There's nothing easy about being a burgeoning hockey player in northern Florida.

WILMINGTON — There is one ice rink in Jacksonville, but Mark Ferlin made sure his son knew it well. Brian Ferlin would be schooled in hockey, even if many of the other kids in town had never seen a pair of skates.

Mark came to Jacksonville from Chicago to play baseball at Jacksonville University. He met his wife Sherry there and settled in the city. But he was also a hockey enthusiast and had played the sport as a kid. A few years after Brian was born, he put the toddler on the ice.

“He got me started when I was little,” Brian, now 22 years old, recalled last week. “I played other sports growing up, football, but I just liked hockey the best. It was a passion and I just stuck with it.”

Not that there’s anything easy about being a burgeoning hockey player in northern Florida. Forget finding ice time; it’s tough rounding up a group of kids to get a game of shinny, assuming anyone knows what shinny means. The organized teams have to travel all across the state for tournaments.

Ferlin notes the sport is making inroads in the southern half of the state thanks to the Lightning and Panthers, but the lack of an NHL team within 200 miles in this football hotbed makes breaking the ice for hockey slow in Jacksonville.

And yet, there was Ferlin on Thursday, taking part in Day 1 of the Bruins’ rookie camp at Ristuccia Arena, and wearing a Bruins uniform for the first time two days later in a rookie tournament in Nashville. A fourth-round pick in 2012, Ferlin turned pro after three seasons at Cornell last spring, and is a dark horse candidate to make the Bruins’ roster this season out of training camp.

If he succeeds, he’ll become just the fifth Florida native to play in the NHL.

“I made it work,” Ferlin said, “and hopefully some other kids will too.”

Finding ice

As a multi-sport athlete himself, Mark Ferlin made sure his son got a taste of all the different flavors of sports a kid can play. There was hockey, yes, for Brian Ferlin, but also football and soccer. He was a runner as well.

Naturally, there are plenty of open fields in Jacksonville. Year-round, he was outside, something that still shows in his slight tan.

Ferlin says there’s an advantage to playing multiple sports as a kid, something that is melting away in this era of specialized sports — his footwork has improved, for one.

Plus he credits trainer Brett Strot, who he started working with at 10 years old. Strot is a youth coach in Florida, and worked individually with Ferlin. He set up resistance bands at Ferlin’s house to train with.

“Without him I don’t think I’d be here,” Ferlin said. “He’s a pretty rare find down in Florida. He really helped me with my skills, my skating, everything. A lot of areas that being down in Florida, I wouldn’t have had that exposure without him helping and exposing me.”

If a trainer’s work is graded by a client's physical testing, Strot deserves a ‘A’. The Bruins still talk about Ferlin’s performance at the NHL combine in 2011.

Off to school

Ask Ferlin about how he ended up at Cornell University, and you’d think it was more him recruiting the Big Red than the other way around.

“So Cornell is in the Christmas Tournament every year down in Florida and they have a youth tournament every year,” Ferlin said, referring to the Florida Hockey Classic that Cornell hosts annually in Estero, Fla. “I would play in that [youth] tournament, when I was 13, 14. I had a Cornell hat and I always kind of liked the team. … I don’t know, I just knew from that tournament I always liked them.”

Of course, if every kid who liked Cornell played for the school, the Big Red would be worse than their western New York neighbors, the Buffalo Sabres. Cornell coach Mike Schafer recalls seeing Ferlin play at a select festival in Rochester, an event which Ferlin played “very, very well” in. It’s tournaments like those, ones that pit Florida’s best against the top talent across the country, where Schafer could truly determine if Ferlin was a talent worth recruiting.

“You evaluate him against his peers at the national camp and in his same age group,” Schafer explains. “We just felt he was more skilled than a lot of the guys there and had good size. … The biggest thing he has that you can’t teach is he's powerful and strong, has good instincts and you can’t teach that.”

Ferlin needed a couple years of facing better competition, though, before he’d be ready for college hockey. He played two years for the Indiana Ice of the USHL, exploding for 25 goals and 48 assists in his second season of 2010-11, a year that got him on the Bruins’ radar.

Explosive look

Ferlin attended the NHL combine in Toronto in May 2011. The Bruins had scouted him with Indiana, but this was their first chance to see what some of the broad-shouldered forward’s top attributes were.

“[Ferlin] had a real good frame when we first saw him and drafted him — athletic build, explosive,” assistant general manager Don Sweeney said. “When you look at his vertical jump numbers, you realize there’s an athleticism to Brian Ferlin that translates to the ice. He’s a powerful guy, shoots the puck well coming down the wing.”

They are attributes dating to his work with Strot, the resistance band work that turned a Florida kid into an athletic demon.

That strength translates on the ice. After adding weight this summer, Ferlin is now at 215 pounds, which combined with his 6-foot-2 frame gives him the outline to play power forward in the NHL. Schafer notes Ferlin’s greatest attribute is using his girth to protect the puck.

“Even at the NHL level where you're not allowed to hook as much or impede as much, he’ll still be good at that,” Schafer said. “That’ll help his game continue to grow.”

A month after his impressive combine, the Bruins selected Ferlin in the fourth round of the draft in St. Paul, Minn., at No. 121 overall. He was the first Jacksonville native to be drafted by an NHL club.

Big (Red) accountability

The Bruins expect their forwards to play a responsible style. Wingers must be strong along the boards, play in straight lines, avoid turnovers in vulnerable areas.

Three years under Schafer at Cornell served as Ferlin’s apprenticeship. The Big Red have been stymying clubs across the Northeast for most of Schafer's 19-year tenure. Cornell players are expected to be secure, strong and reliable.

“It's defensive accountability,” Schafer said. “Any pro team, they want certain things from their pros and we hold guys to that from that level. We make guys accountable and I think Brian did a great job at Cornell with his offensive game, but particularly being accountable.”

Now Ferlin enters the NHL looking to lock down a varsity spot in a bottom-six role. The Bruins put a premium on responsible players; it was a major reason why Reilly Smith won a job out of camp last season. Management saw Smith could be counted on to make good decisions, and Claude Julien put his faith in a young player he knew would be smart and responsible. Like Ferlin, Smith had three years of college experience, although Smith also had a year of pro experience before stepping into the Bruins lineup.

Ironically, Smith’s potential absence from this year’s camp could be a boon to Ferlin’s chances at cracking the varsity. With one less forward, Ferlin could get a look on the second or third line. If Ferlin — who scored 31 goals in three years at Cornell — makes the Bruins, it won’t be on the backbone of his scoring touch.

“We had some good teams [at Cornell] and I liked playing that style,” Ferlin said. “I think it will help me with my transition, especially to a team like Boston who obviously focuses on their defensive responsibilities. Definitely Coach Schafer helped me get to the next level, getting more out of the game defensively.”

This summer, Ferlin moved to Massachusetts and has been working out in the area. He played in the competitive summer league out of Foxboro, and the Bruins were so pleased with his progress that they excused him from development camp in July.

Well, most of camp. Ferlin hopped in with the other prospects when they went to Fenway Park to take batting practice. Ferlin also took in a Patriots preseason game last month.

“I still like my Jags, but the Patriots are growing on me,” he notes.

He still is a Jacksonville kid, after all.

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