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As impressive as Harpur has been with the Senators, he is guilty of understating it a little. The “bit of a growth spurt” saw him vault from 5-9 to 6-3 in a year. He was the stereotypical fast-rising teen who grew out of new pants within weeks and was in danger of repeatedly banging his head on door frames, unaware of his own size.

Ferroni says he remembers throwing Harpur off the ice at practice one day because he didn’t think he was showing enough energy. It was only after talking to Harpur’s father — a surgeon — that he recognized that Harpur was desperately trying to grow into his own body.

“At that point, I think, he had grown four inches in a hurry, and he just couldn’t help it,” Ferroni said in a telephone interview from his home in Hamilton. “Two months later, he was a beast.”

Ferroni, who runs his own hockey skills program, had worked with Harpur going back to when he was 12, paying special attention to backwards skating drills that Harpur refers to as “Russian figure skating stuff”. His eventual growth, coupled with his maturity, had Ferroni believing that Harpur had a legitimate shot to make it all the way to the NHL.

All of it came in a hurry for Harpur.

“I had about two months of experience on defence when I got drafted by Guelph (in the OHL),” he said. “When I was 15, I barely knew what the OHL was. It kind of took off from there.”

Harpur enjoyed a solid, if unspectacular junior career and was drafted by the Senators in the fourth round (108th overall) in 2013. He made gradual growth through the Senators organization, even spending four games with Evansville of the ECHL. The biggest change he made while playing with Binghamton of the American Hockey League this season was adding a mean streak. It led him to being named Binghamton’s most valuable player. After being recalled to Ottawa and playing in the final five regular-season games due to injuries, he opened the eyes of Senators coach Guy Boucher.