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Nareg Dekermenjian had Mother’s Day brunch with the Stanley Cup, which caused more than a little anxiety since no one was sure what hockey’s championship trophy liked to eat.
“I’m thinking all-meat diet for the Stanley Cup,” Dekermenjian said before sliding into a large corner booth at Stanley’s Restaurant (no relation to the Cup) in Sherman Oaks. “Anything less than that, I’m going to be very, very disappointed.”
As it turned out, the Cup was fasting so the plate in front of it remained empty. But then the trophy wasn’t the one being feted Sunday, Dekermenjian was. Last week he was named the winner of the NHL’s Future Goals Most Valuable Teacher Program, chosen from a field of hundreds of candidates from 31 of the league’s 32 cities.
For the fifth-grade teacher, who left a well-paying job as a financial advisor for a classroom four years ago, being honored by a visit from the Stanley Cup was a full-circle moment in several ways. For starters, it was an acknowledgment of the role hockey played in helping him adapt to his new country after his father, Edward, a jeweler in Lebanon who spoke only broken English, wagered everything when he left Beirut for the West Valley so his three children could have a chance at a better life.
Dekermenjian, the youngest, was just 5 and he immediately had trouble fitting in.
“Making friends or having some kind of link with the kids my age, coming from a different country, that was really different,” he said. So one day his mother, Zovig, pushed him out the door to join some neighborhood kids in a street-hockey game.
“I’m glad I did,” Zovig said Sunday. The game, it turned out, would change everything.
“They gave me a roller-hockey stick and I just kind of fell in love with the sport immediately,” Dekermenjian said. “I’d never been really good at anything before, especially athletics. But I took to roller hockey.
“What it helped me do is create a lot of self-confidence and self-esteem, which is turn helped me in social situations.”
Dekermenjian went on to play at several levels, became a Kings season-ticket holder and now coaches his two sons on the concrete rink he built in their backyard. He’s also using hockey to break down social and cultural barriers at the Dixie Canyon Community Charter School in Sherman Oaks, where many of the nearly 700 students come from immigrant families new to the U.S.
“We have a big melting pot here,” assistant principal Maria Silva said.
But if all those children speak different languages, wear different clothes and pack different foods for lunch, they all understand sports. Even hockey.
“One hundred percent,” said Dekermenjian, 41. “That’s kind of why I do it.”
There are parallels between the challenges athletes face and the ones students face. The grit and perseverance needed to make it through an NHL season is just as necessary to make it through an academic year. There are goals and victories and defeats and teamwork, both on the ice and in the classroom.
“That connects a lot of the dots for these kids that aren’t used to hearing it that way,” Dekermenjian said. “I actually show clips and videos of hockey games when teams are down by multiple goals and they don’t give up and then they come back, they pull the goalie, and they take it.
“That’s, I think, a better way of starting a session. Having these kids look at something so incredible and then looking at themselves and thinking, ‘You know what? I can do this.’”
Silva said few teachers at Dixie Canyon are requested by parents more frequently than Dekermenjian, whom she calls Mr. Deker. She often stop by his class herself just to listen.
“I’m just captivated by the stories that he’s sharing. And I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I want to be a kid and listen to him too. When they announced that he won [the NHL award,] I definitely felt they got it right.”
The stories don’t always work, however. And when they don’t Dekermenjian, like a good coach, changes his game plan — as he did in his first year as a teacher after welcoming a shy Ukrainian girl named Maria, who understood little English.
“We’re going over U.S. history and I’m like, ‘What does this child need to know about the Constitution?’ There’s way more important lessons we need to teach,” he said.
Maria loved art so Dekermenjian asked her to draw each day and then, after class, he and a translator would discuss the meaning behind what she had drawn. She was soon thriving in her new environment.
The Kings have a small army of behind-the-scenes specialists, including a so-called fight coach, that have played important roles in the team’s success.
When kids struggle, Dekermenjian said, the problem often isn’t the student, but rather an engagement issue with the teacher.
“Educators, we need to kind of step it up and engage them in nontraditional ways,” he said.
“I’ve seen it work in the classroom. So I do it more and more and the feedback has been overwhelming. I’m creating a bunch of hockey fans and Kings fans in the process, so everyone wins, I guess.”
Speaking of the Kings, that’s the second reason Sunday’s meal was a reunion with the Stanley Cup. The first time he met the trophy was in 2014, when he posed in front of it with his wife, Lori, and then-infant son Ian, who actually owes his existence to the Cup.
During the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs, Lori came up to Dekermenjian and suggested that if the Kings won the Cup, they should have a baby. Dekermenjian, uncertain whether he was ready to be a dad but certain the Kings had no chance to win the NHL title, agreed — and a little more than a year later, Ian was born. They have since added a second son, Oliver.
“It’s a full-circle thing,” he said.
“I definitely feel like I found where I need to be in life. And I’m 100% certain that I was meant to teach.”
On Sunday the NHL agreed, giving him an afternoon with the Stanley Cup to prove it.
Go beyond the scoreboard
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