There was no better choice to wear the “C” in Worcester than Jordan Lavallee-Smotherman.

The 35-year-old veteran has been everywhere his younger teammates want to go, including spending parts of two seasons in the National Hockey League with the Atlanta Thrashers and has been a valuable asset to the Railers in his first season with the club.

“I grew up, for the most part, about 15 minutes from the DCU Center here in Worcester, so it was a natural fit for me to want to come back and maybe finish my career off close to home,” Lavallee-Smotherman told FloHockey. “I’ve had a relationship with Mike Myers, who was the president here for a number of years (and is now the COO), so when I made the decision to stop playing over in Europe and come back home to North America, I gave him a call, he hooked me up with (head coach David Cunniff) and this is where I ended up.”

So far, so good for the skilled forward, who has posted eight goals and nine assists in his first 18 games with the Railers, his first stint back in the ECHL since spending all of the 2017-18 campaign with the Manchester Monarchs.

He’s spent the majority of the past decade playing overseas, however, and unexpectedly had to do so last season as well after Worcester was one of the teams that opted out due to COVID concerns, instead suiting up for the Esbjerg Energy in Denmark’s Metal Ligaen for a short stint.  

He’d been supremely successful in Europe playing in numerous different leagues and countries, but as he was getting older, it was simply time to come back home.

“COVID obviously played a factor with everything that was going on in the world as well, so wanting to be close to home was a big component of that,” he said. “But, at the same time, my brother has three little ones that are 3, 6 and 9 years old, and I want to be close to home. I’m 35 now, and I missed a lot of their early years, so I want to be a part of their lives as well as starting to put down some roots here.”

Part of those roots may one day entail a role behind the bench; Lavallee-Smotherman has served in a player-coach role previously in Europe, most recently in Belfast for the 2019-20 season, and it was a spot that served him well in helping him prepare for a potential next chapter of his career.

“I think that was huge,” he said. “The two opportunities I’ve had to do some coaching – I jumped on as a volunteer assistant in Manchester four years ago for 35-plus games and the playoffs as well and then the player-coach experience over in Belfast – I definitely have looked into the possibility of finding some coaching jobs in the future, because the experience I have gotten, I’ve very much enjoyed.”

The focus for now, of course, remains on the ice for Lavallee-Smotherman, as he works to help turn around a Railers team that’s floundered toward the bottom of the league standings for the majority of the season.

“As a whole, on a personal level, I’ve been pretty happy with my game,” he said. “There’s been some consistency issues I’d like to iron out myself from night to night, but overall, I think I’ve surprised myself a little bit. I thought it might be a lot harder after taking most of the year off to come back and get back into the swing of things, but I think it actually did me a lot of good to work on my own game and work on a lot of things that you might not get a chance to put a lot of time into during another season.

“On the team aspect, things are definitely starting to turn around. ‘Cunny’ wants us to play the game a certain way, and I think we’re finally buying into that concept and really starting to play hockey the right way and the way he wants us to. Now, it’s just about stringing a couple wins together instead of going every other game like we have now for the last, probably three weeks or so. It’s obviously been a weird season with all the call-ups and the COVID impact and all that stuff, but it’s felt like as a group, we’re on the verge of turning a corner.  I’ve seen a lot more positives than negatives, and I really think it’s going to be the case where we start to move up the board.”

A lot of that potential stems directly from Lavallee-Smotherman himself – he memorably scored a hat trick in Worcester’s Dec. 11 “Teddy Bear Toss Game” win over the Maine Mariners on a Saturday night – the team’s leading scorer who often leads by example.

“I was kicking myself that weekend, the (previous) game on Friday, we’d lost a couple bodies, we were down a few D and it was probably the worst game I’ve played all year,” he said. “So, in those situations, I really want to be the guy that steps up and the younger guys can kind of look to and look at and follow by example. Coming back on Saturday, I tried to make a point of emphasizing that early on in the game. I do think (the younger guys) look to me a decent amount, but I really just try to be a pillar for them as a guy who’s been through a lot.”