At Shattuck-St. Mary’s, hockey was the gateway to a gift gathering

For 25 years, Shattuck-St. Mary’s has gone national (and occasionally international) with its hockey program. The undertaking was a survival tactic after overall enrollment dipped to perilous lows, so much so that a full team of SSM students was not possible. Since the turnaround, hockey has remained a microcosm of Minnesota’s lone boarding school’s fortunes, and perpetually holds a standard that eight programs in other fields are emulating around campus.

On a crisp Good Friday in 2007, St. Louis Blues captain Doug Weight entered a two-sheet arena and stood solo in the open space to the right of the home bench. He was a healthy scratch for practice on the eve of the playoff no-go team’s season finale in Minnesota.

Along with fellow veteran Dallas Drake, radio analyst Kelly Chase and play-by-play man Chris Kerber, Weight had spent the first part of the reprieve speaking to the student body at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in the small town of Faribault. At midday’s approach, he strolled from the prep school’s auditorium to the SSM Sports Complex with the rest of the guests and hosts.

Structurally and size-wise, the rink the Blues utilized for this one day is on a par with top-notch NCAA Division III venues. A four-sided scoreboard hangs over center ice, bleachers that seat at least 600 spectators face opposite the benches while added standing room brings the conceivable capacity to a four-figure range.

Across from Weight’s view in those geothermal bleachers, 250-plus students marveled at the craft his teammates honed each day. Weight, in return, marveled at the facilities — both this newer and larger of the two campus ice houses and the academic buildings that hosted the preceding assembly — the students utilized each day.

When the active Blues adjourned to the dressing room, the captain met a Comic Con-length line of autograph and photograph seekers. Finishing that row was the campus newspaper’s sports specialist pursuing an exclusive.

In the ensuing chat, Weight unwittingly spoke more to the future of the institute than what he was soaking in at that moment.

“It’s a mini college campus,” the then-15-season NHL veteran told that student-reporter.

A decade later to the week, Dr. Maren LaLiberty vouches for that comparison. The seventh-year SSM science instructor coached women’s rowing at the University of Wisconsin from 1997 to 2003. That entailed working at a Big Ten institution in a town that Best College Reviews ranked third among America’s top 50 college cities.

But while Madison’s population of over 240,000 dwarfs Faribault’s populace 10 times, and while UW’s undergraduate enrollment is nearly 60 times greater, LaLiberty was drawn to SSM by its sixth-sense similarities.

Passing through the hallowed Whitney Arch, the main entrance to the main campus, one sees a slew of Collegiate Gothic architecture dressing the academic and residential buildings. Three of those buildings are part of the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Together with an Episcopal chapel, those structures flank one of the school’s three regulation soccer fields. The other two pitches are on the other side of the academic facilities, situated behind the rinks to comprise the Sports Complex.

“There is no doubt that driving through the Whitney Arch for the first time is a spine-tingling experience,” LaLiberty told Pucks and Recreation, “much the same as entering many college campuses for the first time. The SSM campus — with its distinctive architecture, expansive green spaces and adjoining athletic complex — can easily be mistaken for a college campus.”

As the founder and leader of the school’s selective bioscience studies program, LaLiberty has aimed to lend that feel to the campus’ insides her own way. The exclusively accessible lab boasts everything from beakers and skeletons to models of human organs and DNA helixes.

Much of the lab’s activity requires full surgical regalia. Ditto the road trips students often take to the much-heralded Mayo Clinic in Rochester, to the University of Minnesota or to Medtronic’s operational U.S. headquarters, all within an hour’s-drive radius from Faribault.

“We are incredibly fortunate to ‘rub elbows’ with leaders in in all different areas of health science on a regular basis,” LaLiberty said.

Those opportunities are the product of a program that, along with seven others, emulated a school-saving experiment that the hockey specialists undertook in the early ’90s. Within a year of the Blues’ visit, SSM was celebrating its sesquicentennial with six established or fledgling pieces of what it dubs the Centers of Excellence. Besides the three athletic programs — hockey, soccer and figure skating — there were two academic bodies and one performing arts-oriented guild.

With the exception of the hockey program, all were far from their fifth respective anniversaries at the time. Today, as they all plunge deep into their second decade of existence, they have the company of three other specialized societies for elite students, athletes and artists.

As of the current academic year, the athletic Centers of Excellence encompass hockey, soccer, figure skating and golf. Vocal performance and pre-conservatory music cater to arts prodigies.

In academics, the school inaugurated its rigorous bioscience program under LaLiberty’s direction in 2010. An engineering center came along in 2014, followed by a customizable academic regimen program known as “The Major.” As school president Nick Stoneman explained to Pucks and Rec, the latter is meant “for those students interested in developing a specific area of academic interest for which we do not have an existing COE. It has led to some fascinating areas of study.”

As the Major program’s web page states, it is geared expressly toward affording its beneficiaries “the flexibility to explore and develop new areas of passion and interest as they also meet the rigors of our core college preparatory program.”

By that logic, Weight’s statement is all but a retroactive overstatement. The full and explicit higher-education simulation on the compact campus was still to come when the Blues dropped by. But first, SSM had to get away with ostensibly running a reverse on the “school comes first” dogma.

Starting from the rink out

SSM was merely tapping into its A-list connections on the occasion of the Blues’ visit. A near-spontaneous event born out of serendipity catered to a hockey-dominated student body. But it also intrigued other community members and set a tone for the school’s future elite programs with comparable connections.

Then-St. Louis head coach Andy Murray had led the SSM Sabres’ top-level team to a USA Hockey national title in 1999. Two of his children had subsequently graduated there, and his youngest son, Jordy, had just helped the same program to its fifth national crown as a junior on the 2006-07 team.

At the other end of Jordy and company’s crowning week, the Blues happened to be passing through en route to the next night’s engagement with the Wild in St. Paul, a straightforward 45-minute commute up north.

Besides borrowing the second-year state-of-the-art rink for their pre-game-day practice, they cut into the middle of the day of classes for an all-school guest lecture at Newhall Auditorium. The auditorium, tucked into the second floor of the main academic building, was famously the site of the assembly scene in D3: The Mighty Ducks. And earlier in the week, it had hosted another all-school gathering to toast both the SSM’s boys’ 18-and-under and girls’ 19-and-under national championships, clinched on the preceding Sunday.

The events matched the makeup of the student body as it was constituted that year. With eight travel hockey teams in total — two girls’, two boys’ Bantam and two boys’ Midget — roughly two-thirds of SSM’s enrollees were pucksters with professional aspirations. All of the teams played schedules hovering around 70 games from September to March, and five were eligible to compete at USA Hockey’s national tournament.

In addition, an equivalent athletic brethren in the form of four soccer teams and a cluster of figure skaters had just taken root. Then there was the contingent of overseas imports with an American academic experience at the forefront of their incentives. They and others joined the student-athletes in settings of modernized mystique every school day, and were on hand for the NHL-flavored assembly in the auditorium and at the Sports Complex on that typically Minnesotan first-week-of-April day.

Prep-school purists would have likely winced at such a scene. They could have framed it as proof of an administration disproportionately feeding its fancy facilities at the expense of essentials for the classroom.

Such complainants are quite real, and ordinarily manifest themselves when the subject is an illustrious NCAA Division I school. Putting that another way, from a Shattuck-St. Mary’s standpoint, external (and occasionally internal) accusations of becoming a sports specialty school come with the territory that is the “mini college campus” Weight spoke of.

In reality, the campus’ young residents are still student-athletes, just ones who are subject to more rigor in what they juggle. Former coach and administrator John Sumner, who retired after a 40-year tenure in 2011, had little trouble justifying the hockey program’s upgrade in its formative days.

As Sumner recalled, one skeptic opened an exchange of dialogue by asking, “Geez, seven or eight months of hockey?”

Sumner nimbly replied, “If you want to be a good piano player, what are you doing every day? You’re practicing three or four hours a day. So why can’t a hockey player do that?”

The comparison sank in like a soda tablet. “I guess you’re right,” the conversationalist consented.

SSM’s advocates, especially the internal ones, have never spared any energy in their effort to inform the outside world that they are not merely running a “hockey school.” The place has never taken after the National Sports Academy, a place for winter high school-aged athletes that shut down in 2015 after a 38-year run in Lake Placid, N.Y.

With that being said, Stoneman does not shy away from acknowledging the prolonged special focus the hockey experiment needed before anyone planted equivalent seeds.

A decade before Stoneman himself arrived in 2002, the “Shad pucksters” mutated with intent to outgrow Minnesota’s interscholastic ranks. As the state’s sole boarding school, and as the product of a merger between a bygone military academy and neighboring girls’ school (which still serves as a smaller SSM campus), it needed a new way of reeling in recruits from afar.

Under former Wisconsin Badgers and professional veterans Craig Norwich and Mike Eaves, shuffling to the auspices of USA Hockey was the first step. The top boys’ team (classified as “prep” rather than “varsity”) and those that followed it would soon be in season from September to April. Some teams would be eligible to represent the Minnkota District at the national tournament, at times going uncontested through the travel sport’s equivalent of a primary season.

Boys’ prep had three national championship banners to its credit by the time Stoneman stepped in. Future NHL staples Zach Parise, Patrick Eaves, Sidney Crosby, Jack Johnson and Drew Stafford each had a hand in one or another of those title runs.

Within another year, Stoneman oversaw the groundbreaking for the second ice arena, plus one outdoor and one domed soccer field. The first priority, though, was reaffirming the school’s regal position on the hockey map in multiple tones.

“It was essential for SSM to, first of all, further its dominance in its hockey program through leadership recruitment for both the boys’ and girls’ programs, through facility enhancement and through strategic planning,” Stoneman said. “We did not want to assume anything as ‘given’ in the hockey program as we considered other Centers of Excellence, and knew we needed to continue to examine and further that which was established.

“We also knew that the school needed to grow, so we identified what we thought were the six essential elements that played a role in the success of the hockey program – leadership, program design, facilities, merit aid, recruitment and placement.

“We felt that if we could bring each of these to bear, we would be able to launch other (Centers).”

Spreading the fever

No elements of Stoneman’s starting point took long to burgeon. In 2004, he and SSM’s hockey program director — the late J.P. Parise — moved to shuffle the coaching staff within the girls’, Midget and Bantam divisions. In those reconfigurations, fourth-level boys’ bench boss Gordie Stafford moved to the head post behind the girls’ 19-and-under bench.

All he did for a first impression in his new gig was assimilate two future Olympians in Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux, a pair of freshmen who helped the team to its first national title in 2005. By the week of the Blues’ visit, the 19-and-under girls were SSM’s first representative to win two, let alone three, USA Hockey crowns in succession.

That 2006-07 school year also saw the soccer and figure skating programs running full-fledged for the first time. The go-ahead to open additional avenues in academic and arts was as clear as a newly Zambonied sheet of ice.

By decade’s end, the same student body that had welcomed the Blues to its home and, one year prior, invaded the Minneapolis-area Blake School Ice Arena for a doubleheader of rivalry hockey paid a similarly purposeful visit to Minnesota Orchestra Hall. One of their pianist peers from the pre-conservatory program — the German-born Magdalena Müllerperth — was giving a solo performance that evening. Müllerperth has since taken her talents to a host of halls in Berlin and New York City.

Student-musicians soon started sharing the stage with their puck-centric peers for national championship shindigs as well. In 2011, the Music Teachers National Association named Russian-born SSM sophomore Osip Nikiforov the top senior pianist at its signature competition. On his triumphant return to campus, Nikiforov performed amidst a ceremony honoring a double crown for the 18-and-under boys’ and 19-and-under girls’ hockey squads — the first such pair of coinciding titles since 2007.

Previous victorious installments of those teams had been serenaded with canned renditions of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” This time, the ostensibly obligatory standard for the occasion gave way to Nikiforov’s renderings of Schubert and Bach masterpieces.

“What an amazing mix of talent we saw that day,” said LaLiberty, who was finishing her first year in Faribault at the time.

“Concluded with a standing ovation,” Stoneman noted.

More recently, student-athletes have commonly transported themselves to watch their arts counterparts on campus, and vice versa. Stoneman remembers one instance that had a combined clique of hockey and soccer players passing by his office on their way upstairs for a girls’ night out at the auditorium.

“I overheard one who was speaking to her mom on her cell phone say that she had to go because she was heading up to Newhall to hear her friend’s senior violin recital,” he said. “This is a Saturday night, and this was classical music! They knew how hard he worked and how good he was and they were going to honor him.

“And, of course, you can see the musicians and engineers and scientists banging the glass at the prep boys’ and girls’ games on any given weeknight.”

Such sights and sounds were inconceivable before the likes of the Lamoureux twins, Müllerperth or Nikiforov came into existence. If Stoneman had yet to see a “given” with the hockey program circa 2003, his forebears faced sweatier specters for the school altogether in the late ’80s.

Stability through skates

For as long as Sumner has been associated with Shattuck-St. Mary’s, dating back to one year before its merger and name change, hockey has been the ultimate microcosm of the school’s fortunes. And earlier on, Lady Livelihood, to say nothing of promising prospects or established celebrity guests in any field, had no incentive to explore SSM’s quarters.

Total enrollment numbers by the late ’80s were south of what the student body’s puck-crazed population would be by the mid-’00s. Shattuck’s long-defining military program had vanished in the wake of the merger with St. Mary’s Hall and of the unpopular Vietnam War. The place’s formerly time-honored signature sport, football, had evaporated from campus for a decade.

“We had a combined enrollment that was close to maybe 140, and the hockey program depended on what came through the arch in September,” Sumner recalled. “We were at the mercy of the admissions department and what families in those days were looking for.”

The Collegiate Gothic architecture that today exudes a historical charm was then holding and discharging a deathly vibe. In response, the administration placed a house call to Dr. W. Rodman Snelling, the founder and longtime consultant of Independent School Management.

As Snelling walked through and around those seemingly ancient structures, then down the same path Weight walked in 2007, he happened past a forlorn football field en route to an equally lonely ice barn. The rink had no partner, no pro shop, no concession stand, no adjacent soccer field and no bubbled dome peering from behind. Trees were the only backdrop.

For that matter, for the better part of the ’80s, the arena had no tenant to call its own. As few as four, five or six SSM enrollees were playing hockey in a given year, which meant forming a unified team with Faribault High School.

Amidst the evaluation visit, Sumner stood in Snelling’s company, watched as he “literally scratched his head” and listened to the obvious statement-question tandem: “You have your own rink. Why don’t you have your own hockey team?”

In the ensuing discussion, Sumner remembers, Snelling said the school needed to enlist “Pied Pipers” from extracurricular fields. In 1989, SSM turned to Norwich, two years removed from his final game as a player and hailing from the Minneapolis suburb of Edina.

Under his direction, and soon with Eaves at his side, vacant dorm beds and cold classroom seats were filled with locals, out-of-staters and Canadians seeking the only available boarding-school experience in the State of Hockey. In turn, Y2K came to SSM a decade early, and for the better, as the number of registered hockey players went from four in 1989 to 22 in 1990.

“The turning point was the hiring of Craig Norwich,” said Sumner. “He brought some good players in, and he said, ‘You come and play for me, and I’ll try to get you in Division I programs.’ And, in most cases, he delivered."

The puck population started to swell all the more when Norwich pursued the program’s reclassification from scholastic to travel, effective in 1992. As it was, the state high school league’s restrictions and SSM’s unique status as a boarding school still inhibited the admissions ambitions.

“We were going to start in November and play a 20-game schedule,” said Sumner, “which in our case, at the end of the fall term we’d go on a fall break, come back and go on Christmas break, then come back, so the season was chopped up.”

“The key was to drop out of the state high school league and become a part of USA Hockey,” he continued. “Every team was playing at least 65 games and starting in September rather than November, so the kids were given the opportunity to follow their passion, playing more games and playing longer. That was the secret.”

The added sense of purpose kept several students on campus more consistently, and in turn drew enough applicants to start multiplying the number of teams. For some of those teams, the two-week Christmas vacation entails an excursion to Europe while others have gone to Canadian tournaments over Thanksgiving. Soccer has since reasserted the merits of this practice by fielding seven U.S. Development Academy-sanctioned teams that are assembled and active for up to 11 months per year.

When Norwich and Eaves left their own vacancies on campus in 1996, former North Stars captain J.P. Parise inherited their creation. By that year, the program had produced its first NHL draftee in Peter Ratchuk, a Colorado Avalanche first-rounder bound for Bowling Green State that fall. Another future pro, goaltender Ty Conklin, had also come through.

Parise would spend the next dozen years as the SSM Sabres hockey godfather. He oversaw the icebreaking one-year wonder that was Andy Murray’s championship-winning coaching stint, then hired former Minnesota Gopher Tom Ward to replace Murray as the top Midget team’s head coach.

Ward, who majored in education at Minnesota, won eight titles in 17 seasons and took on an extra assignment as SSM’s new director of hockey when Parise relinquished the post in 2005. Ward relayed that role to Stafford this past summer upon accepting an assistant coaching job with the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres.

All the while, to ensure no one looked back in the new millennium, administrators conceived and carried out the plan to make the puck the mere bottom layer of a royal wedding-worthy, nine-flavored confection.

Making sense from scratch

SSM’s use of extracurricular activities as a hook for hungry minds was not met without its share of skeptics and cynics. Brian Libby, who retired last spring after teaching history for 38 years, was a leading internal example of that group.

At the outset of the new century, Libby went so far as to pen a satirical novel, And Gladly Teach, loosely adapting the real-life ’80s-to-’90s storyline. The third chapter’s title: “Puck is a Four-letter Word.” In it, the fictitious St. Lawrence Academy tabs a washed-up journeyman who “now reveled in grandiose dreams of a hockey empire: not just one team but half a dozen” as both a coach and admissions officer.

“He admitted only hockey players,” Libby’s narrator notes of St. Lawrence savior Lance Vance. “The call went out: if you can play hockey, SLA is the place for you.” Vance is subsequently described as a sports management savant “who could barely read and write” and whose prized recruits will not have much to write home about, academically speaking, when they arrive.

By 2004, with SSM’s real-life blueprint for the second ice facility and two adjacent soccer pitches in place, Libby was participating in a faculty meeting to address the vision for pluralizing the Centers of Excellence. Stafford, who has also taught several English courses, recalls sitting in on that meeting himself.

As the teacher-coach recalled, Libby argued, “So…we’re trusting the future of the school to programs that don’t exist, in facilities that haven’t been built, run by people who have not been hired?”

“And the answer was ‘Yes,’” Stafford told Pucks and Rec. “The Center of Excellence model, growing out of the hockey template, made sense, and I think the people they hired to run the centers, specifically Diana Ronayne and Tom Hickey (in figure skating), as well as Tim Carter (soccer), really breathed life into the program. The same is true for Maren LaLiberty in bioscience and in Mike Boone in engineering.

“It’s as much about the passion, character and competence of the people as the creation of the programs. This certainly includes J.P. Parise and Tom Ward.”

‘…build on tradition’

Stoneman rattled off multiple ways in which other COE departments plan or hope to add new elements in the near future. In LaLiberty’s bioscience lab, he said, “We will be adding a cancer research center component with a full-time cancer research PhD on staff.”

Soccer is still working on its bid for its first national title. But in the past year, it formally allied with Minnesota United FC, a former North American League franchise now in its inaugural Major League season. In addition, it has already produced a deluge of Division I talent, plus MLS mainstay Teal Bunbury and 2012 Canadian Olympian Chelsea Stewart.

At the ice houses, which now include a smaller studio rink for extra informal practice, an expansion figure skating team is in the works.

Meanwhile, the cohabitating hockey program has recently dropped its second-tier Bantam team, leaving seven squads in total. But with 142 individuals in 2016-17, the puck population still comprises nearly 30 percent of the student body.

When Blues color commentator Kelly Chase spoke to a prior incarnation of that body in 2007, he touched on a few top NHL pugilists, an area of expertise for the former on-ice ruffian. Through hand gestures, he explained that such figures were “done growing,” height-wise, but not finished building their brawn and power.

For Stafford, the SSM hockey program is kind of like that as it rounds out the first quarter-century of its modern form. While the school’s new-wave trendsetter is done growing its participation figures, it will not be a complacent king on his watch.

“Hockey remains the highest profile sport at SSM,” Stafford insists, “and it’s important to, as Coach Ward said it, build on tradition rather than rest on tradition. With the profile we have, new programs are copying us, even call themselves ‘the Shattuck of…’

“We need to stay ahead in terms of players we accept, programs we run and facilities we offer. We are constantly working at that.”

This week marks the school’s next chance to reap rewards from that endless endeavor. The five Nationals-eligible teams will look to tie, if not top, last year’s unprecedented collection of four championships in a single season. Any banner will add to the all-time collection of 23 and secure 13 consecutive years of at least one SSM representative conquering its age and gender group.

All the while, some stick-wielding Sabres have made headlines by crossing into the school’s academic stratosphere. Hockey teammates Maddie Mills and Brette Pettet will both begin their tenures as Division I student-athletes next season, and Pettet is a prospect in Team Canada’s national program. But until June, they are enrolled in the SSM engineering program, where they have been designing a prosthetic arm for a local 14-year-old since last year.

“It is an impressive undertaking by high school students,” Stafford offered.

Granted, Mills and Pettet will not garner the same glamour through engineering as they might if they brush their long-term ceilings at the rink. That is unless the recent GE commercials spotlighting the late Millie Dresselhaus turn out prophetic.

But in the compacted college-imitation confines of their adopted Faribault home, they savor no shortage of symbiotic support.

“It is always beneficial to get to know people outside your familiar group of friends,” said LaLiberty. “Recognizing and acknowledging that other people hold different beliefs, goals and ambitions is the first step toward breaking down stereotypes.”

Stereotypes along the lines of the clueless, careless jock who literally and figuratively skates through St. Lawrence Academy? Pointing to Mills and Pettet — two of his own players — as an example, Stafford thinks so.

“The reality is that most kids who come here are not going to make a living at the passion they pursue here,” he said. “But chances are they will find something in one of their modules to spur them in a direction they never knew about, allowing the basic principle of intrinsic motivation to steer them.

“I’ve always believed that the lessons one learns in sport translate to what they do in other areas, and I really believe that is put into practice here.”