Not far from the small Ontario town of Elmira, a farm — or farms, plural — sprawls out across the rural fields.
It all belongs to the Martin family, grown over a couple of generations. As Sheryl Martin explained on a recent phone call, they have “a few” dairy farms, they raise and sell beef, they crop a few thousand acres, and they “have some chickens, too.”
“Well, a lot of chickens, I guess,” she said, correcting herself.
A big part of the Martin family farms has always been the children. Sheryl and Terry Martin have three boys (eldest, Joey, middle son Brady, and Jordan) and one daughter (youngest Rylee) who’ve grown up working the stalls, and the fields, and choring. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her boys bought their own cows, raised them, and started their own line of beef themselves, a project that has taken on a life of its own over the last four years.
“COVID hit and we were all stuck at home, so I went and bought some cows and started raising them up myself and made money when I wasn’t allowed to do anything,” Brady said.
In the upcoming 2025 NHL Draft, Brady is expected to be a first-round pick. The 18-year-old right-shot center had 72 points (33 goals, 39 assists) in 57 games with Sault Ste. Marie of the Ontario Hockey League, and 11 points (three goals, eight assists) to help Canada win the gold medal at the 2025 IIHF World Under-18 Championship. He’s No. 11 on NHL Central Scouting’s final ranking of North American skaters for the 2025 NHL Draft.
“His hockey has looked different than most kids’ hockey,” Sheryl said.
Growing up, any “extras” that the boys wanted to do — training, skills, skating, anything outside of games and practices — they had to figure out on the farm.
They shot pucks in the basement. They rollerbladed in the barn. They built an outdoor rink themselves. They hung a rope from a tree and climbed it over, and over, and over again. They worked out by … working.
“We had to be very creative on the things that we did here because we weren’t able to drive into town for this and that,” Sheryl said. “Time just doesn’t allow it.”
After finishing his 16-year-old rookie season in the OHL with the Soo Greyhounds, last summer was Brady’s first of proper training and even then he didn’t go into the city for it. Instead, with the guidance of strength and conditioning coach Matt Nichol, they built a gym in the basement.
“So Matt Nichol gave me a program, and just set me up with some stuff,” Martin said. “I got some equipment brought to my house, and that’s what I did this summer. A squat rack and a couple weights and stuff. A lot of body weight stuff, just to get more mobility. It’s a lot. He gave me a lot of stuff to do, and I followed that program this summer. I think it’s part of my success this season.
“I feel like I’m a lot stronger on the ice. I’m just more of an ox out there. It’s tough to get the puck off me, I feel like. I think that’s a big thing for me, is my puck protection. And I think that helped this summer, to get a little bigger.”
On one of Nichol’s visits to the farm to help him get set up, he told stories about a hill Mats Sundin would run up and down at his home in Sweden, and showed him pictures of a time he took the Maple Leafs’ prospects to a farm for a day of work. So Sheryl pulled out the backhoe and they built him a hill on the farm to the incline that Nichol recommended.
Brady’s offseason consisted of being in the barn at 6 a.m. for his chores and whatever else came up overnight — from getting malfunctioning machines back working to tending to sick cattle — and then workouts in the basement with his brother going through programs Nichol prepared for them.
He has skated with local skills coach Tyler Ertel, whose home is a nine-minute drive from the Martin farm, since he was 9 or 10, renting ice in nearby New Hamburg “and other rural towns” wherever they can find it. He has surrounded himself with people who are from where he’s from and get it. He chose his agent, Cam Stewart of KO Sports, late — and because Stewart was from Elmira, his mom’s house was 20 minutes from the Martin farm, and Ertel recommended him. After having a bad experience trying traditional training in a gym and getting hurt, he first began working with Nichol on some rehab — and because Nichol was from the area and Cam recommended him.
The Greyhounds selected Martin, a center, with the third pick in the 2023 OHL Priority Selection after “he basically took us to the OHL Cup,” Ertel said.
“He was lights out. I know he was in talks for first overall strictly because of that,” Ertel said. “And all of this load management talk and all of these things nowadays, he’s just not that kid, he’s actually the opposite. The more he rests, the worse he is. He’s an absolute workhorse. And he doesn’t seem like a big kid but he’s an absolute beast.”
In one of their games on the way to that OHL Cup, Martin put a full morning of work in in the barn and then drove into the city and scored a hat trick against the No. 1 team in the province.
“That’s just Marty’s way of life,” Ertel said. “He’s not into superficial things, and as cliche as it sounds he’s just a typical farm boy: he likes people, he likes hard work, he thinks it’s a good quality, and we all know as we age that it’s actually a great quality but for him to have that right now at 17 years old is special. He’s just got this aura about him. For me, he’s got that it factor. And he knows who he is.”
You have to see the farm to believe it, according to Ertel. “It’s absolutely mind-blowing to see what he does out there,” Ertel said, laughing.
Last season, when the Greyhounds played the Guelph Storm in the OHL playoffs, Sheryl and Terry offered to pick Brady and his teammates up from their hotel and make the 25-minute drive to the farm so that they could see it for themselves.
Only a few took them up on the tour but stories of the visit spread and his teammates regretted not going. This year, on a day off between games in Guelph and Sarnia, Sheryl and Terry smoked 45 pounds of beef and the whole team visited, holding hens and visiting with the cows.
“It’s a different lifestyle and it’s uncommon to most people but it was a really great experience for Brady to have his teammates in so they can actually see and visualize what he has been talking about. Because it’s a big deal to him,” Sheryl said. “Most of the boys had never, ever been on a farm before and had no idea the function of a farm. And he’d kind of taken a little bit of a jabbing for, ‘Oh, you’re a farmer, what does that even mean?’ And so it was fantastic for the boys on his team to see him in his element.”
(Earlier this season, that jabbing also spilled onto the ice when London Knights forward Landon Sim was given a five-game suspension for calling Brady a “Mennonite.”)
Greyhounds head coach John Dean said Brady “almost matured like right in front of my eyes” on that visit. “You got to the farm and you could tell he felt more comfortable there, that that’s his home and suddenly you could just see it, he was protective of things and taking care of little things and he just went into his natural rhythm of picking stuff up off of the ground and moving gates and he wasn’t doing it to impress anybody it was just ‘This is what I do,’” Dean said.
The Greyhounds players “were completely wide-eyed,” according to Dean. Greyhounds general manager Kyle Raftis admitted he was, too.
“For our guys, it was amazing to see another way of life and how it works,” Dean said. “They didn’t understand what it meant to be on the Martin farm. I think they just thought that Marty was a guy who lived in a corn field and then they quickly realized that Marty is responsible for a lot of things at that farm day-in, day-out and every morning.”
When Raftis scouted Brady in his OHL draft year, he was drawn to his ability to take games over through his physicality, work ethic and intangibles.
He was sold, though, after meeting with him before the draft, coming away from the introduction thinking, “This is the guy I want, these are the guys that you win with.”
“(He’s) a bit of a throwback. Years ago, there were a ton of guys who’d come off the farm and the work ethic, the responsibility that he has, he’s up and ready to work and ready to go. It doesn’t matter how you grow up but it’s how those things are instilled in you and it’s definitely apparent with (Brady),” Raftis said. “There’s a lot of good players but it’s one thing to build a list and it’s another thing of ‘Who do you want in your program?’ and I think it’s always the second part. You know what that guy’s going to bring night in and night out. (And) he’s got a lot of confidence, and not in a cocky way. And I think the guys kind of feed off of it actually.”
When he first arrived in the Soo, Dean said he had a bit of a feeling out process with Brady. On the ice, things came naturally to him but he was raw and there was a lot of correcting and coaching. (Off of it, he actually asked a family friend with a farm in the Soo if it would be OK if he came by and did some chores on off days.)
“His work ethic is extremely high, his care factor is extremely high, and those are two things which he naturally comes by from his farm upbringing,” Dean said. “And he wants more and more I think because he’s seeing exponential growth.”
That exponential growth has seen Martin turn from a hard-working, raw talent into a mature player that Dean now views as “a power forward with high-end skill.”
“This guy’s got so many tools. He can cut you with anything. He can cut you with his shot, with his skill, with his physicality, he can win a game by being a bruiser or he can win a game by dancing your entire team. I think that’s what makes him so special is he is multi-faceted and I think he can impact a game in a number of ways where I think some of his counterparts might not have that asset,” Dean said. “And on his really special nights, he’s doing it all. He feels very comfortable going to the next tool as opposed to trying to create something that’s not there. (And) pound for pound (NHL Central scouting lists Brady at 6-feet and 178 pounds), when he hits guys, the way he’s hard on pucks, that’s something that he has come by completely naturally with his work on the farm and just naturally building his body up that way.”
Raftis believes there’s still “so much untapped potential” in front of him as well, arguing that his strengths — the work ethic, the will — are the ones you can’t teach.
Because of how late he was to traditional training, Raftis thinks even things like some of the athletic movements other players have worked on from an early age are still coming for Brady, too.
That’s where Nichol’s help comes in. Nichol believes he can “accomplish the same goals that we would normally do at a gym with barbells, and dumbbells and machines” and that “he’s got huge runway still.” But he also believes that to find that next level “some of that can be found now for him in the gym.”
“They were worried: ‘Is he going to be able to still be at home and be on the farm and accomplish his goals?’ I made sure that they knew that that was absolutely possible. And then it was a matter of saying, ‘OK, how can we make it fit into his life?’” Nichol said. “The narrative on him was that he’d never worked out and I think he’d probably worked out more than most kids his age, just not in a gym.”
For Brady, it’ll be about marrying the two moving forward. “There’s a really special quality about Brady and a lot of it has to do with his upbringing and his family life and life on the farm. I think that it’s a really cool story, but I think that it’s more than just a really cool story — I think there’s a lot of intangible benefits to the lifestyle that he leads. So I didn’t want to lose that and I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water,” Nichol said. “The idea was: ‘How do we slowly start to introduce some of the more traditional types of training but don’t lose all of the fantastic benefits that he has gotten from this incredible lifestyle that he lives on the farm that is spilling over into his hockey game.’”
Nichol, Raftis and Dean all believe he’ll find the right balance.
Ertel knows it and believes Brady’s “going to have a massive impact on some NHL team” as a top-six center who could start his career lower in a lineup but will play his way up.
Like Ertel, Dean also talks about a special kid. “The kid’s a f—ing great kid, like a really great kid,” Dean said.
That kid says he has no plans to stop chipping in at the farm moving forward, either, though he admits next summer will be busier than most — what with the NHL Draft and rookie camps.
The farm will always be in his game, too.
“I think that’s why I play like I do,” Brady said. “My dad always told me hard work is the biggest thing and if you’re working hard good things will come. I think the biggest part of my game is my engine and my work ethic.”
And when it’s all said and done, Nichol hopes that he’ll show other kids they can chase their hockey dreams a little differently. “I feel like guys like me are partly to blame for this idea that you’ve got to be doing the latest and greatest cutting edge training or whatever and I think that so many guys for years and years and years have gotten strong and fit without all of this fancy stuff so it’s really nice to see a kid like that that can inspire some of those kids,” Nichol finished.
Source: NHL.com / The Athletic
