By Nathan Kanter

Kulbida the heart of the Sharks

Dec 14, 2016 | 9:11 AM

Jordan Kulbida has to rush her interview after AAA Sharks practice on Tuesday evening because at 9:15 p.m., her night is far from over.

She doesn’t have a big school project. She’s not meeting up with friends. Instead, she’s going right from hockey practice to fastball training.

Kulbida may be the AAA Sharks captain, but she could very well make Team Sask’s fastball team for the 2017 Canada Summer Games next August.

When you’re that good, there is no off-season.

“[Growing up], I played every sport that I possibly could,” Kulbida, a Saskatoon native said. “My grandpa played hockey and I really looked up to him and all my friends around me played so I was like, ‘Well, I wanna play!’ And as soon as I got a glove for fastball, I just knew. I was like, ‘Yes, I want to do this! This is awesome!’”

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There is still one more round of cuts to go for Team Sask, but she has already made the top 20 of all Saskatchewan female players under the age of 21. The final U-21 roster will be cut to 15 and she won’t find out until close to the games.

Meanwhile, on the ice for the Sharks, Kulbida is just 5’6” with skates on, but her game is anything but small.

She’s in her second season with the club and leads the team in points through 13 games with nine points – six goals and three assists. Even as a rookie last season, she also led the team in points with 12 in 28 games.

She was named Sharks rookie of the year in 2015-16 and this season was named the SFMAAAHL third star of the month in October.

“Last year… it took probably half the season to get used to playing in this league,” Sharks head coach Gary Berggren said, who was an assistant with the team last year. “Towards the end of the season she played much better and this year has just been [even] better. Every game she’s better and better and she is a dominant player in this league when she wants to be.

“She’s everything for this team.”

In her first AAA game of her career, she had to play on international sized ice, because the Sharks were playing in Wilcox against the Notre Dame Hounds.

It posed an additional challenge, but it didn’t make the moment any less special.

“The ice surface was really big, so I wasn’t used to that, and just the pace of the game was so much faster compared to [Saskatoon] Comets,” she said. “But it was awesome. I was so excited to be a part of the team and the league.”

Interestingly, Kulbida wasn’t put on skates until she was eight years old and she didn’t start playing organized hockey until she was 11.

“My mom was just nervous I was going to get hurt,” she said.

Well, it’s a good thing her mom caved, because Kulbida is leading the charge for Battlefords for the second straight season and has aspirations to play university hockey in Canada.

In an ideal world, she would play U-Sports (formerly CIS) hockey while studying kinesiology.

For now, she still has to finish Grade 12 at North Battleford Comprehensive High School, which means balancing her senior year with two competitive sports.

“It’s hard,” she said. “I’ve just got to work hard in school to keep everything all good.”

If she can do that, there’s no question that next season she’ll be playing at the next level.

Nathan Kanter is battlefordsNOW’s sports reporter and voice of the Battlefords North Stars. He can be reached at Nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca or tweet him @NathanKanter11.