Kantola shoots high

Wunderkind an NHL prospect

Bowling Green hockey coach Scott Paluch flew from Ohio on a private jet to meet with Kai Kantola at Kantola's parents' house in North Raleigh this week.

It was, Paluch told the family, the first time he had ever gone on a recruiting trip to North Carolina.

It was, Kantola jokes now, hardly the first time anyone had been surprised to meet an elite hockey player from Raleigh.

"I usually tell them after they see me play," Kantola said of his unusual origins. "Usually they laugh, or ask, 'Do they even have rinks down there?' "

No one is laughing at him now. Kantola's hockey career has taken him as far afield as Finland and Fargo, N.D. Today, the 18-year-old leaves for somewhere equally cold and remote, but far more important.

On Monday, Kantola will wear a USA Hockey jersey for the first time at the Viking Cup, an international tournament in Camrose, Alberta. Come June, Kantola is likely to be the first hockey player from the Triangle taken in the NHL Draft.

A product of the East Coast Eagles youth program, Kantola followed the path of any hockey player with higher ambitions by moving away from home, first to Finland and then to North Dakota, where he is in his second season of junior hockey with the Fargo-Moorhead Jets.

Kantola is fielding Division I college scholarship offers and also has caught the attention of the pros. The NHL's Central Scouting Service ranks him as an A-level prospect, indicating the potential to go in the first three rounds of the draft.

"He's definitely on our radar screen," said Brian Fitzgerald, a Detroit-based scout for the league. "Now it's up to the teams to decide."

Kantola has a cell phone that rings often with calls from coaches and agents. Even his parents in Raleigh aren't immune from the persistent sales pitches.

Home for a week at Christmas, with relatives in town and his siblings roaming through the house, Kantola, the lanky 6-foot-1 1/2, 179-pounder with shaggy brown hair and a scraggly goatee, lounges in a Finland sweatshirt. He's been so far away so often, it's unusual for him to be home.

"It's difficult," said his mother, Merja.

"It might be difficult for parents," Kai interjects. "Not for me."

Kantola graduated from high school in Fargo last spring, so his days are now devoted to hockey. His evenings are spent learning Finnish, the language his parents spoke as children.

He already has scholarship offers from a few Division I schools, but has told them he won't make a decision until January. With a big week at the Viking Cup, he could dazzle both scouts and coaches alike, further cementing his position as the vanguard of the Triangle's burgeoning hockey future.

Triangle's new Ice Age

The Triangle's once-tiny hockey community started expanding with the minor-league Raleigh IceCaps' arrival in 1991 and grew exponentially when the Carolina Hurricanes moved from Hartford, Conn., in 1997.

Now, it's beginning to develop players talented enough to pursue opportunities elsewhere -- in the New England prep schools or the vast world of junior hockey -- where players from across the United States and Canada live with host families and attend local schools while playing more than 70 hockey games a year.

Many Triangle players have participated in USA Hockey's select festivals, which bring together the best 14-, 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds in the country; others are playing in lower-level junior leagues.

Tim McLoughlin, who started in a learn-to-play program at Dorton Arena, played prep-school hockey and now plays for Harvard's junior varsity team, hoping to walk-on with the varsity.