Dzmitry Daniliuk, the Buckskill Winter Club’s personable 30-year-old Belarus-born hockey coach, began playing the sport in Minsk at the age of 6, soon after fleeing a ballet class in which his mother had enrolled him.
“But you would have had all those girls to yourself . . .”
“Yes, but you don’t think that way when you’re 6. Maybe when you’re 18. . . .”
At any rate, hockey has been, from his first moment on ice, Daniliuk’s first love.
“When I was a kid back home in my country, I would wake up at 5:30, and my dad would drive me to the rink. I would train for one hour, then go to school, and after school I would train for another hour, go home, do my homework. . . . Wake up at 5:30. . . . For eight years I did that, from 6 to 14. Train, train, train every day, summer too. For me it was hockey, hockey, hockey — I loved that. . . . If you love something it doesn’t matter. I love to spend time on the ice. When I wake up, at 5:45, at 6:45, I have a smile on my face.”
Hockey being in his opinion the most difficult sport to master, such concentration as he’d described would be required if one wanted to excel. “In my country,” he said, “any kid could play . . . they give you everything. Then, after a while, if you don’t play good in junior hockey, they say do something else.”
As a defenseman, which he’s always been, Daniliuk, who forwent college for a decade-long professional career, in Belarus and in America, said, “First, you have to protect the goalie, then you have to make the first pass. . . . Ninety-five percent is mental. . . . Sometimes you hit someone, sometimes you just grab the puck . . . it depends on the situation.” As a defenseman, he could skate backward almost as fast as he could forward, he added.
Daniliuk first came to this country at the age of 16 — to Montauk (where his mother managed Joni’s restaurant) — and began playing with a Suffolk Police Athletic League travel team based at the Rinx in Hauppauge before returning to Belarus to play professional hockey there for four years, after which he played on professional teams, some of them just below the N.H.L. level, in a number of states here.
After 13 years of competitive play, and impeded by a nagging back injury, the interviewee turned, at 28, to coaching. He’s in his first season at Buckskill, where he gives hockey lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays to youngsters — some as young as 2 — and to students 15 and up. “I want to give them everything I’ve learned,” he said.
Bryan Wish, who coaches a South Fork high school freshman team, the Whalers, that plays in the Suffolk County High School Hockey League, and Daniliuk, who has coached U-16 and U-18 teams based in Riverhead, are working together to develop young hockey players here. But distraction-plagued young Americans would have to devote more time to training, he said, if they were to excel at the sport.
“Training two times a week is not enough. You don’t get better this way. You need to train four times a week and play on Saturday and Sunday.” He agreed that everyone needed a day off.
In parting, Buckskill’s coach said he wished — given the South Fork’s difficult traffic conditions — that East Hampton Town would build a covered rink.
