It took Jeff Sauer about 10 minutes on the ice before he knew this was something he wanted to do.
In July 2011, the former coach of two men’s hockey national championship teams at Wisconsin was asked by some friends at USA Hockey to get involved with a Paralympics program known as sledge hockey, also called sled hockey.
Just two months before winning the NHL’s Lester Patrick Award for outstanding service to hockey in the United States, Sauer was intrigued.
Having retired from Wisconsin in 2002, Sauer had a long association with a school, made for hockey players with hearing disabilities, started in Chicago by Blackhawks legend Stan Mikita. It didn’t take long before watching hockey played on sleds made him long to get back behind the whistle.
“It’s humbling more than anything,” Sauer said over the phone before his team headed off to Sochi, Russia, where on March 7 the Paralympics will begin, as will their defense of the gold medal they won in Vancouver four years ago.
“When you’re around disabled folks, usually you’re intimidated,” he said. “But 10 minutes into that first practice, I was unbelievably enthused about the dedication and the discipline and the idea that they want to get better. I mean, I have 17 world-class athletes here. Going for a gold medal, you can’t ask for more than that.”
In a one-hour documentary titled “Ice Warriors,” set to air on PBS on Monday night, the saga of this year’s sledge hockey team will be detailed. It includes many touching stories, including that of Josh Pauls, who was born in Greenberg, N.J., in Somerset County, without tibia bones in either of his legs.
“It’s a great town. It was a lot of fun, and when I was 8 years old my mom found a flyer to go watch a sledge hockey game,” said Pauls, now 22 and studying sports management at Lindenwood University in Missouri. “A team opened up in my town, and eventually I just fell in love with it.”
The game itself is a lot more physical than one might imagine, with players sitting on a hard-plastic sled, a double-blade skate below them. They propel themselves down the ice with an abbreviated stick in each hand, a taped blade on one end and a metal ice pick on the other. By necessity, they are extremely muscular from waist up, and with full upper-body gear, including a full-face cage, they often slam into each other in full-speed collisions.
“I think we’re all playing it because we do have some aggression,” defenseman Taylor Chace says during the film.
“My father always told me contact sports are anger management for men.”
The backgrounds of the players are equally engaging.
There is forward Rico Roman, who had both of his legs crushed by an IED explosion, flipping his Humvee while serving overseas as a member of the US Army in 2007. There is forward Taylor Lipsett, who was born with “brittle bone” disease and has broken bones in his legs about 105 times in his life and spent 2-3 months a year during his teens in a lower-body cast. There is captain Andy Yohe, who lost both his legs after getting run over by a train as a teenager.
Then, in one of the most gripping moments of the documentary, there is a man named Alexi Salamone, who was an unborn baby when his mother was exposed to a harmful amount of radiation after the nuclear plant meltdown in Chernobyl, Russia. Salamone was born with legs that were twisted at the knees.
While in an orphanage in Moscow at age 3, his legs were amputated, and at age 6, he and his sister were adopted by the American family of Susan and Joseph Salamone.
Leading up to the Paralympics, the coaching staff had to cut its team from 18 to 17. Salamone was a talented player, but he was the one Sauer had to send home — a decision that would have been hard to deliver to anyone, let alone a child of Chernobyl.
“It’s the worst day that any coach has to deal with,” Sauer said.
Yet now Sauer takes his Americans to Russia with hopes of bringing back a gold medal, something Zach Parise and Co. couldn’t do after losing to the Canadians in Friday’s semifinal. And it brings the coach back to that day when he discovered sledge hockey, and embraced it.
“I’m glad that I said yes,” Sauer said, “let’s put it that way.”