Hull Seahawks: Ross Connolly brings winning mentality player-coach Matty Davies is looking for

The 23-year-old left-hander will arrive in East Yorkshire next month as a NIHL National champion, having been part of the Telford Tigers team who backed up their 2019-20 second-tier championship under the guidance of Tom Watkins.

Earlier this week, Connolly was one of a number of players announced by Telford as leaving, with Hull wasting no time in adding to their D-core ahead of their inaugural season.

Because of injury, Scottish-born Connolly was restricted to just 28 appearances for the Tigers last year. But Seahawks player-coach Davies saw more than enough when playing against Connolly for Leeds Knights to offer him a place on his first roster.

“When I started thinking about what sort of team I wanted to put together here, the first thing was obviously the two goalies,” said Davies, who has young British pair Jordan McLaughlin and Curtis Warburton battling to be first-choice between the pipes. “Then it was about trying to get a real big, solid D-core in place.

“Ross is somebody who I played against a bit last year and he’s just a big lad, he has a big presence. He commanded the ice, was pretty solid and my whole ethos for the team was that I want a big D-core, solid D-men who are going to play the body and make it difficult to play against us.

“He’s got plenty of experience, he went over to North America when he was younger and played that style of game, so you know he’s got the physicality in his game.”

Prior to his year in Telford, Connolly came up through the Solway Sharks junior system in Dumfries before switching his attention to North America where he moved to in 2015, aged 17.

He returned after two-and-half years in the Ontario-based Greater Metro Junior Hockey League to see out the 2016-17 season with Raiders IHC.

A return to North America saw him sign for the Casper Coyotes in the Western States Hockey League before he headed back home to finish the year with the Invicta Dynamos.

Whitley Bay and a second spell at Raiders were other stopping points for Connolly before his switch to Telford last summer.

And while the Scot’s time there may have been hampered by injury, Davies used his own contacts from the spell he himself spent in Shropshire when winning the EPL title in 2016-17 to do his initial research.

“I played in Telford and spoke to a couple of people I know there and they told me that he was a good lad,” added Davies.

“And another thing for me too was that he’s coming here having been on a good team, a winning team, with a good coach who I have played for.

“I know what Tommy is like and I know what they expect in Telford, so Ross is somebody who is used to sticking to systems and being part of a professional set-up and that fits into what I’m trying to accomplish here.”