Cam Squires remembers hearing it clearly.
“Competing is like breathing. If you’re going to be a Devil, you’ve got to compete.”
Sitting listening to Tom Fitzgerald, General Manager of the New Jersey Devils, to begin the 2024 Training Camp, Fitzgerald’s words were loud and clear.
And they were poignant.
“It’s a thing that requires no talent,” Squires remembers Fitzgerald saying. “That’s something you should bring every day; it’s one of the most important things.”
“He said it with such authority, with such meaning,” Squires said. “Because of that, it just kind of hit me; it really stuck with me.”
What also has struck him, through his two training camps, is what he was able to take away from watching and working with players like Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt.
"They make everybody feel included in the group," he said of their noticable leadership qualities, that he said are quiet but meaningful. "Jesper Bratt, everybody knows how naturally he goes about his days, how much he works on his craft. He's such a gifted skated. That's a guy I look up to in that sense of his game. Both him and Nico. They're just great leaders."
The 19-year-old has carried not only Fitzgerald's words, but the leadership qualities of both Hischier and Bratt with him as he worked his way through Devils camp, into his first preseason game, and then back to Junior with his Cape Breton Eagles of the Quebec Maritime Junior Hockey League.