Quinn Hughes has a future on both sides of the contract table

If and when playing does not pan out, working in the front office of a professional sports team is a dream for fans around the world. Quinn Hughes is setting himself up to live out the latter after he is done fulfilling the former. 

The Michigan freshman has emerged as one of the premier defensive prospects for this year’s NHL Draft. Adam Herman of The Sporting News sees him ending a dry spell of genuine “superstar” talent among American-born blueliners.

His presence with the puck on the blue line earned him a spot on Team USA’s World Junior roster, and has NHL scouts excited about his potential.

In the meantime, Hughes is getting used to life on campus, where he is majoring in sports management. He described the field as being in a team’s management, or the business side of sports. It chiefly entails dealing with players and forming contracts.

This is something that many people want to do, but most don’t know how to get there. For Hughes, he can follow in the footsteps of his father.

“My dad worked for the (Toronto Maple) Leafs for 10 years,” he said. “He worked as a coach and in management, and it piqued my interest.”

Hughes’ father was the Boston Bruins assistant coach from 2001 to 2003, then worked behind an AHL bench in Manchester, N.H., for three years. He returned to the NHL in 2006 as Toronto’s director of player development. Growing up watching his father and being interested in his job is what influenced Hughes to pursue sports management.

Michigan is one of the most well-known schools in the country. With many different professional development clubs on campus, there are plenty of opportunities to make connections in the industry. Hughes has not joined one yet, but is not ruling it out further down the line.

“It’s only my first semester, so I haven’t had time to really get used to things at Michigan,” he said. “As I get older, it’s something I’ll look at.”

The sports management program at Michigan is well known, and provides a great opportunity for Hughes to learn, even if that wasn’t the reason he chose Ann Arbor.

“It didn’t really influence the decision, but it got me excited to get there,” he said. “After I committed, I found out about that.”

Going west of Lake Ontario was a somewhat unlikely twist in Hughes’ career path. He had been born in Orlando when his father was an assistant coach for the IHL’s Solar Bears.

Subsequently growing up in New England, then Toronto, Hughes was originally more of a Boston College fan than anything else. His cousin, Teddy Doherty, was a captain there in 2015-16. Both of his parents played at a current Hockey East school (Jim at Providence, Ellen at New Hampshire).

But he committed to the Wolverines because they were simply one of the first programs to recruit him.

With such a big alumni base, with many in the sports-management field, Hughes can rest assured in the connections he will have when he begins his post-playing career.

“It’s very comforting to know that there are Michigan people who want to take care of other Michigan people,” Hughes said.

Sports management is a common major among Michigan’s hockey players. With many teammates taking similar classes before him, Hughes feels that he has support in his schoolwork.

“A good chunk of the team is in sports management or training,” he said. “Coming in as a freshman, I can ask what teachers to take, what did you do for that project and just be more prepared. They’re a good resource to have.”

Most people don’t think about how NHL teams care about a collegiate player’s off-ice studies. But Hughes understands the importance of getting good grades to give teams the right impression.

“While I think they’re more interested in hockey, there are so many players,” he said. “So if someone isn’t doing well (academically), and another person is, they’ll take the good student.”

Hughes’ studies mean that he will not be passed up in the draft over his grades. But one day, once his playing career is over, a job in the front office working with contracts would be a welcome reversal of roles.

- Zach Green

For Eric Lindquist, the ice is right with Worcester Railers HC

Photo by Rich LeBlanc

Eric Lindquist likes to be a full-fledged human on the job. He is not the mere eyes and ears of the Worcester Railers HC. And he will certainly not settle for the limitations of being a disembodied voice from above.

No, the Massachusetts- and California-seasoned sportscaster must move about his workspace, taking his audience with him. Families on hand and in the Railers network lean on him as a pivotal infotainer.

“There are 20 sets of parents listening to their sons play,” he told Pucks and Recreation. “It’s a long season, and calling X’s and O’s game in and game out can get a little tiresome and stale.”

So he animates the real-time chronicles the easy way — by living the game-night experience himself. During media timeouts at the DCU Center, while the ice-level laborers slug down sports drinks, he sneaks slurps of small talk in the stands.

At intermission, he savors longer helpings of the same while stretching his legs on the concourse. When the Railers score, he can and will reach out for high-fives with perfect strangers.

Sometimes, before any of that, he dons another metaphorical hat while guests are asked to doff their lids. He ventures from his perch within the seating bowl and enters the spotlight to perform the national anthem.

It is a welcome reversion for a man who prefers making his money and memories in an interactive manner. As the adage goes, caring means sharing. Depending on the setting and situation, Lindquist cares with creativity. He shares his experience and enthusiasm where appropriate — home — and divvies the details like a tourism guru on the road.

“I’m a fan, bottom line,” he said. “I want to be able to share what a hot dog tastes like in a visiting arena. What it’s like in the press box. What the fans are like. Where to get lunch in a certain city.

“I might not be the smoothest when it comes to play-by-play, but I think people recognize my energy.”

His five employers in his minor-league broadcasting career should expect nothing less. After all, Lindquist has obtained the most pizzazz on his resume by competing on game shows defined by contagious energy.

As a young teen, Lindquist fulfilled a dream by appearing on Wheel of Fortune, where he won a whopping $60,000. Later, while working at a Los Angeles sports agency, he won The Price Is Right’s Showcase Showdown. In all, his various stints in Southern California yielded 11 onstage game- or reality-show appearances.

“That’s generally the first thing anybody wants to talk about,” he said of subsequent sportscasting job interviews. “It’s kind of helped me in a strange way to be able to do what I’m doing.”

He could easily say the reverse as well. A North Andover, Mass., native who got his start as a student-broadcaster at Northeastern University, Lindquist calls a sport that requires swiveling heads and open-ended expectation. Anything can take a twist before or during game time (or show time). Accordingly, anyone’s agenda for the day can be altered on the fly.

Lindquist’s initial post-college dabbling in L.A. coincided with the birth and boom of reality TV. With his Showcase Showdown victory, he had cemented his name on the scene at and around CBS Television City. He was part of the pipeline that game-show and reality-show agents go picking at in a pinch.

“Like any other business, everyone sort of knows everyone,” Lindquist explained.

Odds are Lindquist’s affinity for sports made his name jump to precipitate one of his stranger improvisational experiences. While his penchant for pucks has defined his career, he admits he knows little about ball games. (Although he later did broadcast Lowell Spinners baseball for a time.)

Yet one morning, a representative from a dating show called to inquire about serving as a stand-in.

“‘But you have to pretend you know how to play tennis,’” Lindquist remembers being told. “I don’t think I picked up a racket once in my life,” he added with a chuckle.

Nonetheless, he got to the studio, got into uniform and got into character.

And when he was not letting cameras and makeup fall on him, Lindquist granted others a flicker of fame. When his tenure in sports agency “didn’t work out,” he tried working as a casting director for Fox reality programs.

The itch for ice, however, eventually resurged. When the AHL’s Lowell Lock Monsters dangled his first chance to return to the Bay State and broadcasting, Lindquist bit.

He has since made two more end-to-end moves each way. Before the Railers, he called the ECHL’s Long Beach Ice Dogs (2006-07) and AHL’s Worcester Sharks (2007-15) and San Jose Barracuda (2015-17).

The one season in Long Beach coincided with Bob Barker’s 35th and final year of hosting The Price Is Right. The coincidence made for a rare and timely joining of Lindquist’s passions.

As a team-building exercise, he led a 45-minute journey back to his old glorious haunts at CBS Television City. Leading scorer Ash Goldie even answered the coveted “Come on down!” call, though he did not advance beyond the podium.

Back out east, Lindquist occasionally experiments with game-show-inspired activities to keep players loose or humanize them before the fans. He has variously drawn inspiration from the defunct Three’s A Crowd and the time-honored Family Feud.

Of the latter, he recounted, “That didn’t work too well. Guys were cheating.”

Otherwise, in the past 14 years, he has at least put his formal game-show involvement on hold. With that said, he is always open to an eventual stint on Big Brother, Survivor or The Amazing Race.

For now, he expectedly watches from the living room with more-informed-than-average eyes. Just don’t expect him to revisit the grounds he has already covered.

Since Barker retired, Lindquist has eschewed The Price Is Right. When reached by Pucks and Rec, he hinted at giving Wheel the same treatment when Pat Sajak and Vanna White pass their torch. He fears the flavor of the shows may take a turn for the ’80s Coca-Cola formula after that much upheaval.

“I kind of like the old-school mentality,” he said, adding that he has a similar view of his beloved sport.

“I’ve always been a big fan of the hockey fight and the physical aspect of the sport. Not tradition, but things in the way that I enjoyed it or how I remember it.

“I’m not saying I don’t want change, but I grew up in the mid-’90s with Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Lyndon Byers, Chris Nilan. That’s what got me into hockey. I want to get back to how I grew up with it.”

As it happens, per hockeyfights.com, the Railers have engaged in 28 fisticuffs through their first 39 games. This past weekend, leading pugilist Yanick Turcotte engaged Wheeling counterpart Jeremy Beirnes twice in as many days.

Conversely, at that same mark in their schedule last season, the Barracuda had logged 18 fights. In 2015-16, San Jose recorded 22 scraps in its first 39 outings.

The ECHL yields generally chippier action than the league immediately above it. That aspect has ample company in befitting Lindquist’s move back to Worcester this past summer.

Railers HC foretold its advent in 2016, one year after the San Jose Sharks moved their AHL affiliate from Worcester to their own building. Effective a year later, Worcester’s first Double-A hockey franchise followed a self-proclaimed “cue from the European sporting club model.”

“Worcester Railers HC is introducing a new way to be part of professional hockey in North America,” says the de facto mission statement. It has already followed through by engraving the names of season-ticket holders on the backs of their respective seats. It has also spread its own name around the neighborhood without hesitation.

One block up the street from the DCU Center sits the Railers Tavern. A half-mile in the other direction will take you to the Fidelity Bank Worcester Ice Center. Opened one month before the club’s debut, the two-sheet facility also houses a restaurant, a café and a training center.

Two Division III college programs, two youth programs and Worcester Academy have all started calling the Ice Center home. There remains the question of whether the Division I Holy Cross men’s team will ultimately hop over. The added ice also allows Railers personnel to introduce beginners to the pleasures of leisure skating.

“We do have that sense that we want everyone to be a part of what’s going on,” Lindquist said.

As an outspoken, outgoing middle man between the team and fan base, Linquist suits that system. He jumped at the chance to return to Worcester after two fish-half-out-of-water campaigns with the Barracuda.

With the Railers, the 12,239-seat DCU Center wedges its radio booth between its seating bowls. As an NHL facility indefinitely sheltering the organization’s child club, San Jose isolated Linquist above its entire 17,562-spectator space.

But naturally, being a minor-league club, it never filled that cavernous coliseum. The largest audience the Barracuda drew in Lindquist’s lonely SAP Center tenure was 7,664.

“I was sitting all the way up in the ceiling, and I didn’t feel as close to the fans, the players and the action,” he recalled. “I wasn’t in my comfort zone.”

And so that Bay Area fling may be the 38-year-old’s only career stop in a major-league mansion. His return to the Double-A league after a decade in Triple-A is a step down in technical terms only.

Linqduist’s eye-catching game-show track record speaks to his poise before substantial, major-level audiences. But his success formula there of “don’t take it too seriously and don’t take yourself too seriously” also reaffirms his mutual fit with Railers HC and its “eccentric” European marketing model.

“I enjoy doing it at the ECHL level. I’ve have more fun this year,” he said. “Sometimes you kind of have more freedom in minor-league sports to have more personality.”