Ice Dreams: Modesto's Sanders seeking spot on Thunder's roster

STOCKTON -- The schedule calls it an exhibition.

But the hockey game in which Drew Sanders will play tonight might as well be the Stanley Cup Finals.

The Modesto native has 60 minutes tonight and another hour on Saturday to prove he belongs on the roster of the Stockton Thunder.

By this time next week, Thunder coach Chris Cichocki will have trimmed his team to no more than 20 players, and entering tonight's game in Fresno and Saturday's at Stockton Arena, Sanders has yet to earn one of those spots.

He's a left wing on the bubble.

"He's making a great case for himself to be in the Thunder lineup on opening night," Cichocki said. "I have an open mind about who will make the roster."

Think about the odds against someone from Modesto making it far enough in hockey to even be in an ECHL training camp.

Sanders, 24, was born in 1983, seven years after Olympic Gold Ice Arena -- Modesto's last ice rink -- burned down. It's now a Modesto Junior College parking lot and soon to be the site of a parking deck.

Northern California didn't have a team in the National Hockey League in 1983. The Golden Seals bolted Oakland for Cleveland in 1976, and the Sharks began playing at the Cow Palace in 1991.

But Sanders not only beat those initial odds, he's been doing so consistently for 16 years.

As the youngest of three children and the only son of Frank and Linda Sanders, Drew Sanders played baseball and soccer -- just like all the other kids his age.

But late in the 1991-92 NHL season, the Sharks just happened to have a game on television, which was a rarity in those early years -- and Drew Sanders just happened to stumble across the telecast.

Something clicked with the 9-year-old.

"I saw a game on TV and it looked like fun," Sanders said. "I asked my dad if I could try playing hockey, and he had to call around to find out that Stockton had a rink."

He enrolled in the Oak Park Ice Arena's Monday night beginners' hockey program and quickly took to the game, latching on with a Stockton Colts' youth team.

Before long, he was getting noticed by scouts for travel teams and signed on with the Bay Eagles. The good news was that it was a higher level of hockey. The bad news was that the Eagles practiced in Redwood City. Every Sunday. At 6 a.m.

"We'd go there on Saturday night and stay overnight," said Frank Sanders, a building contractor and 1966 Modesto High graduate. "We spent a lot of time doing that, and then they played tournaments in Canada and that was a lot of travel.

"But as long as he was having fun, so was I. I just enjoyed watching him play. Now, people complain to me about having to travel all the way to Lodi for football and they get no sympathy from me."

From the Bay Eagles, Sanders moved up into the Junior Sharks program in San Jose, then was selected to a Northern California elite team.

With each new level came an uptick in competition that for most represented a new ceiling.

"All of these teams are like pyramids in that the higher you go up, the less room there is," Drew Sanders said. "Out of everybody I played with prior to college, I'm the only one still playing."

In Sanders' case, the hockey limits he faced weren't in his abilities but in the level of developmental hockey being played in Northern California. If his dream was to play professional hockey, he would have to leave the region.

So Sanders attended Beyer High School through his sophomore year, then transferred to Marquette Senior High School in Michigan's frosty Upper Peninsula.