International spotlight shines on Cecil boy
Trey Dopson, 8, of Cecil, proudly displays two pucks, including one from Buffalo Sabres coach Dan Bylsma, he received Thursday night at Consol Energy Center.
Trey Dopson of Cecil made a sign Friday morning to show people he wasn’t angry with the man who took a puck Buffalo Sabres coach Dan Bylsma intended to give to him.
Trey Dopson, 8, of Cecil, wears the Sidney Crosby jersey given to him by the Pittsburgh Penguins Thursday night after a man in the crowd at Consol Energy Puck took a puck intended for Dopson from Buffalo Sabres coach Dan Bylsma.
Halloween weekend in Hershey. Can it get any better for an 8-year-old?
Not if you’re Trey Dopson.
Trey, a third-grader from Cecil Township, already became an international figure. He is the lad who, almost literally, had a hockey puck pilfered from his hands by a man of mature age – but not demeanor – at a Pittsburgh Penguins game Thursday night, then benefited from the thievery and became a TV and social media sensation.
“Something nice came out of it,” said Trey, a student at Hills-Hendersonville Elementary School in Canon-McMillan School District.
He was disappointed at first, naturally, that he didn’t get the puck intended for him. But he harbored no ill will toward the man then, and doesn’t now.
“It was like a random spark. It just happened,” he said, rationalizing the offender’s action. Trey spoke via cellphone Sunday night during the family ride home from Hershey. He wasn’t there for chocolate, but for a weekend hockey tournament with his Southpointe Rink Rats Mites team, with whom he is a left wing.
For those who weren’t at Consol Energy Center or watching the game on Root Sports Thursday, or have somehow missed video on social media since, here is a synopsis of the Trey saga.
The youngster and his father, David, were seated a few rows behind the Buffalo Sabres’ bench. Trey waved to head coach Dan Bylsma, who was returning to Pittsburgh for the first time following his firing as Penguins coach a year and a half ago. Trey walked down steps toward the bench and the coach picked up a puck and flipped it over the protective glass toward the third-grader.
Before he could catch it, a man to Trey’s right lunged and deftly caught the rubberized disk. What seems to have gone largely unnoticed from the online video is that two other adults nearby reached for the puck as well.
Trey walked quietly back toward his row as boos cascaded down on the grinch. Almost immediately, Bylsma flipped two other pucks to an arena usher to take to Trey. The Penguins responded in kind on Twitter: “For everyone tweeting us about the little kid who just got the puck snatched away, we’re on it — don’t you worry.”
Iceburgh, the team’s outsized mascot, waddled over to Trey and handed him a Sidney Crosby jersey plus a team puck. The Penguins also gave the boy a stick used by the Sabres’ Mike Weber.
Root showed the incident and broadcasters Paul Steigerwald and Bob Errey commented, Errey especially lamenting the action. That was the beginning of a maelstrom and Trey’s celebrity. The video went viral online and was shown on national news programs. Trey was particularly impressed when he saw it on ESPN’s SportsCenter, as one of the station’s top 10 plays of the day.
“I thought, whoa, this is the big time,” he said.
The big time was about to get bigger. His mother, Shirley, said the story and video “got close to a million hits online. It was one of the trending stories on Twitter. It made headlines in Europe and was the subject of a lot of talk shows.
During the weekend tournament, she added, players and families from teams outside Pennsylvania approached him about it. Trey also was a focal point Saturday night, when the Dopsons attended a Hershey Bears minor-league game. The Bears trainer gave him a puck, he was interviewed by a local TV station and was posted on the Bears’ web page.
“It’s unbelievable how this touched a nerve across the whole world,” said Shirley, a nephrologist originally from Washington who shares a practice, Southwestern Nephrology, in the city with her father, S. Jayakumar.
She also is a Sunday school teacher at Immaculate Conception in Washington, and although she wasn’t there this Sunday, she got emails from other instructors saying “we will use this in our lessons.
A left wing, Trey said hockey is his favorite activity. He and his father, a stay-at-home dad and a substitute physical education teacher, do not have season tickets and were making their first appearance at Consol.
Trey appreciates how Bylsma and the Penguins responded to him. “That was pretty cool.”
But he did not keep all of his gifts. He gave the Sabres’ pucks to his sister, Olivia, and a friend, Luca Torriero.
It was not a perfect four-day stretch for Trey, as the Rink Rats lost in the championship round Sunday afternoon. But it was a wonderful extended family weekend.
“I’m proud of the way Trey handled himself and didn’t get upset with someone who did something that wasn’t right,” his mother said. “My husband and I try to instill the right traits in him and see it has paid off.
“We have no animosity. This was a good lesson. There was one bad action, but thousands of good wishes and sentiments”
“We’re ready to be out of the spotlight, though.”