From Students to Sochi: Phil and Amanda Kessel were destined for hockey success

Siblings Phil and Amanda Kessel have a lot in common.

Phil was a dominant hockey player at the high school level, so was Amanda. Phil had a stellar college career – albeit one season -- so did Amanda. Phil was chosen to represent Team USA in the 2014 Winter Olympics, so was Amanda.

Phil, 26, is playing for the U.S. men's hockey team, while Amanda, 22, is representing the United States on the women's team. Amanda will play against Canada today at noon Eastern Time for the gold medal, while Phil will face Canada Friday in a noon Eastern Time semifinal.

The pair grew up in Madison, Wis., and when both went off to play at high-profile hockey programs in high school – Phil at the USA Hockey National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Amanda at Shattuck-St. Mary's (Faribault, Minn.) -- they were already well established players on the ice. Each were extremely fast skaters and had the innate ability to score almost at will.

"When he came to the national program he was a pure goal scorer," said John Hynes, who coached Phil on the U-18 national team for a season and a half. "He was very opportunistic. Even at that young age, he had a strong desire to score goals. That is really what drove him as a player, his ability to get scoring chances, create scoring chances. … He was a dynamic scoring threat."

The Kessels both went on to play collegiate hockey at the University of Minnesota. Phil was with the Golden Gophers for just one season before becoming the fifth overall selection in the 2006 NHL draft by the Boston Bruins. He currently is a star for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

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The Kessel family has strong sports bloodlines. Phil and Amanda's middle brother, Blake, was a sixth-round NHL Draft pick in 2007 and currently plays for the Orlando Solar Bears in the East Coast Hockey League. Their fathers, Phil Sr., was a solid college quarterback at Northern Michigan University and was drafted by the Washington Redskins, although he never played a snap in the National Football League.

Playing for the U.S. National Team was a step in the right direction for Phil. He got the opportunity to play with and against some of the best hockey players in the nation. However, moving to Ann Arbor meant being away from his family at the ripe age of 15. It was a big adjustment for Phil, who has a great relationship with Amanda, according to Stafford.

"At that point he was a little bit of a shy kid and he kept to himself a little bit," Hynes said. "I know he was real close with his family, his mom and dad and his sister."

MaxPreps took a look at life at the NTDP in a Beyond the X feature. Click here to see what players like Phil Kessel experience.

Phil's extraordinary talents certainly rubbed off on Amanda at a young age.

"She skates exactly like him," said Jocelyne Lamoureux, Amanda's teammate at Shattuck-St. Mary's and on this year's U.S. Olympic Team. "When you've got older brothers like that who are close in age like that, I think it only pushes you to get better because you're trying to keep up with them."

See the "From Students to Sochi" story on Jocelyne Lamoureux and her twin sister Monique

Amanda didn't miss a beat going from playing boys hockey at the middle school level in Wisconsin to competing at the highest level at Shattuck-St. Mary's.

"She came in right away and was a force to be reckoned with and that's how she's always been since I've known her, played with her and played against her," Lamoureux said. "She's always a game-changer."

Amanda, who played center at Shattuck-St. Mary's, was just as offensively wired as her brother in high school. She liked to have the puck on her stick, but she was as comfortable moving with the puck as she was shooting, Shattuck-St. Mary's coach Gordie Stafford said.

As a freshman, she notched 102 points and helped Shattuck-St. Mary's win its third-straight national championship. Two years later, Amanda guided her team to another national title. In her senior season, Amanda logged 122 points (67 goals, 55 assists).

"She loves to make plays," Stafford said. "She's never one of those players that it always had to be about her, that's not it at all. She loves to be on a team. She was very intense and held people to a high level, but she liked being on a team."

Amanda could almost take over a game in high school if she so desired. And she had to on a couple of instances.

"One of the things that stands out in my mind is her senior year semifinals at nationals," Stafford said. "I can't remember the exact score of the game, but we won like 8-7, and I've never seen it, but she basically willed our team to win that game. She had like three goals and four assists or some unbelievable number. Every time the other team would score, she would just kind of get a look in her face and go out and score or set somebody up."

She was versatile, extremely competitive and determined when it came to playing the game she loved.

"I think for her as a girl playing boys hockey as much as she did, she's a complete player," Stafford said. "She can just as easily kill a 5-on-3 penalty as she can be at the top of the umbrella on a power play."

Phil, who attended Pioneer (Ann Arbor, Mich.) as a junior and senior, played just two seasons for the national team (2003-04 and 2004-05), but left as the program's all-time leader in goals and points. He tallied an astounding 104 goals and 180 total points in just 109 games. But that's nothing compared to what Phil did as a 15-year-old for the Madison Capitols bantam team. That season he tallied 286 points (176 goals, 110 assists) in a mere 86 games.

A combination of speed, a quick release on his shots and desire to score made Phil an phenomenal player at the high school level, Hynes said. His former coach even went as far as saying Phil had an "obsession with scoring."

When Phil was playing on the national team, he was always offense-minded. There weren't many parts of his game that needed tweaking in high school, but the coaches helped Phil first and foremost work on his puck distribution.

"Because he was such an elite scorer sometimes he would get extra coverage or teams would try to shut him down and if he wasn't going to be the actual goal scorer, he needed the ability to read situations and to be able to make plays," said Hynes, who is now the head coach of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins of the American Hockey League.

Hynes could clearly see Phil gradually progressing at dishing the puck in his second season. That translated into his teammates scoring more goals. Phil had turned into a rare complete player.

With his extraordinary skill set at a young age, Hynes knew Phil would become a star in the NHL.

"You can see sometimes at that age that there's a lot of talented players that go through the program, but the real special ones are the ones that the tougher the games got that they really showed up and played well," Hynes said. "Phil was one of those players."