Poor Cell Service, Full Hockey Immersion, and a Bubble in the Woods: When The Fantillis Went to New Hampshire

How a school year at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, NH set Luca and Adam Fantilli on a path toward collegiate success at the University of Michigan

The journey from Nobleton, Ontario to the University of Michigan brought Luca and Adam Fantilli to some unusual places.  For Luca, among the most distinct and significant was a bell tower at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire, the lone spot on campus he could garner the requisite cell reception to field recruiting calls.

“I remember being recruited by Michigan and a couple schools, and there wasn’t even cell service,” Luca explains.  “I had to walk up into one of the towers across campus and sneak in because no one was allowed in and go to the top of the tower.  There’s this huge bell, and I’m freezing, and I’m on the phone with the coaches, so I get a bar of service.  It was definitely a culture shock, but I liked it.  It was closed off.  It was not a lot of pressure, and I just got to do what I love.”

It was during their year at Kimball Union—about an hour northwest of Concord, New Hampshire via I-89 in the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River—where Luca and Adam “became confident, independent young men,” as their father Giuliano put it, and where their path to collegiate success in Ann Arbor began to crystallize.  

Of course, the initial plan was for Luca to attend the New England prep school, while Adam continued his minor hockey career back in the Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL).  

The Fantillis believed that college hockey would make sense for Luca, so they explored prep options in the U.S.  First, they looked at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota, then, on a tip from family friend Jim Hughes (father of Luke, Jack, and Quinn) caught word of a boarding school with fewer than 400 students in a sleepy New Hampshire town and with a renown hockey coach by the name of Tim Whitehead, who had twenty-five years of experience in NCAA hockey split between UMass-Lowell and the University of Maine.

At that point, the plan was, more likely than not, for Adam to keep playing in the GTHL and eventually go on to the Ontario Hockey League for major junior rather than playing college hockey at all.  Still, the younger Fantilli brother tagged along for Luca’s visit to campus.

“We were really impressed with [Luca],” says Whitehead.  “And he made a great impression on admissions.”

“Tim was taking us on the tour, and he didn’t even know who Adam was,” recalls Giuliano.  “He said to Adam, ‘Do you play hockey too?’ ‘Yeah, I play hockey.’  And Luca was like ‘Coach, you might want to do a little research on Adam, because you may want to recruit him to come down here.”  Giuliano points out that while Luca’s comment may have been in jest he was struck by his son’s surprise at learning his prospective coach hadn’t heard of his younger brother.  It seemed everyone back home had already caught wind of Adam’s exploits in the GTHL.

The school year and hockey season got started in September, and by Whitehead’s account, “Luca got off to a great start on the ice, in the weight room, and in the classroom.”  Meanwhile, back home, Adam wasn’t thrilled with being away from his older brother for the first time.

As Giuliano tells it, he, his wife Julia, and Adam “had a rare weekend off with the Jr. Canadiens [in the GTHL], and we decided to take a drive down as a family to go visit Luca.  In the meantime, while [Luca] was gone, [Adam] really missed his brother.  I don’t think he anticipated missing him that much, because the house is empty for probably three weeks, we haven’t seen him, and I think [Adam] kind of struggled with that.  And then we went down to watch him play, and Adam was really surprised at the quality and the intensity of the play.  And then, on the car ride home, he was just kind of like ‘I think I made a mistake.’”

Adam confirms his father’s assessment of loneliness with his older brother a nine-hour drive away, saying “I remember him leaving. It’s just us, we don’t have other siblings, so living together up until that point, it was fourteen years, and then he left.  I was still playing minor hockey, and our team was good, but I missed my brother, and I wanted to play against older guys, wanted to play in that U20 league instead of the U16 league where I was.”

After a conversation between the Fantillis and Whitehead, the two parties recognized that the best solution for all involved was for Adam to join Luca at Kimball.  The KUA admissions team had already met Adam on Luca’s visit, which helped expedite the process, and it hadn’t take Whitehead long to identify the younger Fantilli’s talent—“I watched tape on Adam, and I think my grandmother could tell you he was the best player on the ice.”  “That phone call took place on a Thursday, and I was moving into my dorm on Friday,” Adam notes.  “So it all happened pretty fast.”

From Luca’s perspective, the news that his brother would be joining him in the woods of New Hampshire was a delight.  For the first time in his hockey career, he would play on the same team as his brother: 

“I get through the first few weeks, and it’s going amazing—meeting so many new people, new friends, my teammates, and then I get a random call one day, and it’s him and my mom and my dad, and they’re like ‘how would you feel about your brother coming to play with you?’ I was the happiest I’ve ever been.  I thought they were joking at first when they told me it was gonna happen. I mean it’s every kid’s dream to play with their brother, and it came to reality.  When he got down there, I was just so excited to show him around, show him the ropes, and what it’s like being there.”

It didn’t take Adam long to distinguish himself on the ice.  At a preseason showcase known as Top Gun Selects in Salem, New Hampshire, Whitehead tried to explain to Peter Ferriero, the event’s director, that it might make sense for the then-fourteen-year-old Adam to play up an age group or two.  Ferriero assured Whitehead that they’d had a lot of elite players before, so Whitehead decided to “soft sell it a little bit, almost because I wanted to see [Ferriero’s] reaction” to seeing Adam’s game for the first time.  

“It was maybe two shifts in where Peter came up to me, and he’s like ‘what in the world is going on?’” continues Whitehead.  “I said, ‘Well, you want to bump him up to the U16,’ and he’s like ‘no, I think we can go all the way up to U18.”  Whitehead points out that in the hyper-competitive world of amateur hockey, it’s common for any such leap to yield complaints from parents who believe their children better deserving of the move.  In this case, no one had any objections.

Meanwhile, Adam’s late start to school allowed Luca the space to establish his own identity in a new environment.  As Whitehead put it, “Luca arriving first and without the intention of Adam even going helped immensely because Luca was such a good-natured kid that he made a great first impression on his teachers, coaches, teammates, and classmates right out of the gate.  He’s such a great kid, so positive, his attitude is so uplifting that he made that impression without his brother, so then when Adam came, he really did feel like the big brother that he is and he kind of showed him the ropes and it made sense.”

Whitehead recalls a conversation with Julia and Giuliano in which the three were uncertain as to how the brothers would mesh upon their reunion.  “We were kind of quietly saying ‘it will be interesting to see how this works,’ because there’s no denying when you grew up in Toronto and you’re the big brother of a kid like Adam, who’s getting attention when he’s twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and Luca’s a heck of a player, but it’s inevitable that you kind of play second fiddle sometimes,” remembers Whitehead.  “By Luca getting here first, everyone looked at him just as Luca, not as Adam’s brother, and he really earned that respect, and then when Adam got here, Luca showed him the ropes, and Adam’s respect for Luca is just tremendous.”

At Kimball Union, Luca and Adam had the chance to develop as hockey players and people outside the mania that surrounds the sport from peewee to the NHL in the Greater Toronto Area.  KUA had first class facilities—both brothers had unfettered access to the on-campus rink, but the school also forced them to deal with rigorous academics and the strains of moving away from home for the first time.

At the start of the season in Toronto, “we felt a real microscope those ten games [Adam] played with the Jr. Canadiens,” says Giuliano.  “It was different.  It was very uncomfortable to be honest.  To get him down to Kimball Union and out of the spotlight, nobody really knew who he was, and he could just keep being a kid and going to school and developing without all that pressure on his back.”

“Growing up in Toronto, hockey is obviously huge there, and playing in the GTHL, which is the minor hockey league, it’s very political and a lot of eyes are on you, and there’s lot of pressure on young kids growing up,” explains Luca.  “It’s an amazing league, and you definitely get a lot of eyes on you, but stepping out of that bubble and going to New Hampshire where it was a tiny campus in the middle of the forest—it’s a little different than playing in a big city, so that was amazing.  We just got to go down there and just play for our school and for each other and not have all those eyes on us and just kind of enjoy playing.”

Here, Luca alludes to what Whitehead would describe as the “full hockey immersion” experience of Kimball Union’s commitment to replicate an NCAA environment, while also instilling the habits away from the rink that will set them up for success.  KUA hockey players watch video, go to the weight room, and practice on a collegiate schedule.  At the same time, Whitehead believes that the preparation off the ice is what best sets up his student-athletes for success when they get to a college campus.

Through his own experience at the collegiate level, Whitehead learned that “the kids that arrived prepared for college academically had the least amount of stress on them hockey-wise, because they were feeling good about who they were as people and they were taking care of their responsibilities off the ice. It naturally allowed them to really dial in on their hockey when they showed up at the rink.”

Brandon Naurato, Adam and Luca’s coach at Michigan, sees a similar value in emphasizing academics or even the basics of living away from home: “I think it’s just emotional maturity. I could be ready to play in the NHL, but maybe I’m not emotionally mature enough to handle the travel, the being sent up and down from the minors, to maybe an eighteen-year-old superstar, but Connor McDavid doesn’t know how to cook or do his own laundry. It’s a big deal. He can’t take care of himself. So I think if you’re a good student, and you have good habits, and you’re raised properly by your parents, it gives you a better chance in every area of life. So those prep schools—their environment would give you a better opportunity versus online school and practicing hockey six hours-a-day. And there’s a place for that too. It just depends on the kid and what your goals are.”

The abundance of resources available on campus allowed both brothers to take their development into their own hands.  As Adam puts it, at Kimball Union,“If you want to get better, you will, and if you don’t want to get better then you won’t.  All the tools are there for you to use, but no one’s gonna say that this is your time slot to go do this or this is your time slot to go do that.  You manage your own schedule, and if you want to get better you will use the time you have in between classes either going to the rink to get extra shots in or you go take a nap.  It’s really up to you.”

“That was our rink.  It was always open for us,” Luca points out.  “Me and Adam became best friends with the Zamboni guy just because we would go in between classes—Adam would go more than me because he’s a little crazy about that stuff—but we would go out there all the time just on our spare time and do little drills and get our homework done, but we definitely loved being there, and I thought it really helped us get ready for here.”

Once the regular season began, Luca immediately flourished, and attention from college programs soon followed.  “When he got there, he was almost instantly the number one D on the team,” explains Giuliano.  “He played all situations.”  By season’s end, Luca led the team’s defense corps with forty-two points in thirty-five games.  Whitehead looks back fondly on “the smoothness of his game, the effortless stride, and his high skill level and a positive attitude toward his teammates.  His love of the game is contagious, and he emerged and blossomed, and then Michigan got wind of it.”

Then-Wolverine assistant Kris Mayotte (now the head coach at Colorado College) knew Whitehead from a previous stint at Providence College and developed a keen interest in Luca.  According to Whitehead, Mayotte “knew there were no guarantees Adam would even go to college, let alone go to Michigan, so I remember talking with Kris and at the time, they wanted to make a decision based solely on Luca.”

Luca had attracted interest from Hockey East schools, for whom New England prep programs had always been a vital recruiting pipeline, but he recalls the exact moment at which the school he now attends first made contact:

“I remember one day, I think we were at a tournament, and I was in the shower after the game, and Adam came up behind me and he goes ‘Luca, Michigan wants to talk to you.’  I was like ‘What?!’ And he goes ‘yeah, Michigan wants to talk to you outside.’  I hopped out of the shower, dried off, and got my clothes on as fast as I could, and Mayotte was there.  He was all class, unbelievable guy, and they wanted me here, which was my dream, and I didn’t really look back after they started recruiting me.  I knew that was where I wanted to go.”

Going to Michigan had always been Luca’s dream.  “It’s close to home, and growing up, you just know how amazing it is here.  We came to a game when I was younger and I fell in love with the school, told my parents I wanted to play here, and they ended up giving me a Michigan jersey for Christmas one year, and I had my number and name on it, and that was unbelievable—the best gift.  When I started getting recruited by Mayotte, I was like ‘Oh, I can make this real.’”

The elder Fantilli would commit midway through the brothers’ year in New Hampshire.  At the time, Adam was still planning on going the OHL route, but slowly but surely, he was beginning to see the appeal of playing college hockey instead.

“Originally when Adam came here, they just wanted him to have a great experience academically and hockey-wise, and they hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to go to the OHL or the college route,” points out Whitehead.  “I think this really opened Adam’s eyes that there’s a whole other world out there.  You can set your own timetable in the prep/college route, and there’s more development to your self-esteem and your identity than just hockey.”

“Just being down here learning and not being stubborn in terms of what I wanted to do, listening to the right people I think was the biggest thing for me,” Adam reflects. After seeing friends, teammates, and, most notably, Luca commit to collegiate programs across his time at Kimball and with the USHL’s Chicago Steel, Adam eventually committed to Michigan in August of 2021.

In his first media availability of the year, Luca joked that you might not guess the brothers’ ages from their physical appearances—Adam “so physically mature” and himself “more of a late bloomer,” but Giuliano points out that despite how it may appear to an outsider, Luca blazed a trail for his brother through a year in New Hampshire, two more with the Steel, and now a fourth at the University of Michigan. 

“Luca getting all those minutes under Whitehead and then his commitment to his dream school on his own was great.  He got drafted to the Steel first, and then Adam tendered much later.  All those things Luca achieved on his own.  Most people from the outside looking in, they’re thinking ‘Oh, Luca followed him along to Kimball then followed him along to Chicago and then along to Michigan,’ which is the exact opposite of what happened.”

Adam suffered an injury that ended his season at Kimball early, though not before putting up eighteen goals and eighteen assists in just twenty-six games.  Ever ahead of schedule, he was officially a sophomore, despite being a freshman in age, because his credits from school in Toronto put him ahead of his class.  The injury contributed to the Wildcats falling short in the New England Tournament but couldn’t stop them from winning the Lakes Region League.

When Adam looks back on that season though, he doesn't think about the championship or the injury, but instead about the relationships.  He explains that his favorite part about his time at Kimball Union was “seeing your classmates right on the glass from the student section.  It’s not the same here because it’s such a big school whereas your classes are [less than ten students], and they’re all on the glass, and I can recognize you from my English class or my American history class, whatever it is just seeing them there.”

When Giuliano reflects on the experience, he thinks of how much he saw his sons grow in their time away from home.  “Maybe a month and a half or two months in, they did a ‘Parents Day,’ and Luca and Adam got to take us around to their classes and to meet their teachers and sit in during the day.  Luca took us to one of his classes.  It was a smaller classroom, and we met the teacher, and the teacher said ‘Luca, let your parents know what we do.’  Luca was just completely out of his shell.  He was a little more shy or more quiet, a little more unsure of himself [back in Toronto].  But within two months of being there, he was more confident, he was enjoying his classes more, he loved the school, he just grew up.”

“I just think more Canadiens should be educated on [prep school and college hockey],” Giuliano adds.  “And know what a great option it is, and what a great time we had during the whole process.”

For Giuliano, “process” is a key word here.  “It’s never been a rush to get to the next level,” he explains.  “It’s always been wait til the boys are ready.”  He says that for many GTHL families, “you’re fifteen-years-old or whatever, and you get drafted to the OHL, and you go, and that’s it.  But we tried to look ahead to What happens in Adam’s draft year? What happens in the year after his draft?  You’d be pretty arrogant to think that he’s walking straight into the NHL at eighteen years old, so then he’s gonna come back and do another year of wherever he’s playing.”

That thought process made college hockey—where Adam would play against twenty-two to twenty-five-year-olds—more palatable than the OHL—where he would compete against sixteen to eighteen-year-olds.  Now that Adam’s chosen college hockey, Giuliano still sees no need to hurry.  “We’re not in any rush for him to go to the NHL.  If it’s right for him, then it’s right for him.  If it’s right for him to go back to school, he’ll go back to school.”

Adam began this season as just a seventeen-year-old freshman, but he had an offer to start his college career even earlier.  North Dakota was prepared to bring him in a year ago, as a sixteen-year-old freshman, but the Fantillis decided that taking their time would make more sense.  With sixty-one points through thirty-three games so far, it’s safe to say that decision has panned out all right for the family.

Through a World Junior gold medal, Hobey Baker and NHL Draft buzz, Giuliano takes most pride in the way he’s seen his sons grow together in the four years since they left home.  He refers to a “Monday Question” on Michigan’s social media pages in which Adam names Luca’s first collegiate goal as his favorite moment of the season, then adds that there was “nobody happier than [Luca]” when Adam won gold with Team Canada at the World Juniors in December.

“They just cheer for each other as best friends, and it doesn’t get any better than that as a parent…I don’t think anything they do going forward is going to be able to top the last four years of them playing on the same team, and how close it’s brought them and how much they cheer for each other.”

The idea of sibling-teammates as best friends might sound a bit like a tired sports movie, but watching the two of them interact makes obvious the sincerity of Adam and Luca’s bond.  As their availability to the press Tuesday wraps up, Luca responds to a question about his brother’s outstanding season with a monologue:

“I’ve never seen anything like what he’s doing.  It’s actually incredible.  We joke on the bench all the time when he goes out and rips it from the blue line—just goes perfectly top left.  We’re just like ‘all right, what’s this guy doing?’ We’re just trying to figure it out.  In all seriousness, it’s not a surprise, it’s not by fluke.  He works every day, and everybody sees what he does out there on the ice and it’s special, but no one sees what he does behind the scenes, and I’ve never seen a guy so dedicated about his game, about his habits on and off the ice, and he definitely worked for what he’s getting.  It’s just paying off for him.  He gives it to the game, and the game’s giving it back to him.  In my opinion, and I don’t know if this is a hot take, I don’t think anybody’s been close to him for the Hobey.  It shouldn’t even be an argument.  To me he’s the Hobey Baker Award winner, and I don’t even have words really.  It’s insane to see what he’s doing on this stage, especially as a true freshman.  It’s truly incredible.”

Adam smiles and looks toward his brother. “Thanks, dude.”

Thank you for reading Gulo Gulo Hockey! Thanks to Giuliano Fantilli and Tim Whitehead for lending their time, thought, and photographs for this piece. Thank you also to Michigan Athletics, from whom the final image is lifted. You can support our work further by subscribing or by visiting https://ko-fi.com/gulogulohockey.