13-Year-Old Chooses Size-16 Skates Over Hoops
Thirteen-year-old Nate Miller crouches into the net at 6′3″, 180 lbs, to defend the net for the Junior Pens (who include Mario Lemieux’s son, Austin). His size-16 skates act as another set of blocking pads as he towers over his teammates and opponents and nearly looks the 6′4″ Mario in the eye. And yet he gave up baseball because it was cutting into hockey time.
Nate Miller simply loves hockey.
We can’t say we’re normally proponents of boys becoming singularly focused on a sport at a young age, only to develop a robotic reaction to the sport’s nuances and expose themselves to the repetition injuries that come from specialization at a ridiculously early age. For young Nate, though, we’re happy to make an exception for a specific reason.
