Paralympian learned finer points of hockey from playing video game

Six years ago, Marine Corps gunnery sergeant Ralph DeQuebec lost both legs when he was wounded in Afghanistan by an improvised explosive device. The aftershock included a mild traumatic brain injury followed by partial amputation of his left little finger and right thumb, pneumonia and at least 30 surgeries at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany before returning to the United States.
It was during rehabilitation when his life after combat went into limbo. The Purple Heart recipient was away from family and friends, trying to figure out what to do, trying to create a new identity.

He would find that identity in sled hockey, picking up the game in April 2013 on a suggestion from another wounded soldier. After a rough introduction to the sport, DeQuebec gained an understanding of the rules and finer points of hockey playing EA SPORTS NHL 13.
He used that knowledge to transition from novice to gold medal-winning defenseman, wearing No. 3 for the United States at the 2018 PyeongChang Paralympics.
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The winner receives $50,000, the trophy and a trip to the 2018 NHL Awards presented by Hulu on June 20. All will leave with a sense of how today's technology can help be a conduit to victory in the game of life.
That concept gave DeQuebec, 35, his new lease.
"The more I learned on the ice I was able to apply to the game," DeQuebec said. "It went back and forth, so I grew with this game. It wasn't until I got fully enveloped in the sport that it turned my life around.
"The world is full of resources, especially in this day and age with the internet. You can pretty much learn anything you want on a video. Me being an older player, and identifying that there is a different way of learning and utilizing that to get to a position I'm in right now, is proof that if you're willing to do whatever it takes, you can."

One day in April 2013, DeQuebec was in the gym when another wounded solider suggested playing sled hockey. DeQuebec, who grew up in Los Angeles playing football, basketball and baseball, knew nothing about hockey. The sport wasn't on his radar at 10 years old when Wayne Gretzky and the Los Angeles Kings advanced to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 1993.
DeQuebec dismissed the idea, but the fellow soldier persisted. Two months later, he decided to give it a try.
"It was hard and wasn't something I was used to," he said. "I didn't know any of the rules. It was something new. Just having to learn everything at an older age, I didn't know if it was going to be a sport that I can play."
DeQuebec skated for the first time at a rink in Rockville, Maryland, and that's where his new identity began to take shape. Once he delivered a check on his first shift, a light went on.
"Wreck It Ralph" was born.
"It wasn't until I played my first game, got my first hit in, and realized you can hit in hockey and there's no penalties," he said. "I was like, 'Oh my God, this sport is for me.' It wasn't until I got fully enveloped in the sport that it turned my life around."

Long before DeQuebec became a gold medalist, the nuances of his game needed polishing. So after that first practice, he bought EA SPORTS NHL 13. The game had a mode where you can customize a player. He created a right-shot defenseman to match the position he wanted to play.
"They had little queues to tell you what you needed to do to set it up, so I was learning positioning," DeQuebec said. "Eventually it developed to where I didn't have to have those queues anymore. I had awesome teammates that would talk me through it and to be able to go through it in a video game with a lot of repetition helped me develop that hockey IQ fast.
"In a video game, you learn how to pinch. I became very cautious of when I was pinching, so it helped me with my game. One of the first things I noticed was when I was pinching in a video game, if I lost the puck it was bad news, so I transferred it over to sled hockey."
DeQuebec also understood knowledge without application is useless knowledge. He took private lessons and practiced with a team that joined a competitive league. He learned what it meant to be offside and how shift changes worked.
After each practice, DeQuebec returned home to his video game. Step by step, everything clicked. Hockey became his new beginning and a road to greater things. He evolved into a stay-at-home defenseman who added that gold medal from PyeongChang next to his Purple Heart. Though he'd like his game to evolve offensively, he loves being the protector, analogous to how he served his country with the U.S. Marines.
"I always want to defend the home," DeQuebec said. "In military service, we're protectors and we're protecting home. It's only natural for me to want to play [defense]."