TORONTO — The San Jose Sharks can thank Max Mahoney for Sam Dickinson.

The 19-year-old Toronto native will play his first NHL game in his hometown on Thursday, when the Sharks visit the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But if not for Dickinson’s childhood friend, the big defenseman might not even be playing hockey.

“You hear these stories, especially up here, ‘I was on the ice at two.’ Sam as a young kid — five, six — hockey didn’t stick with him. He didn’t like it,” Steve Dickinson, Sam’s father, told San Jose Hockey Now.

So what did Dickinson like as a boy?

Courtesy: Steve Dickinson

“Anything that a five or six-year-old would be into,” Sam Dickinson smiled.

“He liked dinosaurs. He liked space science fiction movies and Star Wars and stuff like that,” Steve recalled.

He added: “We put him in everything as a kid. All my kids, you put them in soccer, you put them in T-ball, whatever. He’d go. But he just, at those early ages, sports didn’t seem to be the type of thing that he was going to take to.”

Steve Dickinson thought that might be the end of an eight-year-old Sam Dickinson’s hockey career.

“The real last kick at the can was a friend of mine had a team that [Sam’s] very good friend at the time was on,” Steve said. “His friend was Max Mahoney. It was actually his dad, Shane, who called me one day, and I remember the start of the conversation. He’s like, ‘We need a back-up goalie who’s never going to play, you interested?’”

“I remember I only wanted to play if I could be on all my friends’ team, and the only way I could play on the team was to be a goalie. So I had to be a goalie for a year — back-up goalie, not a good one,” Sam laughed.

Courtesy: Steve Dickinson

But Sam realized something on the bench.

“Just playing another year got me back into it, made me realize I really liked hockey and thought it was something I wanted to play,” Sam said.

Now, to find a position. It wasn’t going to be goalie.

“I think if you ask Sam the actual time, he may have got in for a minute or two the whole season,” Steve laughed.

“The Garbage Man”

So it turns out Sam Dickinson wasn’t much of a forward either.

But what he was, he was always bigger and faster and more athletic than his age group.

“They used to have a play where Sam would just go stand in front of the net. They called him the Garbage Man. He used to just stand in front of the net. There’s nothing anyone could do about it at that age,” Steve said. “And if a puck bounced to him, he’d slap at it and hope it would find its way in the back of the net, which it didn’t very often.”

Sam Dickinson was a grinder.

“They had a penalty kill where he’d be out there killing, they’d just [clear] the puck,” Steve recalled, “and Sam would beat the other team to the puck and then just freeze it on the boards.”

Steve was not a parent with illusions about his child.

“They had nine forwards, and he was firmly planted in ninth,” Steve laughed.

Courtesy: Steve Dickinson

But Sam still played, perhaps inspired in part by his older brother Jack, who could do things with the puck that Sam could only imagine at that time.

“He played for me growing up, and he scored 100 goals one year in minor hockey. He was incredible. Jack just didn’t love it as much as Sam did,” Steve said. “Me and [Mark Deciantis], we coached Jack, and he’d do things in games, and Sam would be sitting behind the glass, and jokingly, we’d bang back on the glass at Sam and go, ‘You can’t do that.’”

Jack and Sam remain close.

“I think Jack had a huge impact on Sam coming up and in this game,” Steve Dickinson said. “I think Sam took a lot of that, just watching how great a hockey player his older brother was, and knew there was always work to do and in a great way.”

But it took a new position for Sam Dickinson to shine as a hockey player.

“He used to be a winger. I used to play center, and he used to be my winger, and I gave him like six breakaways a game and he never scored,” 2024 No. 3 pick Beckett Sennecke said, “and then they put him on defense.”

Beckett Sennecke on longtime friend Sam Dickinson, who makes his Sharks/NHL debut tonight:

“He used to be a winger. I used to play center, and he used to be my winger, and I gave him like six breakaways a game and he never scored, and then they put him on defense.”#FlyTogether pic.twitter.com/pe8iYoIKtq

— Zach Cavanagh (@ZachCav) October 11, 2025

“You’ve found your home”

Once again, Dickinson’s superior size and skating made a difference.

“The only reason he was moved to defense in minor bantam was because that was the year hitting starts, and then they had a player that moved out, [so the coach] was like, well we’ve got a big body here, we’ll move him back,” Steve said.

So remarkably, Dickinson was 14 when he made the full-time jump to defense. Four short years later, the San Jose Sharks would make him the No. 11 pick of the 2024 Draft.

Sam had tried defense for the first time a couple years before that.

“I remember asking him, going home the first day, and I said, ‘How do you like playing defense?’” Steve said. “And he said, ‘I like having the game in front of me.’ And I was like, ‘You’ve found your home.’”

It wasn’t just physical gifts that made Dickinson a first-round pick. Steve cited local coach Justin Donati, who had starred professionally in the ECHL and Norway in his playing days.

“A great, great, great young mentor for Sam and Beckett. He took both of those players under his wing because they were ones who were willing to and wanted more,” Steve said. “If you ask Sam about this, the single most important person that he came across on the hockey side, in his journey, is Justin.”

“He was the first person who actually believed that I could [do] something with hockey. Meant a lot to me as my coach, really pushed me to actually play, and want to play, and want to be a hockey player,” Sam said of Donati, who coached him from 12 to 16. “Probably at the start, he believed in me more than I believed in myself. He’s definitely got me to where I am, and I wouldn’t even be close to here without him, that’s for sure.”

To this day, Donati still watches Dickinson and Sennecke’s NHL shifts regularly, and gives them feedback.

Hockey Parents

But in the end, it’s about the hockey parents, who wake up before dawn to take their kids to the rink, work overtime to buy expensive equipment, and make sure to attend every game.

Steve credited his wife Megan for always being a ray of light for Sam, when he could be a bit of a coach.

“There were times when — hockey dads are so guilty of it — we’d always be honest, if he had a bad game, or there was something that I’d think needed to be discussed, we’d discuss it,” Steve said. “If I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that, I didn’t like this, or how was that,’ she’d step in and make sure he knew that everything was okay.”

Steve added: “She’s the No. 1 fan. She doesn’t care whether he scores. She doesn’t care what his plus-minus is, she doesn’t care what his time on ice is.”

“My dad, he’s been my No. 1 fan since I started playing hockey. He’d sacrifice going on vacations, my family [would] stick back with me and stay in freezing cold Toronto for a tournament, or be up at 6 AM to take me to a practice,” Dickinson told SJHN in October, after he broke camp with the San Jose Sharks.

“There was no sacrifice,” Steve countered. “Sure, you didn’t go [on vacation]. But when you see how hard he was willing [to work], how much he wanted to get better, you just do it.”

A proud parent moment 🩵@TaraSlone catches up with Sam’s parents, Steve and Megan! https://t.co/F04557WDQV pic.twitter.com/qJqZvEffSG

— San Jose Sharks (@SanJoseSharks) October 12, 2025

This is how Steve saw it:

“When it was COVID, my wife and my older son and daughter [Kennedy], they were down at a place in Florida, Sam wouldn’t go over that winter because he knew there was no way he’d be on the ice.

“So me and him stayed back. I had a very good friend of mine who ran a rink and he gave me a key. There was nobody going on the ice, so the rink was underused quite a bit. We could go whenever.

“It’s two in the afternoon or two in the morning. Sam would come to me, knock on the door of the bedroom, or if I was downstairs watching something, he was just like, ‘Go for a skate?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ We’d go for a skate. And I’d ask him, I said, ‘Do I need to bring pucks?’ And he’d be like, ‘No, just skate.’ And we’d go to that arena, just the two of us, and he’d skate suicides, blue line back, red line back. We’d go in the middle of the night, just the two of us, and he’d do that for 45 minutes. No pucks, no nothing. I’d have my skates on and just be leaning against the boards, drinking a coffee, watching him do this.

“Would I have liked to have been down [in Florida] playing golf? Yeah, sure, of course. But I wouldn’t have wanted to be playing golf in exchange for what he wanted to do at two o’clock in the morning by himself.

“That’s how that always was. He recognized how hard, how much effort. As a kid, he never cut a corner, he never cheated, he never took a short route in a practice. He just works so hard. All the time.

“I appreciate that he would frame it like that. But it wasn’t. I got so much out of it that it can’t be a sacrifice for me.”

Steve, who’s still coaching with Mark Deciantis of Golden Glide Hockey, closed with this message to hockey parents everywhere:

“There’s so much focus on these kids at such a young, young age, and so much pressure and so much determination what these kids are going to be 10, 11 years later, and you’ve got to just let the process play out.

“Parents know who Sam is. And the question that I get a lot is, ‘What’s the cheat?’ And I’m just like, I don’t know how to answer that question.

“There’s nothing I can tell you at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. You come back tomorrow and you come back the next day and you come back the next day. I don’t know, maybe that’s a start.

“But it’s quite a crazy thing to think from [Sam] quitting to having you call me for this interview, the arc of his journey as a hockey player.

“They’ll figure it out. They’re the ones in charge. Those kids are in charge, and they’ll figure it out, or they won’t. Nothing you can do about it.”