Read his lips: Philadelphia Flyers prospect Noah Powell’s star is on the rise

Noah Powell was sitting in his usual chair by the TV at his home in the suburbs north of Chicago, surrounded by a close-knit group of family and friends.

The group hadn’t travelled to Vegas for the 2024 NHL Draft. Powell kept the gathering small because he had no idea if he’d even be picked. He’d passed through drafts — plural — before, going unselected into the USHL and missing out at the NHL level once already. He still wasn’t among the 223 North American skaters ranked by NHL Central Scouting for 2024, despite having just led the USHL in goals with 43.

As the captions rolled below the broadcast in the fifth round, Powell reading along with them, his phone buzzed with a text from his agent Ryan Barnes.

“I think Philly’s going to take me,” Powell told the room.

Moments later, the Philadelphia Flyers on the clock, Powell’s name popped up on screen.

Screams and “surreal, over-the-top-exciting” feelings — feelings that have filled so many homes during that moment — followed.

Except Powell’s story is unlike those of the 147 players who’d heard their names called before him.

Shortly after his name flashed across the TV, Powell’s mom sent a message to her son’s old speech pathologist. “You were instrumental in helping Noah,” she wrote.

Powell, taken with the 148th pick in the draft, wants to become the Flyers’ next hard-to-play-against forward, a physical energizer first and a scorer second. He also hopes to follow in the footsteps of Jim Kyte, the first legally deaf NHL player.

He says getting here, and eventually there, all starts with the people around him.

“I’ve had to lean on the people closest to me, whether that be friends, family, coaching,” Powell said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have a very supportive family.”

Powell was born with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. His parents, Maria (who works in pharmaceutical sales) and Anthony (who works in finance), didn’t learn about it until he failed his kindergarten hearing exam — a test they didn’t even know the state of Illinois required until he’d failed it twice.

At the time, it explained a lot of things. Powell had been working with a speech-language pathologist since he was 3 because he wasn’t talking much and his parents felt something wasn’t right.

They didn’t know how resourceful he’d become, though — that he’d learned to lip-read. The multiple pathologists who came through the house and told them “he’s great, he’s caught up to speed, he’s good to go” after two or three months of working with him didn’t realize that was how he was learning, either.

Ever since those failed tests, Powell has worn hearing aids. When he was a child, he’d use an assisted listening device to hear mic’d-up coaches and teachers so he didn’t have to rely on lip-reading from a distance.

“His hearing loss is such that the common phonetic sounds used in the English language happen to be the sounds that he has a hard time hearing,” Maria said. “Every day we use our language to communicate and he struggles to hear those sounds. So if he’s not wearing his hearing aids he’s either got to rely on lip-reading or pure context to make sure that he’s understanding what’s being communicated to him. And no two hearing losses are the same, which a lot of people don’t understand. We’re still learning more to this day about his hearing loss and how it impacts his development and him on the ice and in the classroom and even in a social environment.”

Over time, Powell asked if he could stop wearing his hearing aids during hockey.

Maria and Anthony, who were by then spending a lot of time repairing them because of sweat and the impact on the ice — “people don’t realize that these cost about $3,000 each, so they’re really expensive and hard to maintain,” Maria said — came to an agreement with him. So long as he was either making sure he was close to coaches when they were talking so he could lip-read or waiting until the end of the line during drills (especially when the coach was at the opposite end of the ice), he could take them out on the ice.

“If he loses sound or it stops working, then now it’s plugging that ear. So now it’s making it even that much harder to hear. And it’s not like you can just take off your hockey glove and put it somewhere,” Maria said.

“I do not want families or impacted players to think it’s not possible to wear hearing aids while playing hockey. But with a visor helmet and increased intensity of the game, we did support Noah’s decision not to wear his hearing aids.”

These days, Powell wears a brand of inner-ear hearing aids rather than over-ear ones, popping them in when he gets off the ice.

Maria said getting to this point was “a learning curve for all of us.” Because he wasn’t always comfortable saying, “I’m hard of hearing,” many didn’t even realize until he started to learn to advocate for himself in the seventh or eighth grade.

Today, Maria describes her son as animated, free-spirited, intense and competitive.

“He loves to debate,” she said, laughing. “He’s a big debater for sure. But I guess that goes with being competitive. When he’s set out to do something he takes it seriously. You tell him he can’t do something and he will prove to you that he can. He’s very driven, very determined. He can be a little stubborn at times but I guess that that also helps him be successful and got him to where he is now.”

But it took a lot of his parents telling him, “This is what you have, you were born with hearing loss, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be capable of doing things that you love to do like hockey” to get there.

“It’s not a visible disability where if he had a limp or he had crutches or was in a wheelchair it would be a constant reminder, so oftentimes folks would forget, including his own friends,” Maria said. “It wasn’t easy. As a family, we’ve always supported Noah through the lows and highs. At times he would get in trouble for doing the wrong thing on the ice. (And) he never wanted to use it as an excuse and never wanted that kind of attention. So he just over the years figured it out and has definitely come a long way. It’s kind of cool to see that level of maturity and you kind of have to just accept what you have.”

It also, Maria insists, took being “so blessed in just a number of people that we have been surrounded by.”

Among the first people Maria and Noah point to are Mike and Nancy Nelson, his billet parents the last two seasons in Dubuque in the USHL.

Mike and Nancy are season ticket holders who years ago billeted future NHLer Tyce Thompson. They’ve got seats in the first row behind the net, and one of the Powells’ favorite photos is of Noah crashing into Mike for a high-five after a goal. The Nelsons are family-centered and never missed a game unless they each had a unique conflict, according to Maria.

“Mike and Nancy played a huge role for me,” Powell said. “Me walking in there, I didn’t know anything (and) they knew the ins and outs of what to do. I leaned on them for help and they welcomed me into their home.”

Last season, nobody expected him to break out like he did, finishing fifth in the USHL in points with 74. Not Maria. Not Kalle Larsson, who was his general manager in Dubuque before recently taking a job with the Edmonton Oilers. Not even Powell himself.

The previous season, in his first year of eligibility for the draft, Powell had scored just 19 points in 53 games. Before that, the only reason Larsson had added him as a free agent was because one of their draft picks, Aron Kiviharju, signed in Finland and they had seven days to add another player. Larsson laughs about having seen Powell play for the Chicago Mission that September, knowing he was local, and thinking, Why not?

Even through the first couple of months of last season, Powell wasn’t on anyone’s radar for the draft and scored just one goal in his first 16 games.

The Nelsons believed, though.

“I just remember (Mike) was so supportive and would say to me and his dad, ‘It’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, the floodgates are going to come,’” Maria said.

And eventually they did. After losing a group of players in December and January to the World Junior A Challenge and the world juniors, Powell was elevated in Dubuque’s lineup and took off, one big night following the last. He had a 10-shot game on New Year’s Eve, scored four hat tricks and put together one of the best goal-scoring runs in USHL history, scoring 42 times in his final 45 games.

“I would be lying if I thought that he was going to score 43 goals and be the leading scorer in the whole league,” Larsson said. “He wasn’t even drafted in the league and becomes the league’s leading scorer, which is pretty impressive. I knew he was going to be a good player but maybe that jump would have been to 25 goals and 50 points. And you can probably put that on us too, where early in the season we didn’t put him in situations that obviously in hindsight he had earned.”

Powell and his mom both point to Larsson and Dubuque coaches Kirk MacDonald (“KMac,” they call him), Evan Dixon and Alex Kromm for “transforming” him as a player and helping him “make the transition from youth to junior and eventually able to dominate the junior level.”

Larsson says if he wasn’t told that Noah was hearing-impaired he might not have ever known because his lip-reading is so strong, his hearing aids are hidden and he “never once brought it up — like never once ever.” When NHL scouts started to call him in the New Year and they’d ask about how he did with it in the dressing room, Larsson would tell them the same thing: “You wouldn’t even really know.” He’d also tell them of a fun, funny, likeable kid who was loved by his teammates and very competitive.

Said Larsson: “There are times when you’ll talk to Noah and you’ll be having a conversation and he’ll be like, ‘Please repeat that,’ and you’ll just have to slow down a little bit. If the coaches have to talk to him, they’ll tap his shoulder so that he turns around instead of a lot of times where a coach will just lean down and talk into a player’s ear. That obviously doesn’t work for him. Sometimes if you’re talking to him and you tell a joke you don’t see him laughing with you and that’s because he’s reading your lips so he doesn’t pay attention to your facial expressions sometimes. That’s about it.”

For support, Powell has also worked with both a strength and conditioning coach and a mindset coach since the age of 12, and over the last four years a video coach who helped him review his games so he didn’t fall behind in coaching.

Both Powell and his mom talk about the “huge role” the people at JET Hockey Training Arena — strength coach Barry Brennan and skills coach and former NHLer Ben Eager — have played in his development. Brennan (who also used to work with the Blue Jackets) trained Eager before he played for the Blackhawks and together they converted a portion of the rink, which is just seven or eight minutes from the Powells, into a gym.

Powell said Eager “basically taught me how to rip the pill” and Brennan introduced him to boxing and high-level Olympic weightlifting, sprinting, and even using cycling and swimming for conditioning.

Maria said the gym has become the place Noah goes to release tension. Noah called it his “quiet space.”

“I go there and there’s not too much that I have to worry about,” Noah said of unplugging sound-wise during his lifts.

Working out and martial arts have become his second love. On top of boxing with Brennan, he trains in jiu-jitsu under Ronaldo Candido, who competed on season 24 of “The Ultimate Fighter” and was a multi-time International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation world champion. During the pandemic, he also built a gym in his garage.

Larsson jokes Powell is “built like Hulk Hogan.”

“I mean, he’s jacked,” Larsson said of the 6-foot-1, 210-pound winger.

Some of the athleticism is genetic: Anthony grew up playing baseball and basketball and his grandfather was a Division I track athlete. But nobody in the family played hockey. Maria is Colombian and Anthony is half African-American and half Polish. His mom tried to push him to soccer but he loved wearing hockey gear.

On the ice, his strength shows up in a power forward game and an ability to “really, really, really shoot the puck,” according to Larsson.

Said Larsson: “He’s really fast when he gets going but will probably have to work on lateral movements and acceleration to take the next steps. I also like his versatility. Not that fighting is something that I think is a huge deal in hockey anymore, but he’s willing to do whatever it takes to contribute to the team. Like he’s not just a goal scorer. If you need a fourth-liner who is a crasher and banger, Noah can crash and bang or move up the lineup and help your power play.”

That game earned him an invite from USA Hockey to this summer’s World Junior Summer Showcase, the start of the audition process for the under-20 world championship in December.

In camp, he made an immediate impression on head coach David Carle, who “knew he was a big power forward type” but was pleasantly surprised by his poise on the puck and credited him for breathing energy into the team.

At his next camp — training camp with the Flyers someday— he’ll continue to work toward a vision Maria said he’s had since he was 5 years old of playing in the NHL.

After that, he’ll join the Buckeyes as freshman at Ohio State under head coach Steve Rohlik.

Rohlik’s daughter Erin, a sophomore at OSU, is coincidentally also hard of hearing and relies on lip-reading. Powell didn’t even initially know that when he committed to the Buckeyes.

“He knows different approaches as to how to communicate with me,” Powell said. “(Rohlik’s) been nothing but amazing. He’s made me feel nothing but welcome. I was only there for eight days (earlier this year) and I walked away feeling like I’d known him for eight months.”

Erin played field hockey growing up and used to also go to the back of the line. Rohlik, like Maria, mentioned it to coaches when Erin wasn’t yet confident enough to do so.

“I really have some personal experience every day,” Rohlik said. “You would not know anything talking with (Erin) and facing and having a discussion, but now you throw Noah on the ice during drills, during games, there’s lots of noise, probably lots of ringing, and you’ve got to be understandable as a coach that sometimes you’ve got to grab him and make sure that communication process is delivered maybe in a little bit of a different fashion. You’ll still get great results if you understand how the communication process needs to be done for them.”

After getting to know Noah a little more during an eight-day visit to campus earlier this summer, Rohlik can’t wait to work with him.

“He was on an absolute tear there at the end of the year. It was absolutely unbelievable. And he scored ugly goals, pretty goals, you name it,” Rohlik said. “And he doesn’t know how strong he is at times. He’s a bull in a china shop. I just think there’s so many things we can help with his development. That’s the exciting part.”

But they’ve also fallen in love with the kid — as everyone does.

“He’s a tremendous person and in the perfect world you want to get the best hockey player and the best person possible, and I think we got both,” Rohlik said. “He has persevered, I think he’s a tremendous competitor, and I think he’s just scratching the surface of where he can be.”

(Photo: Rena Laverty / USA Hockey)