Couch: Like mother, like son — MSU's Dylan St. Cyr tries to 'prove them wrong' like his legendary mom, Manon Rheaume
EAST LANSING – Michigan State goaltender Dylan St. Cyr knew French well enough growing up to understand what his mother was saying to him. It was, after all, her preferred language when he was in trouble.
But when, at age 11, St. Cyr, found himself being interviewed in French — about his mom — at the famed Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament, he began to realize just what a hockey legend his mother is, what a sensation in net she had been.
“Des gens disent que les filles sont incapables de faire des choses que les hommes font, mais elle leur a prouvé le contraire. Je suis très fier!” he told one Montreal-based publication in 2011. Or, in English: “People say girls can't do things that men do, but she proved them wrong. I'm very proud.”
“It was really cool to get to see people stopping by, whether it be restaurants or rinks, either asking for pictures or autographs,” St. Cyr said last week.
St. Cyr’s mom is Manon Rheaume, the first woman to ever play in a major American men’s sports league. She remains the only woman ever to play in an NHL game, having been in goal in a preseason game for the Tampa Bay Lightning in 1992 and, a year later, a preseason game for the Boston Bruins.
In 1984, she had been the first girl to play at that pee-wee tournament in Quebec City, near her hometown. Years later, she loved seeing St. Cyr, the goalie for the Detroit Honeybaked team in 2011, experience the craze of Quebec City during this event. She'd played in front of 15,000 people there and was interviewed on television for the first time in her life. It’s where she first became a pioneer, a star, long before she appeared on the David Letterman show, having never heard of David Letterman.
“It's funny, because to (Dylan), I'm just a normal person. I’m just his mom,” Rheaume said. “(Him) growing up here in the U.S., it’s not like when I go to Canada, so I can just be a normal person, which is great. But I knew (it would be different) going to that tournament — because growing up in Quebec, having seen that tournament and played in that tournament, and every time they had an NHL player that was coming to the tournament with his kid, it was always the big story. I knew that him going there, he would get some attention.
“That was kind of cool to see, how he was handling all of that, how he was dealing with it. As a parent, just to see him answer questions and be very humble and doing his thing.”
These days, she watches him do his thing from the stands at Munn Ice Arena or on TV from wherever she is.
“He doesn't take any start for granted,” she said. “He doesn't take any moment on the ice for granted. And that makes him work harder.”
An ideal match, MSU and St. Cyr
St. Cyr is an important part of the MSU hockey renaissance in Year 1 under Adam Nightingale. He’s started in net in 24 of the Spartans’ first 25 games, winning 12, with two ties, while allowing 2.62 goals per game. If this season winds up being the foundation of an MSU program revival, especially if the Spartans get to the NCAA tournament for the first time in more than a decade, St. Cyr will have his place in Spartan lore, even before the tie to his famous mom.
MORE: Couch: Michigan State hockey has Munn buzzing again, back on track for NCAA tourney bid
It’s been an ideal match, the Spartans and St. Cyr. Nightingale was looking for a leader, someone who’d been around winning college hockey programs and, above all, a quality goaltender.
St. Cyr, 23, was looking for a place where he had a chance to be the choice every night in net, to close out his college hockey career — and perhaps his hockey career — with a memorable season. He didn’t need anymore schooling. He has a degree in finance from Notre Dame and MBA from Quinnipiac. He spent five years battling for playing time in South Bend and out east at Quinnipiac. He’d been on NCAA tournament teams every season there was a tournament played — with the Irish in 2018, 2019 and 2021 and Quinnipiac last season. He played in Quinnipiac’s quarterfinal loss to Michigan last March.
“When I got the call from Coach Nightingale, he kind of explained the situation here, the job that he took over, and kind of the culture and team that he wanted to build,” said St. Cyr, who’s getting a graduate certificate in sports coaching leadership from MSU, while focusing most of his time on an internship in town.
Being close to home was enticing, too. This is the state where he played his youth hockey. He’d grown up in Northville, moving there in first grade. It's where his mother still lives and where he decided to be a goalie.
His mom didn’t push him in that direction — other than dressing him up in a goalie outfit when he was a toddler. His father, Gerry, had been a center and spent five seasons in the minor leagues and also played professional roller hockey. So Dylan’s influences were varied. Ultimately, he chose to be a goaltender because as a kid he didn’t like leaving the ice for shift changes. Being the goalie meant he played the whole time.
“Obviously looking back now, you have to be the starter to not leave the ice, which is the one caveat. The red herring, if you will,” St. Cyr said. “But I think for me, the part that I fell in love with was having the control of the game … and kind of the pressure that comes along with it.”
His mother can relate to that pressure. She loved playing goalie for a lot of the same reasons. As a parent, she hates it.
“I think it was his first year in Squirts (9-under youth hockey), they went to state and he was the one starting the game in the final the next day,” Rheaume said. “I remember getting up in the morning and having butterflies in my stomach. ‘What's that?’ So I picked up the phone and I called my mom and said, ‘OK, I have a crazy question to ask you. Dylan's playing in the final today. And I have butterflies in my stomach. Is that normal?’ And my mom said to me, ‘It’s payback time.’ That's when I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I put you through this all those years.’ ”
In youth hockey, Rheaume was just like any other parent, especially a parent of a goalie.
“If your kid allows a bad goal, you feel like everybody's looking at you like, ‘What is he doing?’ she said.
At higher levels, the butterflies haven’t gone away — even as she’s watched him win a gold medal for Team USA in the U-18 World Championships and become a seasoned veteran in college hockey. These aren’t normal mom nerves. They’re the nerves of someone who truly understands the pressure of the position.
“I understand like the importance of playing well and, even if you're up like 5-0, a goalie has to be great for the rest of the game, especially in college. You only have one net, it's one goalie,” She said. “ … You need to earn the net. The room for error for a goalie, it's so slim compared to a player.”
For this reason, Rheaume has no issue fully enjoying watching her younger son, Dakoda, a defenseman. Her favorite way to see Dylan play is to watch a recording of his game when she knows he’s performed well and won.
“Do you know how much fun it is?” said Rheaume, who only misses games when they conflict with her work as a hockey operations and prospect advisor for the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, a job she can do traveling from Northville. “I'm so excited to go watch his game (then) and I'm hoping they shoot on him because I know that he's going to do well.”
After games, Rheaume is mom, rather than goalie coach, even if she's an advanced mom of sorts. She sees the game the way St. Cyr does. She knows the saves he’s most happy about, the shots he thinks he should have stopped, the highlight saves that were actually easy and the ones that looked routine but weren't.
“We're both the same way,” St. Cyr said. “We have our nerves pregame or pre-any situation. But as soon as you're kind of thrown into the fire, that's when it all sets away. I know she's talked about that with her game in Tampa Bay (in 1992) and how nervous she was leading up to it. But as soon as she stepped on the ice, it kind of faded away. Now that she's watching, she doesn't have any control so that nervousness doesn't flush away.”
A hockey culture that didn't want her
Rheaume didn’t realize how impactful and significant what she was doing was when she tried out for the Lightning 30 years ago last September. She was just trying to chase her dreams and to play hockey. She knew she was up against a culture that didn’t accept her. But that was nothing new. When her father would take her to a youth tryout in Quebec, they would tell him not to bring her, that they weren’t going to let her take a spot from one of the boys.
“He would take me anyway and I would go and I would get cut and he saw how much I was working harder to make it,” said Rheaume, who was raised in a hockey family, her younger brother, Pascal, playing for seven NHL organizations. “Sometimes I wish I would have had the same chance, at least, as the other boys to play at the highest level younger, because I may have played major junior (hockey) for four years like everybody else and saw how far I could take my game.”
There were no women’s hockey college scholarships back then or even women’s Olympic hockey. Women’s ice hockey didn’t become an Olympic sport until 1998. Rheaume won a silver medal with the Canadian team that year and gold medals at two world championships prior to that.
She also played for seven men's professional minor league teams over five years in the 1990s, always aware that she wasn’t quite getting a full opportunity.
“I would win a game and sometimes not see another game for three weeks,” Rheaume said. “Every time a coach put me in the net, it was almost like, ‘OK, if it goes well, great, but if it doesn't go well, I look bad, too, because I put her out there.’ So the coach had as much pressure.”
Rheaume briefly played for both the Port Huron Icehawks and Flint Generals in the 2000s and also played women’s professional hockey for the Minnesota Whitecaps. She’s been involved in hockey in a lot of different ways, from broadcasting, to coaching, to building a girls youth program with the Little Caesars Hockey Club — the sort of program she would have thrived in 40 years ago. And now traveling to watch and meet with the L.A. Kings’ prospects throughout college hockey and the Ontario Hockey League.
Yet the reason she is a household name in so many circles well outside of Quebec are her two NHL preseason games, especially the one with Tampa Bay as a 20-year-old, which opened eyes and perhaps doors. And which led to an appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman” on Oct. 9, 1992, following "Regis and Kathy Lee."
“I didn't even know that I would get so much attention for it,” Rheaume said. “When they asked me to do David Letterman, I didn't even know who David Letterman was. I was from Quebec, I'd never watched English TV and I was going to bed early. Years later, when I was living in the U.S., and I saw that show and see all the people that were going on that show, I was like, ‘I cannot believe I was on it.’ ”
She began to realize her impact as the years went on. Parents, young girls, even some NHL goalies have told Rheaume that she was an inspiration.
“I think, too, over the years, my story has been told a different way,” she said. “Like back then, it was almost like in a time where it was not supposed to be happening. Where now, it's more like people are talking about my performance, that I had to perform well in the camp to earn a start in an exhibition game. When back then, they were talking, ‘Oh, they invited her for a publicity thing.’ Nobody talked about the fact that first I had to show up, I had to play well. They would have never put me in an exhibition game if I didn't play well.”
Among the ways she relates to her oldest son is the adversity she's had to overcome. His is not the same. But at 5-foot-8, St. Cyr, like his mom, is battling some disadvantages in net. His stature will probably keep him from his wildest hockey dreams, though he’s considering playing in Europe, if the right opportunities are there.
“To be able to play at the level that he’s playing, at his size, a lot of people don’t even want to look at a smaller size goalie,” Rheaume said. “So for him, he had to face the same kind of adversity, but because of his size. Like with me, it pushes him to prove people wrong.”
Or, as St. Cyr said to that reporter all those years ago, “Prouver le contraire.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU hockey: Legend Manon Rheaume sees herself in son Dylan St. Cyr
