All that’s left on the ice are a battered bucket of pucks, the snow scraped up by 20-odd pairs of skates and Ryan Ruikka. The Terriers’ new assistant captain, now pursuing his second master’s degree, is gathering pucks one by one, stickhandling around the bucket and flipping them in, seemingly unaware that everyone else has hit the showers.
Ruikka, a six-foot-tall defenseman from Chelsea, Mich., is the last man left on the ice and the last player left at BU who was here for the 2009 national championship. He could have moved on with his classmates in May, but because he redshirted his sophomore season with a knee injury, he still had one year of athletic eligibility left. Why not keep playing?
“It’s definitely kind of weird, but at the same time you kind of appreciate it because most kids don’t get to come back for a fifth year, especially at a school like this,” Ruikka said. “So I’m definitely really soaking it in and taking advantage of it.”
In September, Ruikka was named the Terriers’ assistant captain, serving alongside senior captain Wade Megan. Although he has never been the flashiest player on the ice — he has scored three goals and 12 points in 63 games — BU coach Jack Parker said he is the right fit to help lead this year’s team.
“In past years, the assistant captain was a junior, but we wanted this senior class to have a little bit more say, so [Ruikka] was an obvious choice,” Parker said. “He’s a great student. He’s a great kid. This is his fifth year here. He went through a lot of adversity his first two years, not playing a game, getting hurt the first day of practice each year and losing the entire season, so he’s quite a story in himself because he’s still here.”
Ruikka never seems to demand the spotlight, on or off the ice. But in light of the problems BU hockey faced last season, with two players being accused of sexual assault and the program coming under scrutiny from a university task force, it is easy to see why a coach would choose him to represent the team this year.
He’s been chosen for the Hockey East All-Academic team for four years straight. Amid the task force’s findings that hockey players had been held to lower academic standards than the rest of the student body, he completed a dual degree in math and economics and a master’s in economics. His second master’s will be in finance.
BU was the second-most penalized team in Hockey East last year, but Ruikka was rarely part of the melee: He had 18 penalty minutes, by far the fewest of any BU defenseman. The next most-disciplined blueliners, Alexx Privitera and Patrick MacGregor, each served twice that many. While Ruikka did play just 29 of BU’s 39 games, he still averaged fewer penalty minutes per game (0.65) than any other defender.
Ruikka said he and Megan both feel an added responsibility to represent the Terriers well after the events of last year.
“[Athletic Director] Mike Lynch asked us to keep an extra eye out and make sure guys aren’t doing things they shouldn’t be doing, and step in when we should step in and not just turn our shoulder and let things happen that we know shouldn’t be right,” Ruikka said. “We’re held more accountable, and it’s a good thing — it’s what guys need because it helps you grow up and be a better person.”
Injuries marred Ruikka’s first two seasons at BU, and even once he got healthy, playing time was never a given.
Ruikka began the 2011-12 season competing with MacGregor to be the team’s sixth defenseman, and he was a healthy scratch 10 times. But by the end of the year, after Max Nicastro was removed from the program and Privitera missed time with an injury, he became a regular starter, earning himself a more secure role this year.
“I don’t think [being] assistant captain automatically gets you more ice time,” Parker said.
“But I think that he’ll be in the lineup. He’ll be an important player. He’s always going to be the fourth, fifth or sixth defenseman. He’s not a power-play guy that gets all of the ice time. He’s a very good penalty killer, so he’ll get ice time there as well … He won’t [want] for ice time, that’s for sure.”
Several of his teammates left BU early to join the pro teams who drafted them, but no NHL team has drafted Ruikka.
He said he does plan to continue playing hockey after he graduates, likely in Europe, before looking for a job — “maybe I’ll use some of the majors I’ve got,” he said.
Megan, a soft-spoken leader himself, said Ruikka will set an ideal example for an uncommonly young BU team that features nine freshmen.
“He always says the right thing and he is definitely a big role model, especially for the younger guys coming in this year,” Megan said. “If they follow what he does, all of them will be okay.”