Local hockey fans who are also followers of the National Football League might look at the last name of the latest addition to the Newfoundland Growlers’ roster and wonder, “could the newest member of the ECHL team be related to one of the NFL’s rising young stars?”
The answer is yes.
The Growlers signed forward Dylan Vander Esch Wednesday in advance of the start of a road trip through the northeastern U.S,. The 25-year-old native of San Jose, Calif., who had been playing with the Fayetteville Marksmen of the Southern Professional Hockey League, is the first cousin of Dallas Cowboys’ star linebacker Leighton Vander Esch
This season, Dylan Vander Esch has nine points (5G, 4A) in seven games this season with the Fayetteville Marksmen of the Southern Professional Hockey League. The 6-1, 190-pounder has also played with Macon and Knoxville in the SPHL, but most of his brief time as a professional has actually been spent in the ECHL. During the 2018-19 season, Vander Esch appeared in 49 games for the ECHL’s Greenville Swamp Rabbits, registering 11 goals and four assists.
Vander Esch played college hockey at the State University New York-Potsdam, where he had been the team’s captain and leading scorer, as well as a conference second team all-star in 2017-18.
Leighton Vander Esch, who was a first-round draft pick of the Dallas Cowboys in 2018 and was a second-team NFL All-Pro as a rookie last season, isn’t his hockey-playing cousin’s only relative who has starred on the gridiron.
Dylan Vander Esch’s father Doug was a star football player at the University of South Dakota and is a member of that school’s athletic Hall of Fame. Dylan’s younger brother Caleb is a junior-year wide receiver at USD.
Vander Esch wasn’t in the Newfoundland lineup as the Growlers opened their road swing Wednesday night in Glens Falls, N.Y., with a game against the Adirondack Thunder. But there will be plenty of opportunity for him to see action over the next nine days, when Newfoundland will play six more away games, including the upcoming weekend, when they play three games in three days against the North Division-leading Reading Royals
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