Leto High School has a hockey team

Jan Marcos Echeverria is a self-confessed hockey nut.
A 6-foot-2 monster of a defenseman on the Leto High School JV hockey team, Echeverria is known affectionately as "the headhunter" by his teammates and Leto's head coach Bobby Pizzio.
The coach should know. The first week the team practiced, Echeverria collided with Pizzio, breaking one of the coach's ribs and sending him to the hospital.
"Crushed me," Pizzio said.
Echeverria consumes everything he can about the sport. He's like a sponge, watching games, searching YouTube for new drills, texting his coach late at night with ideas for practice, soaking up every drop of tutoring he can get.
"I'm obsessed with hockey," he says. "Every minute, everything I do has to be something with hockey."
Funny thing is, four years ago, Echeverria was clueless when it came to the sport.
"I did not know what it was at all," he said.

In middle school, Echeverria joined the Guide the Thunder program, an initiative sponsored by the Tampa Bay Lightning's community hockey department. The program provides an outlet for kids from non-traditional hockey locales to not only learn how to play the game but also teaches them how to achieve academically and become productive members of the community.
Each season, around 100 students from Webb and Pierce Middle Schools in the Town 'n' Country section of Tampa embark on a 30-week program where they meet at school with a mentor from the Lightning staff for an hour before heading over to Xtra Ice for an hour of on-ice instruction led by former Lightning player and Stanley Cup winner Jassen Cullimore. After, students receive a half-hour of off-ice physical training led by a certified trainer and are fed dinner before going home for the evening.
The Lightning supplies all of the equipment, ice time and meals. At the beginning of every season, each student is given their own, brand-new gear, a hockey bag filled with skates, helmet, pads, gloves, socks, sticks and jerseys. They get a backpack filled with school supplies too.
Echeverria completed three years with Guide the Thunder.
Now in high school, he's a member of the inaugural hockey team at Leto High School.
"When I play you feel so free," he said. "It's just you and your team. My team is always doing their best and me as well. It's just, there's nothing like it."
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Leto High School was a cross country powerhouse back in the day, the boys team winning seven state titles from 1982 to 1995 in the Florida High School Athletic Association's largest classification. The girls program captured two.
The Falcons won a couple boys soccer state titles in the 80s. The baseball team, also coached by Pizzio, reached the state final four in 2019 and is routinely one of Tampa Bay's top teams.
But hockey?
"We come from a place that wouldn't originally play hockey," Echeverria said.
Leto didn't have a hockey team. But with students entering the school after spending a few years in the Guide the Thunder program, they wanted a chance to compete against their peers from other area schools in the Lightning High School Hockey League.
So for the 2019-20 school year, they started a hockey program, the first in the school's history, competing in the junior varsity division.
"The kids absolutely loved it," said Joey Galuppi, the Lightning's community hockey coordinator for diversity development and sled hockey. "Not going to say they won the championship. This isn't a Mighty Ducks story or anything like that, but they absolutely loved the season. And they did win a couple games toward the back end of it."
Pizzio was the team's first head coach. Raised in Tampa, he's a Lightning fan from the inaugural days, going to games at Expo Hall at the Florida State Fairgrounds in the team's inaugural season and then buying seats in the upper deck at the ThunderDome and sneaking down into the lower level when the Lightning played in St. Petersburg for a couple of seasons.
"I can tell you, coaching baseball, I've always had kids that came in and have played the game for a long time," Pizzio said. "Going to hockey, most of the kids I've had have never played an organized sport before. To see how fast they took to being coached and wanting to be good players was kind of a testament to the Guide program that prepared them really to go into a situation like that."
Like his pupils, Pizzio wasn't weened on hockey from an early age. He didn't start skating until his early 30s he said. But he has a willingness to learn, to try the unconventional and to grow into his role as the leader of the neophyte Leto hockey program much like his younger players.
"I'm very honest with the kids. I told them, 'You know, I'm not the most technical hockey guy you're going to meet. But we can learn this together,'" Pizzio said. "So we watch video together. We're constantly emailing, texting all night long back and forth, 'Hey coach, I found this video. What do you think?' So we're creating drills. Our practices are very unorthodox because I try and take practical use of what we have because we don't have all the skill sets yet and it's neat to watch how these drills have transformed from these crazy hustle things to now we're actually making plays and scoring goals and shutting teams down. It's been fun."
The early results in Leto's first season were rough. The Falcons were shut out in five of their first eight games. They endured a three-game stretch where they lost 9-1, 9-0 and 10-0.
But the players were never discouraged.
"They stayed positive," Pizzio said. "I think that was a testament to their wanting to actually being good and seeing that there was a light at the end of the tunnel."

A couple months into the season, they posted their first victories, beating the Lightning M.A.D.E. girls JV team twice on the same day by a 3-2 and 5-2 count, a team that had defeated the Falcons by a combined 9-1 two months earlier in their first two games of the season.
In the second half of that inaugural season, the scores tightened up. There was a 5-4 loss to the Bloomingdale Red team and a narrow 2-1 defeat to Team Bradley. They fell 3-1 to the Steinbrenner JV team, a squad that had outscored them 18-1 in two games at the beginning of the season.
We competed last year," Pizzio said. "The scores didn't really reflect the play because we would shut teams down for one or two periods and usually we just ran out of gas because we weren't conditioned or used to playing as much as a lot of these guys. But we were going out there surprising some teams. And the nice part was we gained the respect of some teams. We weren't just a pushover, and I think at the beginning of the year that was my fear, I'm taking a bunch of kids out there, they're going to get beat up on."
"I really enjoy the respect of all the people and all the players," added Luis Santiago, a defenseman for the Falcons. "Most of the teams didn't even know that we existed, so the fact they gave us respect after the game when we played them and they congratulated us on our play, it felt good."
Santiago was "clueless" about hockey when he entered the Guide the Thunder program he said. At Leto, he wanted to quit halfway through the season as the losses piled up, but his coach wouldn't let him.
It's a choice he would have regretted. He's as committed as any player in the program now, motivated by the fact he's a part of something new and laying the groundwork for future players from his area.
"I feel like we're building a good foundation," he said. "We're the first generation of hockey at Leto. I feel like it will go pretty far. We'll go pretty far."
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Leto was scheduled to finish its inaugural season with a JV Jamboree at AdventHealth Center Ice in mid-March. Galuppi and his staff were going to surprise the Falcons with a pep rally at the school on the Friday before the games. They ordered red Leto Falcons t-shirts for everyone to wear to 'red out' the stands. The players were going to be honored in front of their fellow students. They were also going to receive customized black Leto hockey jackets personalized with their name and number.
"We wanted to try to make their last game as special as possible for the season, get as many people out and give them as much support," Galuppi said.
But that was right around the time the coronavirus consumed the country and the world. The National Hockey League season paused March 12, three days before the Falcons were to finish their season. Schools closed. The pep rally, along with the final weekend of games, was cancelled.
"It was disappointing," Santiago said. "I was so pumped up for those games."
With schools opening back up for the 2020-21 school year, Galuppi still had a box of red Leto t-shirts at his desk, the ones he wasn't able to pass out to parents, family members and students in the days leading up to the pep rally.
He still had the jackets too.
On the first day students in Hillsborough County returned to school for brick and mortar learning, Pizzio had a surprise for his players. He texted them to stop by his room at some point during the day.
Waiting for them in his classroom were the jackets.
"I was like, 'Oh, look at those. Those look nice," said Xavier Pomales, a junior on the team this year.
"It was a huge surprise, a really nice surprise," added Coltin Pizzio, the coach's son who's played baseball his whole life but started hockey for the first time last season. "It's probably the nicest jacket I have right now. Just thankful for it."
Pizzio the coach said the players wear their jackets around school like a badge of honor. Last year when they were in season, they'd don their hockey sweaters for school the Friday before weekend games.
"They've got the respect of their peers," Pizzio said. "They wear their hockey jerseys on game days, and everyone's like, 'We've got a hockey team?' Yes, we have a hockey team. It's really cool because I don't think anybody ever expected Leto to have a hockey team."
Leto will begin its second season in the LHSHL JV division toward the beginning of November. Pizzio expects to have around 20 players on his team, up from the 15 that competed in the first season.
"That's going to be the fun part is now they have a base, now they understand what the expectations are," he said. "I don't treat them like they're new. I treat them like they've been doing this their whole life. If they want to go out there and compete then this is what it's going to take. But they've been very willing. It's hard to get a bunch of kids that have never played an organized sport to go out there and be willing to be coached. Even Cullimore will come out there and work with us and everything he says, they're hanging on. He talks about it and says, 'I wish I could get my own team to listen like these kids. Here I am coaching one of the best teams in the country, and they don't even listen to half the stuff these kids do.' These kids, they want it. They want to be part of something. They understand it's a privilege what they have and not many people get it. They're definitely taking advantage of it."
Leto expects to be more competitive in its second season. The Falcons think they can win more games too.
And when they enter the rink, they'll look the part in their matching black hockey jackets.
"It gives us pride," Echeverria said. "It's just great because you can feel like you're a part of something, and it's a good feeling."