'Cac Coaching Connections in the Frozen Four

The other week, we wrote about the connections between the NESCAC and the NCAA D-1 men's hockey tournament. Three of the four teams that made this week's Frozen Four come from the East, and all three have 'Cac connections on their coaching staff.

Norm Bazin, former Hamilton coach (and two time NESCAC Coach of the Year) and UMass-Lowell program savior, has had quite a few digital/print words penned about him recently. Bazin began his coaching career as an assistant to Hamilton alumnus ('85) Tim Whitehead at Bazin's alma mater, UMass-Lowell, in the late 1990s. Whitehead would go on to coach the University of Maine for 12 seasons after leaving the Mill City in 2001. Yesterday, the Black Bears fired Whitehead after a 11-19-8 season.

USCHO has a feature on how Lowell's fight for survival as a program parallels Bazin's own near death experience in a car accident a decade ago. The Boston Globe has a similar story, which also includes the tidbit that the second year Lowell coach named his oldest son after the doctor that saved his life. Both articles give additional credit for the River Hawks revival to former congressman and current Chancellor of UMass-Lowell, Marty Meehan.

Rand Pecknold, head coach of top seeded Quinnipiac and a Conn College alumnus ('90), has also received a good deal of attention.  Pecknold's rise to prominence with Quinnipiac is a bit different than Bazin's with the River Hawks. The 44 year old Conn College grad has spent his entire 19 year head coaching career as the Bobcat's bench boss and has been the only Division I coach the commuter school has ever known.

Last week, the  ESPN Podcast, "The Sporting Life with Jeremy Schaap," dedicated a segment to Pecknold and his Bobcat's ascension of the college hockey ladder. Pecknold took over the then Division II Quinnipiac program in 1994. Rand minces no words on why he took the position.  "I literally could not get another job." Rand supplemented his gaudy $6,700 a year coaching job by working as a high school history teacher.

Things weren't glamorous early on in Hamden, CT for Pecknold. Here's his description of the first tryout  from a recent New York Daily News  feature on the coach:

"I remember at the first tryout I only had 17 skaters and 12 (were goalies. I brought the 12 goalies in a room and said 'we're going take three or four goalies. If any of you don't make it, have any of you ever skated out before?" I had to ask it because we didn't have enough players...I couldn't even fathom that today."

Quinnipiac made the jump to D-1 in 1998 and was part of the now defunct Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) and then Atlantic Conference for their first seven years, before making the jump to the ECAC in 2005. The Sporting Life podcast chronicles Quinnipiac's journey from Division I after-thought to top ranked team in the nation and includes interesting angles on how they did it; from Pecknold's use of  "Moneyball"- type tactics to the state of the art TD Bank Sports Center and the school's political polls. The full segment can be found in the embed below.




Quinnipiac is located 10 miles north of New Haven, CT, home of the Yale University Bulldogs, the Bobcats rival and UMass-Lowell's opponent in the Frozen Four semis on Thursday. Quinnipiac takes on Minnesota's St. Cloud State in the other matchup. Of the four teams, Yale is the only school that has ever been to the Frozen Four, but that was back in 1952 when the tournament only had four teams. USCHO has a good feature on that team, which talks of the politics of getting into the tournament, Yale's former NHL player turned coach "Iron Man" Murray Murdoch and the difficulties of playing hockey in the elevated atmosphere of Colorado.

Current Yale coach Keith Allain has no connections to the 'Cac, but his assistant Dan Muse spent a year as an assistant to Williams coach Bill Kangas' in 2007-8. Allain joined Pecknold and Bazin as part of the seven man finalists' list for the Spencer Penrose Award, given annually by the American Hockey Coaches Association (AHCA) to the best coach in Division I men's hockey.

Today, Bazin was announced as the winner of the Spencer Penrose Award. In four years, Bazin has gone from a D-III coach at Hamilton to having his River Hawks in their first D-1 Frozen Four. In that time period, Bazin has racked up four straight conference Coach of the Year awards honors (NESCAC '10,11, HockeyEast '12,13) and completed the largest single season turnaround in NCAA Division I history, taking Lowell from five wins in 2010-11 to a 24-13-1 in 2011-12. To put his meteoric rise in the coaching ranks in perspective, next year's Hamilton senior class, which includes captain Evan Haney and starting goalie Joe Quatrocchi, played their freshman season under Bazin at Sage Rink.

Pecknold was named one of the two runner-ups for the award, along with St. Cloud State's Bob Motzko; Pecknold has been a finalist for the award twice before. Last week, Pecknold became the first ECAC coach  since 1998 to win the the Clark Hodder Division I Coach of the Year Award, given to the best D-I coach in New England. Pecknold and his Bobcats can boast something that no other D-I program can: in their 25 years in Division I, they have never had a losing season.

Lowell plays Yale in the first semifinal tomorrow, Thursday, April 11, at 4:30 PM. Quinnipiac plays St. Cloud State at 8:00 PM. Both games will be played in Pittsburgh at the CONSOL Energy Center, home of the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. In addition, both games will be broadcast on ESPN 2, with John Bucigroos, Barry Melrose and Clay Matvick in the booth.