Thursday, May 25, 2017

Offseason News and Notes

It's 158 days until the start of NESCAC men's hockey team activities and it's currently graduation season, so let's catch up on some news and notes while we wait. We'll throw together some recruiting items in a separate post later on this summer, but for now, here are some tidbits to mull over for the time being. 

 Bill Kangas to Take Sabbatical for 2017-18 Season
Next season would have been Williams coach Bill Kangas' 29th as Ephs bench boss, but it will also be his son Ryan's senior season at SUNY Brockport. Kangas is taking a sabbatical in 2017-18 to both watch his son's senior season and to travel the country and study other hockey programs. Now retired Middlebury coach Bill Beaney took a sabbatical in 2002-03 to watch his son Trevor play his senior season at Princeton, so this isn't unprecedented. Current Panther coach and then Panther assistant Neil Sinclair coached Middlebury that season.

Like Sinclair, Williams assistant coach Mike Monti will take over behind the bench for a season. Monti is in his second stint as a Williams assistant. He was with Kangas in 2011-12, before leaving to join the staff of DI University of Vermont for three season until returning to Williamstown for the 2015-16 season. He'll take over a team that is losing eight seniors, including NESCAC first team blueliner Frankie Mork, and gaining nine recruits.

Williams is in the market for a new assistant coach for the 2017-18, so if you are interested, you can find out more and apply here.

 Tufts Hockey Documentary
Tufts graduating senior and men's hockey player Pat Lackey released a documentary (broken up into 16 episodes of about four minutes each) covering the 2016-17 Tufts Jumbos season entitled "Inside Tufts Hockey 2017" by Penalty Kill Productions. We got a glimpse of Lackey's production skills with his preseason Game of Thrones "Winter is Coming" preview for Tufts hockey, which you can watch here.

The doc series covers the season from preseason stairs workouts at Harvard Stadium until the aftermath of the NESCAC Quaterfinal  loss to Trinity. The series features interviews with players and coach Pat Norton, game and locker room footage, as well as some footage from around campus.

It captures the a capella talent of frosh blueliner Evan Haney, the chronic hip struggles of goalie Nik Nugnes, the career ending injury of Mason Pulde and more. A particularly poignant moment comes in Episode 15 with a candid soundbite from coach Norton talking about how players ending their careers have lost something they'll never get back again. Coach Norton, a D1 player at UNH himself (there's some old footage of his college days early in the season), admits that even coaching does not completely fill that void of  completing a collegiate playing career.

The final episode has some encouraging news for the Jumbos as Norton hints that an on-campus rink might be in the works. The lack of rink is one of the biggest hindrances for the Jumbos program, which has traditionally been weak in hockey but strong in other sports.

You can watch episode 1 below, and find all episodes here.



NESCAC in the Pros
In the North American pro ranks, the only postseason play for NESCAC alums came at the SPHL level.  Jon Landry's Bridgeport Sound Tigers failed to make the AHL playoffs. The 34 year old former Bowdoin star finished with 18 points (4-14-18) in 53 games for the New York Islanders' AAA affiliate. If Landry is back with the Islanders farm team next year, I still stand by my offer to the Islanders to pay top dollar for the god awful obstructed seats in Barclays if they call up Landry for just one game. No NESCAC players has graced an NHL sheet of ice since Guy Hebert last played for the organization that fleeces an obscene amount of money from me on a yearly basis come playoff time, the New York Rangers, in 2001.

Way down south in single A, several CACers plied their trade in the playoffs. Middlebury alum Louis Belisle ('14) made it to the SPHL semifinals with the Pensacola Ice Flyers before being ousted by the eventual champion Macon Mayhem. Belisle had a cup of coffee in the ECHL with the Florida Everblades, but spent the vast majority of the season with the pan-handle puckers of Pensacola. The former Panther had 50 points (18-32-50) in 52 games for the Ice Flyers en route to SPHL Defensemen of the Year.

Former Belisle teammate Evan Neugold ('16) spent 48 games with the Columbus Cottonmouths, Belisle's first pro team and now a defunct franchise, before finishing off the season with the Knoxville Ice Bears, where he joined another former Panther in Robbie Donahoe ('14). Donahoe began the year in the ECHL with the Manchester Monarchs and Utah Grizzlies, before spending the final 33 regular season games with the Ice Bears, a team with which he won an SPHL title in his first pro season back in 2014-15. The two former Middlebury stars went down in the first round of the playoffs.

Trinity alum Jackson Brewer ('15) spent the 2016-17 campaign with the Roanoake Rail Yard Dawgs for their inaugral SPHL campaign. They failed to make the playoffs but Brewer put up a 41 spot (  16-25-41) for the season. He had a welcome reunion with Sean Orlando, who spent a few games with the Virginia club on an ATO after he wrapped up his career at Trinity with a loss in the national title game against Norwich. The Cadet goalie in that game? None other than Ty Reichenbach, who joined both Brewer and Orlando on Roanoke for those final games of the season.

Colby's Jack Burton had the highest level of ATO experience spending four games with the ECHL's Indy Fuel during spring break.

New Rink for Colby in 2020
The NESCAC has a variety of shelf lives on their rinks, from Hamilton's Sage Rink - the oldest rink in all of D-III - to Bowdoin's Sid Watson Arena, opened in 2009 and the first rink to earn a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. Colby will have the newest rink in the conference come 2020 when a new,$200 million multi-sport athletic complex will be completed.  Unclear if Joe Biden made any hockey references in his commencement speech at Colby this past weekend.


Upwards and Onwards
The end of the year means picking new captains for the upcoming season and saying goodbye to former captains. I could tell you who some of these graduates or new captains are, but let's be lazy and let the NESCAC team twitter feeds (most have them now in #2017) tell us.











 As NESCAC seniors prepped last week for the next stage of their lives post hockey and college, the world tragically lost Chris Cornell on May 17th. I never saw Cornell with Soundgarden, but I did see him with Audioslave on Halloween 2005 - one day before Jon Landry officially began his final year of Bowdoin hockey - at the Tsongas Center, the current home of now UMass-Lowell coach and former Hamilton coach Norm Bazin. 

 In honor of the NESCAC seniors moving on and in remembrance of Chris Cornell and his legendary pipes, here's Audioslave with "Your Time Has Come" 
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