{"id":40260,"date":"2011-12-13T05:00:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uscho.com\/?p=40260"},"modified":"2020-08-24T21:22:41","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T02:22:41","slug":"cornells-lowry-puts-family-connections-to-good-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/2011\/12\/13\/cornells-lowry-puts-family-connections-to-good-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Cornell’s Lowry puts family connections to good use"},"content":{"rendered":"
In hockey, you hear the word family a lot. Maybe it’s a the way a coach describes his team, or maybe it’s the way a teammate talks about the special bond that exists on his or her team.<\/p>\n
But in the case of the Lowry family, it really is about family.<\/p>\n
First there’s Dave Lowry, assistant coach with the NHL’s Calgary Flames. He played in over 1,000 NHL games for five different teams, doing so by playing hard and gritty.<\/p>\n
Then there’s 20-year-old Joel Lowry, a freshman forward at Cornell, and 18-year-old Adam, who plays major junior for the Western Hockey League’s Swift Current Broncos.<\/p>\n
Dave and his sons all have this in common: They have been drafted by NHL teams. Dave was drafted in the sixth round by Vancouver in 1983; Joel went to the Los Angeles Kings in the fifth round last summer; and Adam was drafted by the Winnipeg Jets in the third round, also last offseason.<\/p>\n
Joel moved around a lot as a child. He was born in St. Louis when his dad was playing for the Blues. He also lived in Florida, San Jose and Calgary, all stops in the career of his father.<\/p>\n
“My family was always around the rink,” Joel said. “It was a great experience to do that.”<\/p>\n
He spent a large part of his childhood growing up in Calgary, and that’s where some life lessons and competitive lessons were learned playing with and against Adam.<\/p>\n
“We had a pond in the backyard at the house and we played all day long,” Lowry said.<\/p>\n
Both Joel and Adam have good hockey size — Joel is 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds; Adam is a little bigger at 6-5 and 189 pounds — and both play similar styles, Joel said. That includes going to the net and playing a gritty brand of hockey they both learned from their father.<\/p>\n
So many outstanding teenage hockey players in the U.S. and Canada are faced with a tough decision and a topic that always seems to be a hot-button issue in hockey circles: college hockey or major juniors?<\/p>\n
Joel was in that group, a talented player who had to make a decision. It was one that wasn’t easy, he said, but one he has no regrets about now.<\/p>\n
“It was a tough choice,” he said. “I was really focused on major junior. Growing up in Canada, that’s usually the first route.”<\/p>\n
His father played major junior in the Ontario Hockey League with the London Knights, and that’s the route his brother chose.<\/p>\n
“I got some advice from my dad, but we talked about me making my own decisions,” Joel said.<\/p>\n
Joel took a recruiting trip to Ithaca, N.Y., and Cornell, an Ivy League school with great history and tradition. That trip was what sealed the deal for him to ultimately play college hockey.<\/p>\n