As the Icers battled Rhode Island in early February, senior Matt Schwartz watched from the stands with his leg in a brace and his arms around his little brother.

Rejection and decision have defined his hockey career. Despite early signs of unique hockey talents, he and his family were forced to deal with disappointment throughout his career -- the latest being an injury-ridden season.

He recently sprained his lateral collateral ligament (LCL) and bruised and chipped a bone in his left leg after a knee-on-knee collision during a game against Drexel two weeks ago. He will absent from the ice for the next two to four weeks, but hopes to return for the ACHA Division I National Tournament in Rochester, N.Y., Feb. 29.

"It's going to take a lot to make me not play," Schwartz said. "As long as I can stand on two feet and shoot a puck, I want to be out there. I don't really care how it feels."

Schwartz is no stranger to injury this season. Earlier, he played through four games with foot pain until he couldn't tie his skates without his foot throbbing.

An MRI, revealed a broken Talus bone in his foot. He missed the next 12 games, which his father said were the first 12 hockey games he had ever missed for any reason.

"The worst hockey injury he ever had was a bruised tail bone when he was younger," Schwartz's father, Gregg, said. "But even that time he only missed a few practices and he was back on the ice pretty quickly."

When Schwartz was lost to injury the first time this season, he was leading the Icers in scoring with six goals and 10 assists. He recorded two assists against Scranton, which turned out to be his last points for eight weeks.

"I remember sitting in the stands, watching every game after I went down," Schwartz said. "It was pretty miserable to watch practice every day and coming into rehab."

Two months after Schwartz went down from the Talus bone injury, he scored in his first weekend back but was shut out a week later. He didn't feel 100 percent -- but, a week afterward, he said he was healthy again.

That was evident when Schwartz scored two hat tricks against Navy and registered eight points overall on Jan. 18-19. He said he hadn't felt a better joy than to be back.

"When you're sitting out that long and just watch everything from the stands, then you get your chance to get in there, you have all this emotion and energy packed up inside and to get out there and just start playing is unbelievable," he said. "I felt like I was at the top of my game and everything was working out for me. I had a lot built up from just sitting on the bench and it was awesome to just be thrown back into the fire."

Only a week later, Schwartz found himself lying on the ice in pain.

Schwartz wasn't bothered at first. He said he had gone knee to knee with other players before with little result. But the longer he lied there, the more worried he grew.

"I knew he really was hurt because he doesn't ever lie on the ice unless he's injured," Gregg Schwartz said. "Then as soon as I saw him pound the ice with his fist, his little brother and I went straight down to the locker room because I figured it wasn't good."

When his father arrived, his suspicions were confirmed. Schwartz sat on a training table as trainers rolled up his sock and examined his steadily swelling knee. As Schwartz's 7-year-old brother cried, he and his father exchanged few words and sullen glances. Both wondered if Schwartz had played in his final hockey game.

"That night was one of the hardest rides home of my life," Gregg Schwartz said.

A few days after, Schwartz entered the familiarity of the Icers' training room. Virtually unable to move his leg, trainers applied muscle stimulation and cold compression to decrease the swelling. Since then, he has been receiving physical therapy twice every day.

His therapy was more than just physical. Other hockey players and friends began to stop by his apartment more frequently to watch Penguins games or play video games to keep his spirits up. He and his roommates, Brandon Rubeo and former Icer Steve Marchi, meet often with their neighbors Nick Signet, Brent Tranter and Jaime Zimmel to hang out.

Schwartz also sought insight from junior Andrew Magulick, who tore his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) earlier in the season, about dealing with the injury.

"I told him that it's not easy, but unfortunately it's just one of those things that happens," Magulick said. "A day after the injury you could tell that he was down, but it's been a few weeks now and he's changed. I told him to just keep up with his rehab and I think he's starting to realize it's not the end of the world and he'll be back."

Schwartz has always found comfort in friends, family and especially the Penguins. As a 4 year old, he began watching Mario Lemieux with his father, which sparked his interest in hockey. As the Pens won two Stanley Cups, Schwartz and his father formed a strong bond that hockey has maintained.

"Ever since those days when he was little and I started driving him to skating lessons at 5 in the morning, Matt and I have been very close," Gregg Schwartz said. "We have been a hockey family now for a good 15 years, and I've loved watching Matt play every step of the way."

The Beginning

Schwartz enrolled in a hockey school at 5 and played Pee Wee hockey for the next seven years. That experience translated into success when he started playing high school hockey as a freshman at Peters Township High School.

Not only did he help the team win two state championships, but he also played for the Pittsburgh Hornets, a USA Tier I youth hockey organization, for all four years of high school. The Hornets' travel coach Joe Gaul said he knew Matt was a special hockey player from the start.

"He was pressing himself because he came from a lower level of hockey and he just wanted to perform at the same high level right away," Gaul said. "A lot of the time I had to settle him down because he just had so much competitive intensity."

It didn't take long for Schwartz to get an opportunity to start playing at a higher level of hockey. When he was only 17, the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles began to notice him. Cape Breton was a premiere junior major team from Nova Scotia with hopes of landing Schwartz. According to his father, the team became so interested in Matt, its representatives drove 13 hours from Canada to take him and his family out for dinner to offer him a full scholarship.

Schwartz and his family passed on the offer because he wanted to attend college in the United States. His father said it was a difficult offer to pass up.

"Junior major teams like Cape Breton typically pick guys to groom into professional hockey players in the NHL," he said. "Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury got his start there, but Matt didn't want to go to Canada for school so we said thanks, but no thanks."

As a junior in high school, Schwartz tried out for the Sioux City Musketeers, a junior hockey team in Iowa. Musketeer coach Dave Siciliano decided he wanted Schwartz on his team because, "Matt was a very smart guy and a very talented hockey player."

Schwartz and his family prepared him to move and made arrangements for Matt to finish his final year of high school in Iowa so he could start to play with the team as soon as possible. A month later, the Musketeers called. Matt said that call left a sour taste in his mouth for junior hockey.

"We told Matt that, unfortunately, we felt we had enough veterans at his position and he should stay another year in midgets," said Siciliano. "That year we had a lot of young players coming up and we knew he wouldn't see much playing time so we took back the offer."

Schwartz was devastated. His father said that it had been his son's, "first real dose of the hockey business in the real world."

College Hockey

A year after, Schwartz started getting scholarship offers.

At the top of his list was Bentley College in Massachusetts. Other schools like Holy Cross and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) offered him scholarships, but Bentley was Division I and Schwartz said playing at the Division I level was always his goal growing up.

"It was a really good business school and I was promised a lot of ice time," Schwartz said. "They were paying for two years of my schooling so it was just a real promising situation."

The situation turned out to be less than he expected. In 43 games, he scored only two goals and five assists. Again, the sport he loved was causing him more grief than joy. After his sophomore season, he wanted a change.

"I loved being in Boston, but what it ultimately boiled down to was their hockey program wasn't worth the commitment," Schwartz said.

To transfer to another Division I school to play, he would have to sit out a year. Being a junior already, he looked into smaller hockey schools around the State College area, including Penn State. Rubeo, a high school friend, already played for the Icers and Schwartz realized coming to Penn State would offer a good situation for him.

In addition, Schwartz had inside help. Former Icers coach Joe Batista had known the Schwartz family while living in Pittsburgh and had recruited Matt when he was a sophomore in high school. When he found out Schwartz was considering Penn State, Batista immediately looked into getting Schwartz into the Schreyer Honors College through a close tie he had with Dr. Michele Kirsch, the director of administrative operations in the college.

"I knew Matt met all the criteria we were looking for to represent the Penn State hockey team," Batista said. "He was a great student, a talented hockey player and he came from a genuinely good family."

Batista said he knew Schwartz was a natural-born scorer with an uncanny vision of the ice that reminded him of NHL star Joe Sakic.

Once arrangements were made, Schwartz left Boston to add the next chapter of his hockey career with yet another team.

"I knew I found the right place to be because I got into the Schreyer Honors College and it was close to home," Schwartz said. "To top it off, I knew the hockey program was very good too."

In his first year at Penn State, Schwartz registered 17 goals and 23 assists, second to only Luke DeLorenzo in both categories. Current Icers coach Scott Balboni said he immediately noticed Schwartz was talented and polite.

"He balanced school and hockey well and became one of the elite players and premier scorers on the team," Balboni said.

Looking Ahead

This season, Schwartz is sixth in goals and points with 16 and 31, respectively. Balboni said he hopes Schwartz is able to return for the national tournament, in which Penn State has advanced to the national championship for 10 consecutive years.

"The toughest part we would have to overcome would be losing him from our power play and special teams," Balboni said, "because he's such a good shooter and he utilizes his team mates very well on the ice."

Schwartz said even though he loves hockey, playing after college is doubtful and his career will result from his prospective degree in economics.

"I explored the option [to continue playing hockey] and I don't know if I'd want to for a couple years or not," he said. "The injuries make me think about if I'd really want to go through that hassle in hockey. I think in the long term, brains will get me farther. But hockey has been good to me and it's been fun while it lasted."