Malone’s Hans Schumacher will graduate as Franklin Academy’s all-time goal scoring leader. (Provided photo — Evan Wheaton, Malone Telegram)

MALONE — There are six wooden boards nailed together.

They form a hexagon, laying on its side in Hans Schumacher’s backyard, where he’d spend hours in the center of it. His legs a blur, rocketing a soccer ball around the dirt. Bouncing, banging off the wood.

A whirlwind.

“I had to really buckle down and train,” he said.

Schumacher would try to hit every panel as fast as he could. Speed, dexterity, precision — he had to work on these things alone. He couldn’t make all the practices four-and-a-half hours away in Rochester, where he played for the Empire United Soccer Academy.

“Dude, where’s your soccer net?” Schumacher’s friends would ask.

He didn’t have one. White paint and black tape on the side of Schumacher’s horse barn made a decent target. Nothing too special or fancy, but for 12 years, this was the work station.

“His determination and commitment to becoming a better soccer player for me is the biggest thing,” Malone soccer coach Chris Yaw said.

Much of his craft was mastered in that hexagon. It developed him, sheltered him like a birdhouse. When it came to running through drills at high school varsity practices, Schumacher was just fine-tuning things a little more.

Yaw has been watching Schumacher’s development ever since he played with Calista, Yaw’s daughter, when they were very young.

“To be able to do the things that he does, it’s not something you get by being coached by Chris Yaw, or anybody,” Yaw said. “You get it by years and years and hours of repetition and practice and commitment to improvement.”

For all the time Schumacher, the 2020 Watertown Daily Times All-North MVP for the Northern Athletic Conference, spent contained in that enclosed space working on his game, he also found opportunities to do so far and wide outside the wood.

The 18-year-old has played in a bevy of states now through youth development travel teams and camps, but now he’ll do so in another country entirely.

After the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the United States in March, the NCAA created dead periods where athletes couldn’t communicate with coaches. At the time, Schumacher was in talks with Syracuse, Villanova, the University at Albany, Vermont and several D-III schools, but couldn’t close the deal.

Instead, Schumacher finds himself heading to Borea Dresden, an international soccer academy in the German state of Saxony. From a young age, he always had the determination to enhance his game.

“The only thing motivating me was the prospect of going pro,” Schumacher said.

And while he’s certainly on his way, that motivation was with him on those travel teams. With him in that wooden hexagon blasting boards until the sun sank.

“I really felt like pro was the bottom line for me,” Schumacher said. “Anything other than that would be a disappointment.”

Like the motion of Schumacher’s legs in the hexagon, the ball as it ricochets from board to board. Like Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind.

It’s time to take flight.

——

Schumacher enjoyed a stellar career at Malone’s Franklin Academy. A two-time offensive player league MVP, he helped lead the way to three sectional wins.

But his senior campaign was up in the air with COVID-19 gripping the world. When the spring sports season was canceled, Schumacher was hopeful that humanity would have the virus at bay by then. He carried that optimism as the fall progressed.

“I just had no doubt in my mind we were going to really hammer out most of our season,” Schumacher said.

While other schools switched to remote learning and their athletics ended early — Gouvernuer, Harrisville — Malone’s third-to-final scheduled game was its last.

And Schumacher spent it scoring a hat trick in the first half against Potsdam, breaking the school’s scoring record of 64 goals.

The Huskies won six straight games, and they were a far cry from the beginning of the abbreviated season in which they dropped two of the first three.

“Our defense needed a little more of a calming presence that we lost last year,” Yaw said.

Schumacher is traditionally a central middie — that’s where he can do the most damage, offensively, defensively and side-to-side.

The idea of him in a central defensive role was floated at the beginning of the year, but Schumacher wasn’t thrilled. He knew the record was within his reach.

But after the two losses, Schumacher remembered what’s more important.

“We revisited it, and he was in full agreement,” Yaw said on the personnel change.

The Huskies went from a 4-5-1 scheme to a 4-4-2. Already having two strikers up top, Yaw knew Schumacher would move up and bank his goals with the added firepower at the net when he could.

“The best defense is a good offense,” Yaw said.

Schumacher made the system flexible during play. Sometimes he’d be at midfield, creating a 3-5-2 look. To have such a fluid player in the driver’s seat, to have that ability to mold to whatever his teammates were doing in every phase, it’s not common in high school.

“Not every soccer player at the varsity level has the soccer intelligence that Hans does,” Yaw said.

The intelligence. The knowledge, the repetition. Schumacher doesn’t just make young soccer players better while coaching youth camps. He acts as a second coach to Yaw, giving instruction, guidance from experience.

“I’m losing more than a player after he graduates,” Yaw said.

When opponents see number 7, they see the threat. They see the danger he presents. But what opponents don’t see is how Schumacher elevates those around him on the field.

Schumacher is to report at Borea Dresden by Jan. 14. Traveling has been as much of Schumacher’s development as those countless hours in the backyard.

“I pick up so many life skills. It forms who I am now, traveling all the time, meeting all these new people and meeting all these new teams,” Schumacher said.

Schumacher picked up plenty on the road regarding his prowess on the field. But he gained more beyond the game.

The kid growing up in the North Country has seen the country itself, other cultures, different people.

“It gave me a better look at life,” Schumacher said.

And now Germany.

“There are a lot of coaches that are happy to see him go,” Yaw said with a laugh.