Cameron Gaunce brought more than an NHL career. He brought his attention.

Everyone has seen the other version of this. A professional athlete turns up at a youth program, stands for photographs, says something about hard work, and goes. The children remember that somebody famous came. They do not remember a word of it.

Cameron Gaunce did something else.

The former NHL defenceman and TSN analyst arrived at Ted Reeve and stepped onto the ice beside campers who had never played hockey before. He ran drills. He demonstrated skating mechanics, fixed stick positions, and crouched down beside children who could not find their balance to explain what an edge actually does.

What that attention is worth is hard to put a number on and impossible to miss in the room. Children who arrived with their heads down were skating with visible confidence by the middle of the week.

My favourite thing about hockey is not being good at hockey. It's spending time with friends.

Cameron Gaunce, former NHL defenceman

In the dryland block on media day he sat down with Councillor Brad Bradford for a question and answer session run entirely by the campers. They asked what the NHL was like, how you handle losing, and whether he had ever been frightened on the ice.

Asked what his favourite thing about hockey was, he gave an answer that had nothing to do with winning. “My favourite thing about hockey is not being good at hockey, it’s spending time together with friends. I would imagine you didn’t all know each other before showing up here this morning, but by the end of the week you’re going to spend a bunch of time together, make some memories, and hopefully that’s something you can continue going forward.”

The equipment, the ice, the curriculum and the volunteers do the daily work of an Open Ice camp. What a coach like Gaunce adds is something no budget line can buy: proof, for a child taking their first strides, that people at the highest level of the game care about them.