.

“Everything Dennis has, he’s earned,” Crozier said. “And if you look at his journey, it’s quite significant. He scratched and clawed at every level. … It’s almost like he’s got the mentality that he refuses to be denied.”

Gilbert sat in the locker room of his hometown NHL team, surrounded by the fruits of early workouts and two-a-day practices and late-night skates, and thought back to those days.

“Those were long days, looking back on them now.”