Down-to-earth Cossa working hard to take next step | TheAHL.com

by Mark Newman | AHL On The Beat

Grand Rapids Griffins goaltender Sebastian Cossa grew up playing hockey in Fort McMurray, Alberta, because there wasn’t much else to do. Options were limited.

“Dig a hole. Hit your head against the wall. Pick your nose,” laughs Cossa, who moved to the capital of Canada’s burgeoning tar sands industry when he was a little boy. In the hinterlands of the country’s western prairies, you grew up playing hockey or football because, well, that’s what you did if you didn’t want to become bored to death.

“There are two or three lakes in the area, but they’re a couple of hours away,” Cossa continued. “There are two golf courses, which are nice and where my parents played five or six times a week, but other than that, there’s not much.”

It was, in fact, the oil sands that led Gianni and Sandie Cossa to take Sebastian and his older brother Nicholas to Alberta in the first place. They left the residential community of Stoney Creek in Hamilton, Ontario, before Gianni’s work as an occupational health and safety professional brought him to the Fort McMurray area. The blue-collar roots go back more than a generation: Cossa’s late grandfather, Pietro, emigrated from the Italian island of Sardinia to Germany, where he labored for six years before coming to Canada.

Cossa, who stands 6-foot-7 today in his stocking feet, was always tall for his age. So he naturally gravitated to sports as a boy, except he never played organized basketball – even though he was already over six feet tall at the beginning of his teens. He started skating at a young age and was already playing goalie by the time he was seven or eight.

“During my second year of atom hockey, we had three goalies to start the season and we were kind of rotating each game,” Cossa recalled. “By Christmas, the other two quit being goalies because they didn’t like it, so I was the one who stuck with it.”

Cossa was born in 2002, so the heyday of Edmonton goalies Grant Fuhr and Andy Moog had long passed – and he wasn’t an Oilers fan anyway. His hockey hero was farther east.

“My whole family’s from Ontario, so they were big Leaf fans, but my favorite goalie growing up was Carey Price,” said Cossa. “I would spend hours just watching the way he played, searching for videos on YouTube to watch how he practiced, the way he moved in the net, and how smooth everything was.”

Cossa and his brother were on the ice at an early age, even…