His Own Big Dance, on Skates

Brett Sterling would run from the parking lot in full hockey gear, leaving 80-degree temperatures at the door to get to the frozen surface inside at the Pasadena Convention Center, a onetime ballroom converted to a creaky ice skating facility.

Even 17 years ago, the place was old.

“Oh yeah, I remember the smell,” said Sterling, 20, a junior at Colorado College and one of the nation’s top college players.

The lighting in Pasadena was augmented by large chandeliers over the rink. The scoreboard was basic and the grandstands were small, although more than ample to handle the dozens who watched his games.

Sterling can trace his path back from the moment at hand. His fourth-ranked team is headed to the Frozen Four, college hockey’s version of the Final Four, and he is the first player born and raised in Southern California to be nominated for the Hobey Baker Award, given to collegiate hockey’s best player. Sterling is among 10 finalists for the honor, a field that will be pared to three Wednesday before the award is presented at the Frozen Four in April.

Inside, though, he’s still that little kid running through that parking lot.

Sterling’s career path winds from Baldwin Park High through Ann Arbor, Mich., where he participated in the United States national team development program and won a gold medal for Team USA at the 2004 world junior championships. But his hockey roots are firmly planted in that quaint (on a good day) and cramped (every day of the week) rink in Pasadena, where people used to tango, not tangle.

“My past definitely keeps me grounded,” said Sterling, a fifth-round draft pick of the Atlanta Thrashers in 2003. “It reminds me where I came from and what it took to get here. When I first played in Pasadena, they didn’t have Plexiglass around the rink, they had a chain-link fence.”

Sterling’s home rink now is the pristine, 7,000-seat World Arena in Colorado Springs, which has a state-of-the-art video display scoreboard, Olympic-sized ice rink and rabid fans.

The centerpiece of the arena when the Tigers are on the ice is Sterling, a 5-foot-8, 160-pound powder keg, and linemate Marty Sertich, also a Hobey Baker Award finalist. Sertich, who scored a goal in a 4-3 victory over Michigan on Saturday in the Midwest Regional final at Grand Rapids, Mich., has 64 points this season, tops in the nation and one more than Sterling.

Sertich is from Roseville, Minn., a hockey holy land in a state that worships the sport. Sterling is from Southern California, where hockey has, at best, small cult status. He still hears about that.

“Yeah, I still get, ‘Do you surf or skateboard?’ ” said Sterling, who has 34 goals this season.

Sterling did neither. He played hockey and has played it so well that he is in line to possibly win an award that has helped launch the NHL careers of such former winners as Paul Kariya, Chris Drury and Brendan Morrison.

“You get a lot of players who do things well and look good doing them, but they can’t finish like Brett,” Colorado Coach Scott Owens said. “He scores on long shots, he scores on rebounds, he scores lying down.”

Sterling has nine multiple-goal games this season, including two goals in a 6-5 victory over Colgate on Friday in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Both came in the final period, including the game-winner, which he popped in on a rebound with 4 minutes 32 seconds left in the game. He also had two goals and one assist in a 3-0 victory over fifth-ranked Minnesota in the Western Collegiate Hockey Assn. playoff semifinals March 18.

This is hardly new stuff for Sterling, who has led Colorado in goals the last three seasons. He has 19 career goals and five assists in 15 postseason games.

“He has a knack for being around the net and always seems to be in the right place at the right time,” Sertich said in a recent interview, adding that, “It’s kind of surprising that guys from California can turn into good hockey players.”

Sterling is a native of Southern California but fell for hockey like a kid from Saskatoon. He began skating when he was 2 1/2, after being introduced to the sport by his uncle and older brother, who both caught the Wayne Gretzky hockey fever in the late 1980s.

By the age of 4, Sterling was playing in youth leagues and had already shown a knack for scoring goals.

“There was one game where he had like 15 goals and the parents from the other team were screaming at us,” said Terry Sterling, his mother. “They were certain he was older than he looked and shouldn’t be playing at that level.”

That opinion followed Sterling as a youth player with the L.A. junior Kings bantam and midget teams. The move to higher-quality teams required a greater commitment, which at times meant getting up at 4 a.m. so his parents could drive him to practice in Lakewood, a 1 1/2 -hour trip some days.

But his ability was evident.

At a tournament in Minnesota for the top 16-year-old players in the U.S., Sterling scored two goals to lead his Pacific Region team to a 3-1 victory in the title game. Afterward, Mo Mantha, a coach with the USA national program, invited Sterling to join Team USA.

Sterling went through a grueling program in Ann Arbor, where the national program is based -- school in the mornings and hockey in the afternoons. He excelled at both, ranking first in his high school class with a 4.2 grade-point average and helping Team USA win its first gold medal at the world junior championships.

Heady stuff for a non-surfer dude who used to skate around a Pasadena ballroom.

“Coming from California, [hockey] people always want to discredit you,” Sterling said. “That’s not a problem for me. It makes me want to show them that they don’t have as much heart as I do. I’m going to beat them.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Hobey Baker Award

The 10 finalists for the Hobey Baker Award, given to college hockey’s best player. Three finalists will be announced Wednesday, and the winner will be announced on April 8:

* REID CASHMAN...Quinnipiac

* PATRICK EAVES...Boston College

* DOV GRUMET-MORRIS...Harvard

* T.J. HENSICK...Michigan

* DAVID McKEE...Cornell

* COLIN MURPHY...Michigan Tech

* MARTY SERTICH...Colorado College

* JORDAN SIGALET...Bowling Green

* BRETT STERLING...Colorado College

* TUOMAS TARKKI...Northern Michigan