from Sarah Lindenau of The Left Wing Lock,

I never met Matthew Wuest in person, but he meant a lot to me. It wasn’t until he landed his first full time reporter job with the Metro Halifax that I even knew what he looked like.

We met on a hockey message board talking about Red Wings prospects while he was running the Detroit section for a website called hockeysfuture.com. The year was 1998 and after I posted that I was about to attend my first Red Wings training camp in Traverse City, MI he asked me to do some scouting.

I had never done anything like that but he sent me some scouting forms he had created and asked me to fill them out for each of the Red Wings prospects. So there I was sitting in the stands at Centre I.C.E. with a clipboard and pen filling out these forms and rating abilities of Detroit’s sparse assortment of talent that included the likes of Maxim Kuznetsov, Daryl LapLante and Jesse Wallin. Matt used my ratings to help shape the profiles of the up-and-coming talent and while I didn’t really know what I was doing in those early years he encouraged me to continue.

Shortly after my first scouting experience, Matt ended his tenure at hockeysfuture to co-found a website on the Rivals network called thewingedwheel.com.

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