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Canfield player ‘nets’ award
By Tom Williams
CANFIELD
One of Stephen Sansoterra’s best memories as a Canfield High School hockey player was scoring his first goal.
A forward for the Cardinals for the past four seasons, Sansoterra was a sophomore when he scored in a road game against Chardon Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin.
“Right off the faceoff, the puck came right to me and I snapped it to the top [of the net],” Sansoterra said.
The senior whose 4.33 grade-point average has him ranked near the top of his class won’t forget his final hockey accomplishment. The future Ivy League student recently was awarded a $3,000 scholarship from the Cleveland Hockey Booster Club for an essay he wrote on diversity.
“Stephen was awarded the first Matthew Castro Shlonsky Memorial Award because we felt his essay embodied exactly what Matt stood for which was service to others and the betterment of his community,” said Meagan Tomblin, vice president of the booster club.
Schlonsky played hockey for Brush High School from 2006-10 and was awarded a scholarship from the booster club in his final season. Last summer in Washington D.C., Schlonsky was an innocent bystander who was shot and killed during a crossfire.
The boosters, with the help of the Lake Erie Monsters of the American Hockey League, created the scholarship honoring Schlonsky, with $12,000 being awarded to hockey players in the Greater Cleveland High School Hockey League.
Sansoterra wrote about how Zoie Amatore, a student at Ursuline High School, was a member of Canfield’s hockey team for three seasons. (Canfield has the only varsity hockey program in the Mahoning Valley.) Amatore and Sam Hepola were often his linemates as the Cardinals went 15-5 1.
His essay won first place.
“Stephen wrote about the challenges a female hockey player faced on their all-male team and how he did his best to make her feel welcome simply because he was able to look past the fact that she was a girl, he saw her as a person,” Tomblin said. “His empathy didn’t stop at his teammates.
“He helped a fellow classmate raise a grade by tutoring and went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic where he helped aid in vision screenings and dental treatments,” Tomblin said. “We felt that he has learned and shows a great deal of respect for his fellow man at such a young age and was incredibly worthy of the honor.”
Sansoterra was emailed that he had won one of the three tiers involved with the scholarship.
“I didn’t know which,” Sansoterra said. “I was excited to know I had won something, but I was nervous because I didn’t know what place.”
Sansoterra had never won an essay contest. He didn’t find out in person. The booster club’s 24th annual Fund-raising/Scholarship Awards in Garfield Heights coincided with Canfield’s spring break band trip to Orlando, Fla. An alto saxophonist, Sansoterra also is assistant principal violinist of the Youngstown Youth Symphony.
“So my parents [David Sansoterra and Maria Kowal] were [at the hockey banquet] to accept,” Sansoterra said. “I was a little bit mad [at the timing but] I was committed to band and I had to go.”
Sansoterra began playing hockey as a sixth grader when he participated in a program at The Ice Zone in Boardman.
Because Canfield’s road games are all in the Cleveland area, Sansoterra said playing hockey had its challenges, especially riding the buses.
“They are long and they are arduous but it’s exciting to know we are the [only] group in this area to embrace this sport,” he said.
In August, Sansoterra will begin classes at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He plans to play intramural hockey as he studies biochemistry and global and public health sciences.
He also was accepted at UCLA and Illinois State.
“Cornell is not too far from Albany where you can take trains to go to Boston or New York,” Sansoterra said.