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Madison Primeau and her brother, Mason, trained together every day in summer 2020.

At the time, Peter Renzetti was Mason’s strength and conditioning coach for the Ontario Hockey League’s North Bay Battalion. During that summer, Mason had a weight-lifting schedule from Renzetti that he would do in his garage. Primeau would join him because she “wanted to push” herself, she said.

When Renzetti found out they were working out together, he told Primeau to train with Mason’s group of collegiate and professional players, all men two years older than Primeau. The siblings would drive an hour each way four to five times a week.

Primeau’s father, Wayne Primeau, played 19 seasons in the NHL. Her uncles Keith Primeau and Derrick Smith played 15 and 10 seasons, respectively. Currently, four of Primeau’s cousins play hockey collegiately or professionally, while Mason plays for the Savannah Ghost Pirates in the ECHL. Wayne never thought his daughter, who was only interested in lacrosse, dance and gymnastics, would take up the sport. But, Primeau, a sophomore forward for Syracuse, found her love for hockey on her own, despite the hockey culture in her family.

“Growing up in a sports family, you think everything is sports related, but my parents have never put pressure on me, and neither have my siblings, to participate in sport,” Primeau said.

In Wayne’s last professional season with the Toronto Maple Leafs, someone she knew from lacrosse encouraged Primeau, just six years old, to play hockey. She’d never shown interest in the sport before.

“I think it was on the backburner, to be honest,” Primeau said. “I mean, my dad, to this day, he just never thought I’d be playing Division-I hockey at Syracuse.”

But there was one problem with Primeau playing hockey: she didn’t know how to skate. Regardless, she asked to sign up. A lot of girls started out playing boys’ hockey in Toronto, but Primeau didn’t, Wayne said. She started out with no skating experience and just a few friends on the team, but she fell in love with the sport.

She improved every year and seemed to enjoy the sport more and more, Wayne said. In her junior year of high school, Primeau received collegiate offers and wanted to raise her game to the next level, starting to train with her brother and Renzetti.

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The majority of her training group play collegiate or professional hockey. But she’s never actually seen them on the ice because her training with Renzetti is completely strength-based and off the ice.

“It’s a different mindset,” Primeau said, discussing her training with Renzetti. “They are there to work, which is so nice because they push me, they don’t treat me as a girl, which should never be the case.”

Primeau’s shot has gotten stronger at Syracuse while working with Renzetti. During her freshman season last year, she scored 10 goals which tied for second most on the team. That was also the fifth-most goals by a freshman in Syracuse history.

“If there’s one thing she has — it’s a shot,” Wayne said.

Wayne still helped out “here and there” with Primeau’s school teams, but he was never behind the bench of her club teams. He let her do her “own thing.”

Primeau also said her parents have gotten her top nutritionists and sports psychologists as well as hosting the “hard conversations” about what Primeau needed to improve on.

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Keith said that almost all the Primeau kids liked hockey more than the other sports they played. It’s just part of the family’s DNA, he said. Primeau said her hockey IQ comes from her genetics.

“For the kids, it almost felt like a natural progression,” Keith told The Athletic in a piece about Mason’s family history. “They all played different sports, whether it was lacrosse or soccer, but they all eventually gravitated toward hockey because it was such a big part of our family.”

Meanwhile, Primeau works out with younger brother, Manning, who plays club hockey, and now she’s the role model for him, just as Mason was for her. When she’s home, they’ll go out to the garage and do workouts together, where she and Mason used to train.

“They are always doing something when it comes to exercising or working out, always a competition in this house,” joked Primeau’s mom, Leanne.

The Primeaus are one of hockey’s most well-known families. Both Wayne and Keith were NHL first-round picks in the 1990’s, but they cemented “Primeau” as a household name by throwing punches in their first-ever professional matchup against each other.

When Wayne’s Buffalo Sabres visited Keith’s Hartford Whalers on April 7, 1997, the two hit each other in the head repeatedly, while Wayne even landed a hard uppercut. Throughout the week prior, Wayne had gotten the same question over and over again: “Are you going to fight your brother?”

“I was just dumbfounded by that question because there was no chance,” Wayne said. “We were like super, super close.”

The fight started with the Whalers’ goalie and ended with Keith, who threw Wayne to the ground to end it. Both left for their respective dressing rooms and Keith called their parents right away. His dad answered the phone laughing, while his mom and sister screamed deliriously. But Keith immediately apologized, stating that he was the older sibling and should have known better, Wayne said.

The two played many more times without altercation, and they laugh about the incident now, as do their kids.

“You know, my dad won,” Primeau joked. “But it’s a great conversation starter. It’s not too often that two brothers play in the NHL and then fight against each other.”

Published on February 12, 2023 at 10:56 pm

Contact Wyatt: wbmiller@syr.edu