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LEXINGTON, Mass. — By dinnertime, for much of September and October of 2021, discouragement and exhaustion made Will Smith slump at the kitchen table.
Smith and his Under-17 U.S. National Team Development Program teammates lost nine of their first 10 games in 2021-22. There was the 8-1 hammering against Youngstown (USHL). The 6-0 setback to Madison (USHL). The Michigan-to-Louisiana bus ride that preceded back-to-back losses to Shreveport (NAHL).
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It wasn’t just that. Smith was grinding through practices and two-hour weightlifting sessions at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Mich. While his friends at St. Sebastian’s School were on campus in Needham, Mass., the 16-year-old was taking online classes at the arena with his teammates. The native of Lexington, a Boston suburb, was adjusting to life in Novi, about 15 minutes away from the rink.
It helped that teammates and fellow Massachusetts boys Will Vote (Arlington) and Ryan Leonard (Amherst), usually in similar states of physical and mental weariness, shared Smith’s table as his housemates.
The three friends replenished with chicken and steak cooked by Colleen Smith, Will’s mother. At 9 p.m., they would top off with Colleen’s recovery shakes, which followed U.S. NTDP director of sports science Brian Galivan’s recipe: almond milk, protein powder, Greek yogurt, blueberries, spinach, hemp seeds, flax seeds and chia seeds.
When Smith, Vote and Leonard were ready for bed, each retired to his room. Even though Lexington was 700 miles away, Smith was literally in his family home.
Natural talent
Smith is a 6-foot, 180-pound center. For the upcoming 2023 NHL Draft, he is No. 3 on NHL Central Scouting’s list of North American skaters after Connor Bedard and Adam Fantilli. The offensive dynamo’s 191 points over two seasons places him second in U.S. NTDP history after Jack Hughes (228), ahead of previous program prodigies such as Patrick Kane and Auston Matthews.
Smith originally committed to Northeastern when he was 14 years old. NCAA rules have changed since then. Schools must wait until August prior to a player’s junior year before making their offers.
Smith will be a freshman at Boston College this fall. He will be the 14th family member to attend BC. His Chestnut Hill residence may not last very long.
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It goes without saying, then, that Smith has always had a hockey knack, ever since he first hit the ice at 4 years old.
“Pretty early, I knew he was good,” father Bill Smith said of his son, the younger of his two children (daughter Grace will be a BC senior). “I could tell he could play. He was always one of the top kids on the team. He was always producing. He loved the big moments.”
Bill played baseball at Lexington High School and Worcester Academy. Colleen was a swimmer at Creighton University. Neither played hockey. As proof of that, Bill likes to tell the story of how he and Will once prepared at a local rink for the Brick Tournament, the annual summer showcase in Edmonton.
As father and son stepped onto the ice, Bill hit the deck. He got up. He fell again. Leaving your skate guards on will do that to you.
A fellow skater rushed to check on Bill. It was ex-NHLer Freddy Meyer.
To become a possible top-five NHL draft pick, though, requires more than natural talent. For nine seasons, Smith played for the Junior Eagles, one of the Boston area’s strongest minor hockey programs. Montreal general manager Kent Hughes, then an agent, was one of Smith’s coaches. At St. Sebastian’s, Smith played for former Harvard assistant coach Sean McCann. Smith’s teammates included future BC commits Nolan Joyce and Tim Delay.
The family traveled regularly for Smith’s games: Connecticut for showdowns against Mid-Fairfield; Tampa, Fla., for Eagles tournaments; Waterloo, Quebec, for the annual peewee extravaganza.
All of this would advance to a different tier in 2021 when Smith made the U.S. NTDP.
“The Program,” as it is known, is the premier destination for 16- and 17-year-old American players. Eight of the NHL’s top 10 U.S.-born scorers in 2022-23 (Matthew Tkachuk, Jack Hughes, Tage Thompson, Clayton Keller, Matthews, Brady Tkachuk, J.T. Miller, Alex Tuch) are alums. NHL coaches Greg Cronin, Don Granato and David Quinn coached at the program. Dan Muse, who would be Smith’s coach, was hired this week as an assistant by the Rangers.
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Attendance, equipment, education and travel are free. But the U.S. NTDP is not for every 16-year-old.
The competition is older. Training is intense. Pressure is high. Homesickness can set in. Rigor is the keyword to describe the culture.
“They make it really hard,” Bill Smith said of the U17 introductory year. “It’s like boot camp.”
The Smiths recognized the magnitude of the opportunity. They heard the line that Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis, a U.S. NTDP parent (son Ryan played in 2019-20 and 2020-21), used to say: “There’s no better place in America to develop, Monday through Thursday, than the program.”
They believed an on-site support system would maximize what their son would get out of his residency.
It just so happened that Bill Smith was a professional.

Making the move
Until the recent sale of his business, Bill Smith was a principal at Boyd/Smith, a Boston real estate firm that specializes in luxury housing and commercial properties. His father, who was also named Bill, founded the company.
Boyd/Smith’s headquarters is on Massachusetts Ave., a slap shot away from Northeastern’s Matthews Arena. When he was younger, Will’s summer duties included tending the grounds and servicing the air conditioning at Boyd/Smith’s building.
The man with real estate in his blood, then, knew better than most that buying a house in Michigan would serve his family well.
It used to be that most, if not all, U.S. NTDP players lived with billet families. The shift toward remote work has helped to encourage some parents with the means to rent or buy Michigan property and live with their children.
Colleen felt that being with Will would ease his transition. Bill knew that buying would be better than renting.
“I’ve been doing this my entire life,” Bill Smith said. “You can go out there and rent, and spend $3,500 or $4,000 a month. After two years, it’s basically money all down the drain. I felt like the market was pretty strong and we could buy a place out there. Our goal, in two years, all we cared about was that we just break even.”
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The Smiths looked in Plymouth. Through a family connection, they learned of a five-bedroom house in Novi with a finished basement. The Smiths completed the transaction in 2021. The Vote and Leonard families were on board.
Colleen Smith and Deb Childs, Vote’s mother, came up with a plan. Each would spend two weeks per month in Novi to watch over the three boys.
At first, it was harder than they expected.
‘If you’re not cooking, you’re shopping’
The way Colleen Smith remembers the early days of 2021-22, the U17s had to change in the hallways of USA Hockey Arena. A month passed before Muse and his staff determined the players had earned the right to their dressing room.
On the ice, Muse rolled his lines against NAHL and USHL competition. Development, not winning, was the priority. All of a sudden, 16-year-olds used to collecting trophies and being the best players on the ice were losing — badly, at that.
At the same time, Colleen Smith was adjusting to her own life away from home. During her two-week Novi segments, Smith cooked eight steaks at dinner instead of three, saving the rest to slice up for the boys to take to the rink for lunch the next day. She bought 48 eggs at a time instead of a dozen.
“If you’re not cooking, you’re shopping for the food you’re going to cook,” Smith said. “It just continues. Then you think, ‘You just spent $500 at Costco and it’s gone in two days.’ You’re thinking, ‘Where did it go?'”
Meanwhile, Bill Smith was regularly home alone in Lexington. Colleen, Will and Rigs, the Smiths’ energetic white Cavachon, were in Michigan. Grace was at BC.
Smith became a regular on Delta’s Boston-Detroit leg to attend Will’s games. For one game, Bill cut it so close that Colleen booked his flight while he was driving to Logan Airport.
Smith and his teammates, though, turned a corner before Thanksgiving of 2021. They traveled to Finland for their first international tournament. The Americans won all four games.
A month later, they won two of three games in Slovakia. Their performance against their age group gave the Americans confidence.
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Smith was on his way to scoring 37 points in 35 games. He and his teammates were playing well against their age group in international competition.
Colleen Smith and Childs found their rhythm, guided by the five-color-coded spreadsheet that mapped out everyone’s flights and house schedules. At the end of a two-week shift, when it came time for Colleen to return to Lexington, she would drive the car they shared to Detroit International Airport, take a picture of where she parked and send the location to Childs. Once Childs landed, she would find the car and drive to Novi. Sometimes they passed each other in the airport.
“Having the house, it was instrumental in the whole story and how it ended,” Colleen Smith said. “Having that whole living situation with Deb and I there, easing the burden of anything else. They really just had to focus on their health, playing hockey, getting their studies done. That was the main focus of being there.”
Will Smith is special.
Here’s what makes him so. https://t.co/ULvVhzh52g
— Scott Wheeler (@scottcwheeler) April 24, 2023
What’s next?
Sometime last season, when Will Smith and the U18s were playing against a college team, it struck Bill Smith how much his son was growing. During the national anthem, all the players removed their helmets. Most of Smith’s college opponents had beards. Some of them were bald.
Butting heads with older players hardened Smith in 2022-23. He scored 51 goals and 127 points in 60 games. At the U18 World Championship in Switzerland, Smith helped the Americans win gold by scoring 20 points in seven games. His parents were there, just like they had been in Finland and Germany for other tournaments.
This fall, Smith will be joined by five U.S. NTDP teammates at BC: Vote, Leonard, Drew Fortescue, Aram Minnetian and Gabe Perreault.
Smith projects to be a No. 1 NHL center. Come the first round, he could be reunited with Hughes, his former junior coach, in Montreal. The Canadiens own the fifth pick.
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Smith missed out on a normal high school experience. He gained hockey and life perspective, though, he would not have gotten at home.
“Prep hockey’s good. But it’s seasonal,” Bill Smith said. “You’re not going to get the development you’re going to get when it’s basically 24/7 hockey. You’re playing the best of the best every day. You’re getting trained by unbelievable trainers who are there full-time. I remember a couple boys said when they got out there, they didn’t realize that everybody in that facility — from the trainers to the equipment managers to the coaches — they’re all there for them. It’s like, ‘Wow, these people, their jobs, everything — they’re there for us.'”
The Smiths have since sold the Novi house. They bought a place in Harwich on Cape Cod. For Will, this new home will help him catch his breath away from hockey, not get closer to it.
But even if Smith’s U.S. NTDP experience is over, its imprint on his family will not go away.
“When are you ever going to have this experience with your 17-, 18-year-old son in this unbelievably exciting (situation)?” Colleen Smith asked. “And be experiencing it with them, not just from afar. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing that we’ll never forget.”
The Smiths recently attended orientation at BC. They saw Vote and Leonard. Both gave Colleen a hug. She feels like she has two more sons.
Bill Smith recalled sending a boy away to Michigan two years ago. Will Smith came home this spring as a man. What happens next is up to him.
(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
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