Fielder died<\/a> on Feb. 21, 2026, at the age of 95.<\/p>\nShea, a defenseman, had one assist in 10 games with the Black Hawks in 1931-32.<\/p>\n
Sparks\u2019 parents knew little about the sport their sons were so hyped to play, though both have athletic backgrounds. Nate Sparks, a Bakersfield, California, native, was a quarterback with British Columbia of the Canadian Football League in 2000 and with Boise State University in 1997 and 1998.<\/p>\n
Debbie Sparks, a Minnesotan of Chinese, Swedish and Norwegian descent, was a gymnast at Boise State.<\/p>\n
The couple found a local hockey program, enrolled their boys, then proceeded to educate themselves about the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first thing I did when my kids started playing was that I bought the rule book,” Nate Sparks said, “so I could learn what was going on when the referee kept blowing the whistle because I didn\u2019t know what was happening. Then after that, it was trying to learn how to skate myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also became the boys\u2019 trainer, relying on his football expertise and hockey workout tips he would pick up from Google searches.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, yeah, we did a lot of parachute training where the kids would skate up and down the street with parachutes attached whether it was windy or not, probably 100 or 200 yards,\u201d Nate Sparks said. \u201cI would make them flip tires, old football workouts that I had to do, a lot of hurdle jumps, plyometrics. All the off-ice stuff that I knew to do to help me be stronger, I incorporated into their off-ice workouts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tyus Sparks played minor hockey with the Idaho Jr. Steelheads. As his skills progressed, his family had to decide what to do for him to keep improving.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy skill level at that time was above all the other kids, so we kind of had to branch off and go to other places to play,\u201d Tyus Sparks said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The state isn\u2019t known as a hockey hotbed. Only two NHL players were born there — Guyle Fielder,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-707849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}