Mark Osiecki was too slow to ever become much of a hockey player.

He didn’t have the athletic ability, the strength, the agility, the stickhandling or the shot.

He didn’t have much of anything, according to talent evaluators.

“I can’t tell you how many people told me you are not fast enough, or you aren’t a good enough skater or whatever,” Osiecki said. “It was nonstop. It was always, ‘You can’t this or You can’t that.’ ”

Even Burnsville’s highly successful high school coach had his doubts.

“For a long, long time I never thought he could play college hockey,” said Tom Osiecki the former longtime Blaze coach who also happens to be Mark’s father. “He went on to blow my thoughts out of the water.”

Tryouts were a nerve-fraying process for the younger Osiecki. Throughout his youth hockey career, Osiecki always seemed to be one of the last players to make Burnsville’s top-level traveling teams.

If there were 18 players on the Pee Wee A team, then Osiecki came in at No. 18. Same goes for Bantams. As a sophomore, Osiecki played on Burnsville’s junior varsity.

Tom Osiecki still wasn’t sure what kind of a player he had in his son. There had been clues, however, that he had something special – as a son and a player.

“We should have known,” Tom Osiecki said. “One time we were cleaning his room, which was rare because he was an absolute neat-nick, and under his pillow there was a card listing his goals for the week, for the month and for the season.

“Holy cow. What Bantam kid would do that back then? He set goals for himself, and he kept trying to reach and exceed them.”

For years Tom Osiecki and Bloomington Jefferson’s Tom Saterdalen, another state coaching icon, joined forces each summer to conduct instructional camps. Mark Osiecki tagged along with his dad to the camps, and he wasn’t content to just sit and watch.

The younger Osiecki was a pint-sized sponge, burning every useful bit of information into his brain. Osiecki also would mine coaches and top players for advice. One of Osiecki’s favorite players at the time was former Bloomington Jefferson star defenseman Tom Kurvers.

It was Kurvers, the high-scoring Hobey Baker Award-winner at Minnesota-Duluth who was helping coach the summer camps, who suggested Osiecki set short-term goals and then write them down.

“I told him, ‘But you are an offensive guy and I’m not an offensive guy. I can’t do what you do,’ ” Osiecki said. “He told me to set different types of goals. He said, ‘Then maybe you want to block a certain number of shots or be the top plus-minus guy on your team.’ ”

Osiecki molded himself into an invaluable stay-at-home defenseman. He cleared bodies from the front of the net. He broke the puck out of the zone. Shot-blocking became his forte.

Osiecki’s unsung role in hockey was much like the one he played in football. He was, of all things, a center on the high school team.

“I said, ‘I am not going to be the superstar running back or the superstar quarterback,’ ” Osiecki said. “ ‘What can I do to help the team, and I’ll find a way to get it done.’ ”

With Osiecki finally having made the Burnsville varsity hockey team as a junior, he went about clearing bodies and blocking shots in the defensive zone. And with forward phenom Scott Bloom scoring clutch goal after clutch goal, Burnsville had an unstoppable combination. The team won state titles in 1985 and ’86.

Burnsville didn’t allow more than 20 shots on goal in any of its three 1985 tournament games, and the Braves (their nickname has since been changed to Blaze) were dominant defensively again in the 1986 tournament when they allowed an average of two goals per game.

“I think it outweighs everything else I did in hockey, I’ll be honest with you,” said Osiecki, the head men’s hockey coach at Ohio State, about playing in the state tournament. “Playing your first NHL game, or scoring your first NHL goal … I think the Minnesota high school hockey tournament outweighs all of it.”

That’s right, that too-slow, too-everything kid made it all the way to the NHL. But not before making at stop at the University of Wisconsin, where he was a co-captain on a national championship team as a senior in 1990.

“His intensity level was beyond anything I ever experienced,” Tom Osiecki said.

Osiecki played in 93 NHL games for four teams before a wrist injury ended his big-league career. Osiecki, who retired from pro hockey in 1995, suffered the injury while blocking a shot.

-- Loren Nelson, MN Hockey Hub editor