1982 Athlete of the week, J.J. Reydel

On Jan. 27, the top six skaters for Germantown Academy got together and agreed not to score in their game against Roxborough. The following night, they took the ice for one of the strangest games in the history of high school hockey. The best skaters on the best team in Pennsylvania did not score a goal. Among them, they riddled the nets with one shot. Tank job? Mutiny? Point-shaving? No, just a remarkable display of sportsmanship by a team that felt sorry for its outmanned opponent. The final score was 13-0. It could have been 30-0. “Some of us from the top two lines dropped back and played defense, and some of us centered lines with guys who don’t get a chance to play all that much,” said J. J. Reydel, the Patriots’ fine junior center. “Nobody wanted to see a 20-0 game. We just tried to set up the other guys. “It was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever experienced, seeing guys who don’t skate very well. get a chance to score some goals.” A few weeks later, the top guns for GA did the same thing against another helpless foe. Despite firing blanks in those two games, Reydel finished the regular season with 27 goals and 34 assists in 19 outings. But three days before the Flyers Cup series, he woke up with a stabbing pain in his groin, numbness in his legs, and nausea in his gut. Within seven hours, he was stretched on an operating table while doctors opened his abdomen and unraveled a Gordian knot of tangled blood vessels. “There was a blockage of one of the blood vessels in my groin,” said Reydel, The Inquirer’s Suburban Athlete of the Week. “The doctor said it would have happened sooner or later, but by twisting and turning in my sleep, things got tangled up in there.”

The doctors told him that he would start feeling human again in about two weeks. Six days later, he was skating in practice. Ten days later, he scored two goals and assisted on two as the Patriots eliminated Archbishop Ryan, 6-4. Last Wednesday, 12 days after surgery, he scored two goals and set up a third as GA won the Cup by flattening West Chester, 5-0. Healthy or not, nobody but J. J. Reydel stops J. J. Reydel from scoring.