How soccer, track in Texas influenced hockey in North Dakota

(Photo courtesy of University of Mary Athletics)

Daniel Huntley may have created a monster at the University of Mary. So many fans packed the Schwan Cadillac Arena for a first glimpse at the new hockey program in action that the gatekeepers had to start turning would-be spectators away. 

On Sept. 15, exactly one year after announcing that they would add a hockey program, the Marauders hosted their first home game against North Dakota State. With an 8-0 victory, the first impression said a long road to establishing a hockey program was worth it.

“It certainly was a storybook ending,” Huntley told Pucks and Recreation. 

The end of the beginning, he hopes.

Huntley, who doubles as Mary’s associate athletic director, certainly achieved a remarkable feat in getting a hockey program ready in one year. More notably, when he arrived, the Marauders did not even have a club team.

However, he has overcome such challenges before.

Before arriving on the Benedictine Bismarck campus, Huntley logged extensive experience in athletic administration. Among his feats, he oversaw various colleges’ establishing teams in other sports.

That John Chapman-like journey began at Northland College in northern Wisconsin, where he worked from 2000 to 2005.

“A cross-country program was already in place,” he said, “but unfortunately the head coach quit. I was already the hockey coach, but I wanted the cross-country programs to continue. I went to the athletic director and said I would be able to coach cross-country.

“Even though I did not have much experience coaching this particular sport, I believe you can coach if you know how to manage.”

After two years in this role, Huntley handed the reins to his assistant coach. But after preserving this program, his journey was just getting started. In 2005, Huntley moved to the University of Texas-Brownsville, one of the oldest community colleges in the state.

In a three-year stay as the athletic director, his first crack at the top of an athletic department, Huntley navigated other challenges in establishing a new soccer program.

“As soon as I got down there, I knew the community liked soccer,” he reflected. “Brownsville was good at the high-school level, and I looked at adding men’s and women’s soccer.”

Huntley recognized the value of embracing the local community and learned other important lessons at Brownsville as well.

“There were a few important elements contributing to Brownsville’s success,” he said. “Establishing a solid scholarship program and taking the time to find the right guys to coach the team is so valuable. 

“If people see your program is not successful, they won’t go. You have to be diligent in your coaching a player search and find the right people at the right time.”

In 2015, Brownsville merged with the University of Texas-Pan American to form the University of Texas a Rio Grande Valley, but Huntley’s impact remains palpable. Both of its soccer programs continue to compete in the Western Valley Conference.

As for Huntley, he stayed in the state and expanded his resume at Concordia University. Once again, he got a sport going from scratch.

“We sought to establish men’s and women’s track,” he said. “The coach I had there was dedicated and focused on providing student-athletes the opportunity to grow and get better. We had volunteer coaches and former University of Texas coaches. One of these even participated in the Olympics.”

After four years as the athletic director at Marshalltown Community College in Iowa, Huntley arrived at Mary. Pursuing a hockey program there signified a return to his roots, both athletic and regional. He had started his own career in 1990 with one season at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn.

But as with Brownsville’s pitch and Concordia’s track, getting the Marauders on the ice was an ambitious endeavor.

“Our jerseys showed up two days before our first game,” noted Huntley. “Our locker room has also taken some extra time in getting completed. But fortunately, these players are resilient.”

Speaking of players, the Marauders are full of homegrown talent, with 16 out of 20 players hailing from North Dakota. Starting goalie Aaron Nelson stands out as both a Bismarck native and a transfer from Minnesota State’s Division I powerhouse.

“We are a club team, but we aren’t treating it that way,” said Huntley. “The team plays 47 games this year, as opposed to the ACHA, which plays only 24. We take one day off, and it is those types of things that make us stand out.

“We are playing in parts of the United States that you would not expect, like the Florida Gulf Coast. Our players will be challenged with unique experiences, and we care about creating a good environment for them.”

Huntley’s avid commitment to developing the hockey program envelops all aspects of the team, from recruitment and funding to scheduling and practicing.

“We are a fully funded hockey program,” said Huntley. “While having a good strength of schedule is important, perhaps the most important aspect of creating a program like this one is having a vision and plan. Taking time to make sure it is well thought-out is so important. We don’t want to do things halfway. We want to make sure our program is successful.”

Huntley’s and the team’s efforts are certainly paying off. Not only did the team sweep ND State on their opening weekend, but followed up by sweeping the University of North Dakota club team this past weekend.

A 4-0 start is impressive, but Huntley knows the team still has a long season to go.

“We play all seven club teams in North Dakota this year,” he said. “We hope we will have a winning record against them and against teams we play in Division II. Ultimately, we want to be ranked No. 1 out west in Division II ACHA rankings.”

Huntley even hopes to find some rivals in this ambitious schedule. But per his philosophy, they will have to wait for a setback.

“I like to think that a rivalry doesn’t start until someone beats you,” he said. “It could be Minot State or Boise State, you don’t know.

“In the end, we want to be a success and provide a strong, competitive environment for our players. We won’t be afraid this year.”

- John Morton

Teaching moments abound for journeywoman goalie Kelsey Neumann

Kelsey Neumann teaches English, and previously learned some Russian and goaltending from an expert. Now she hopes her underdog career path will force her to master French. (Photo credit: Shanna Martin-Book/CWHL)

Kelsey Neumann knows all about playing backup and paying one’s dues.

The Les Canadiennes de Montreal draftee played one period of intercollegiate Division I hockey. On Groundhog Day 2010, her Clarkson Golden Knights made a simple drive down the road to St. Lawrence. There she gave junior goaltender Lauren Dahm her only night off of the year, stopping 22 shots in a 4-1 loss.

After transferring to Division III’s SUNY-Plattsburgh, she mustered 60 minutes and 54 seconds over three regular-season appearances in 2011-12. Her name never showed up on any other Cardinals stat sheet.

Time for the educator in the making to swap out the pads for a pad and pencil? No, not completely and not for good.

In 2016-17, as a walk-on rookie with the NWHL’s Buffalo Beauts, Neumann logged two periods in as many exhibition games. Team USA veteran Brianne McLaughlin, the eventual playoff MVP, was the clear go-to goalie for the Isobel Cup champions.

This past winter, she finally saw action against a fellow NWHL club. But her shift lasted 32 seconds in a 4-1 win over Connecticut. Naturally, the credit for the victory went to all-star Amanda Leveille, as did the rest of the campaign’s crease time.

But in between, Neumann stood out as the Beauts’ first recipient of the NWHL Foundation Award. Since 2016-17, the league has singled out one player from each team for “actively applying the core values of hockey to her community as well as growing the game and improving hockey culture.”

Taking Somali, Congolese and Eritrean immigrants on their first excursion to an ice rink is one way of doing that. This summer, Neumann did so as a way of combining her game with her sunlight vocation as an English as a second language (ESL) teacher.

Now on the cusp of attaining her teaching certificate, Neumann has honed her pedagogy through the Buffalo-based Journey’s End program. The opportunity presented itself when one full-time ESL instructor took maternity leave. Upon the predecessor’s return, she and Neumann briefly rotated before the old incumbent moved to another department.

Since then, Neumann has built a team of her own with her teenage and twentysomething Anglophone apprentices.

Journey’s End Refugee Services was founded in 1979 when a slew of Cambodians settled into the Buffalo area after the Khmer Rouge crisis. Today the organization caters to those fleeing more than a dozen troubled nations with resettlement, education and job-training.

Teaching ESL at the ground level, Neumann sees the skills break out in every fashion. Sending a student to the program’s second rung is the culmination of a given relationship.

“Their reading ability is about Pre-K to end-of-first-grade reading level,” she told Pucks and Recreation. “Whenever I get to see them improve on paper, that’s great. But I may have some students who don’t have the ability to read the test.”

That is when they show what they have absorbed through conversation instead. And it’s not always restricted to flavorless fundamentals.

Following a year-round itinerary, Neumann’s class will at times have a student absent for a week-plus at a time. But on one pupil’s return from a breather, the craving to delve back in was palpable.

“She came into the classroom the other day so excited and so happy, saying ‘I missed all of you!’”

With assistance from an intern, Neumann helped another learner nail the phonetic difference between B and P. The achievement elicited a round of high-fives. It was one testament to the teacher’s goal of creating “as fun and great an atmosphere as possible.”

“Yes, we are a school,” she said. “But we try to get them out of school, field trip-wise, and that kind of stuff.”

So at the end of June, when the NHL’s Sabres ran their annual prospect camp at HarborCenter, Neumann naturally filled an off day with an optional trip to her other workplace.

“A handful of (students) met us,” she said. And there, next to the only NHL arena where two national anthems precede all games, a cornucopia of cultures converged.

Athletic dream chasers from around North America plus the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia and Sweden constituted the attraction. Outright novice viewers finding relief from the strife of their native lands in Africa looked on.

As the master of the sport in the stands watched her fellow spectators, she could “see their excitement grow.”

Climbing north?

The prospect of playing for Les Canadiennes spells Neumann’s first chance to uproot to another country. That fact is a tad surprising given how much she has darted around the Lower 48 through her first 27 years.

If you know her background and aspirations, but not her phone number, you could anticipate any one of 10 area codes on your screen after scheduling a call. Even then, you just might see an 11th code when she rings.

Neumann was born in Southern California, but admits she moved too early to remember living there. She subsequently lived in Texas and North Carolina. Her father, Tracy, is still based in the latter as chair of a pastoral council.

For the better part of Neumann’s early upbringing, her mother, Cindi, homeschooled her and her older brother, Justus. But the siblings has plenty of chances to learn outside their walls and outside their native tongue.

“My brother has an ear for language,” she said.

Neumann would scoop up some American Sign Language and Italian. But following her brother’s precedent, she established a lofty connection to Russian.

After taking lessons at Justus’ request to Cindi, the two younger Neumanns frequented Vladislav Tretiak’s goaltending camp in Minnesota. From the ages of eight to 14, Kelsey honed her craft under the Soviet stopper’s tutelage.

As a bonus, “every once in a while, we could have a short conversation in Russian with him.”

After her last go-round with Tretiak, Neumann moved to Wisconsin. She spent one season on the predominantly male 2005-06 Madison Capitols bantam team, opposite Amanda Kessel.

From there, she completed high school over three years at the North American Hockey Academy in Vermont. That was the most recent time she held a starting job in net, let alone put sparkling stats on paper. She left the academy with 54 shutouts, a .930 save percentage and a slender 1.16 goals-against average.

NAHA was also where she established her scholarly aptitude as an honors student. For a time that appeared to be her sole professional foundation. In what could have been her senior season at SUNY-Plattsburgh, she was not even on the roster.

By then, Neumann had graduated with a degree in communications, then went to Canisius College in Buffalo. There she worked as a teacher’s aid at local schools and obtained her master’s in childhood education and special education in 2015.

That autumn, Journey’s End came calling and the Beauts began play as one of the NWHL’s Founding Four franchises. By that point, Neumann was three-and-a-half years removed from her last competitive game. Moreover, with McLaughlin, Amanda Makela and Kimberley Sass, Buffalo had sturdy goaltending depth.

But the serendipitous local connection was too tempting to ignore. In June 2016, Neumann attended the Beauts’ free-agent camp. They would ink her to their taxi squad that fall.

Meantime, with her students, she suspects she was unwittingly living out Gordie Howe’s old saying about the two languages all hockey players speak. With Arabic, Congo, Somali and Swahili in the melting pot, she makes the effort to let the pupils play teacher on occasion.

But, she admits, “They might all not be appropriate words. They all laugh whenever I say it. I’m not sure.”

If Neumann has it her way in the crease, though, she will not seek any pardons for uttering French. She already has her Buffalo day boss’ blessing. Jacqueline Ashby, the coordinator of educational services at Journey’s End, is a Canadian expatriate and proficient Francophone.

“My boss knows about the (Montreal) camp, and she’s very excited,” Neumann said. “At the same time, I know it’s more of a tryout camp. So I’m hoping to be able to tell her a bit more.”

Out of the ‘bleu’

When she entered the CWHL Draft, Neumann was not banking on Montreal, since the club did not interview her. Yet in the eighth round on Aug. 28, Les Canadiennes picked her up.

The next step is mid-September’s training camp. It will be her turn to do what she watched with her students 11 weeks earlier.

And she hopes she will earn the need to nail the local lexicon. She wants a turn going international and reversing her role outright.

“Going into the draft, I didn’t even know I was anywhere near Montreal’s radar,” she said. “So I find it really fitting.”

Hockey-wise, not much is changing for Neumann besides the setting and the personnel. She is again facing a steep path to the goaltending stable.

Last year’s Les Canadiennes had the CWHL’s winningest netminder in Emerance Maschmeyer. Over the offseason, they obtained league veteran and two-time Canadian Olympian Genevieve Lacasse.

But, Neumann says, she has reiterated her own lessons of repetitive preparation for herself while teaching some of her own nation’s newcomers. Hers is the same fundamental approach to tutoring a language or becoming a full-time sentient Shooter Tutor (or better).

“It’s all about making sure you’ve done everything that you can to make sure the next day is going to go smoothly,” she said. “I want to know that I’m putting in the work.”

Because you never know when you might get the call. You might even know where it’s coming from, let alone what the party on the other end speaks.

Pro Beach Hockey, we barely knew ye

 

(Photo courtesy of Tomas Scholl)

For the moment, Pro Beach Hockey still has two years on the XFL’s lifespan.

In late January 2018, WWE’s fizzled football offshoot was greenlit to join entertainment’s rash of reboots. After lasting a single campaign on its first try in 2001, the XFL is slated for another go-round starting in 2020.

Notably, as ESPN’s Darren Rovell mentioned, this XFL “won’t rely on flashy cheerleaders and antics as its predecessor did.” That presumably means antics like three-point conversions and a faceoff-type “scramble” to determine possession.

Regardless, those headlines alone should have stirred the minds of those who remember PBH. Then there was this past summer, which marked the 20th anniversary of the radical roller hockey league’s inaugural season.

It mustered two more seasons, then failed to reemerge after the summer of 2000. As such, its time never overlapped with the XFL. In addition, it barely coincided with the rise of Survivor, the quintessential harbinger of this century’s reality-competition TV boom.

ESPN2’s PBH had elements of both of those entities. As a sport, it departed a host of norms in the rulebook. Just as the XFL would scrap coin tosses and point kicking, PBH introduced a two-point goal range and skateboard-like ramps on the end boards.

As a TV institution, PBH made like many other Southern California products. Like the first season of Survivor on CBS, it filled a summer void by “premiering” its “episodes” over June, July and August.

With that said, the bid for bragging rights was genuine. Throughout May, six teams engaged in a 10-game schedule, with the best advancing to a playoff. Compensation hinged on how a given team’s season ended. Afterwards, everyone outside of SoCal found out just how the season unfolded.

To fit an hourlong telecast window, portions of the taping were edited, not affecting the final outcome of the game. (Incidentally, one planned change for the new-look XFL is to aim for a two-hour maximum contest length.) But viewers still saw every second of every quarter (yes, quarter), timed at eight minutes apiece.

It needed to be quick in its rookie campaign, for that summer was anything but slow on sports television. For five weeks, the FIFA World Cup permeated almost every waking hour. Primetime programming was seemingly all about Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa jockeying for MLB’s single-season home-run record.

The ESPN family carried some or all of the baseball and soccer action. But with the flexibility of delayed broadcasts, PBH could reach its niche audience almost any time.

Perhaps you were a grade schooler trying to beat the heat at home. Maybe your family was taking some midday downtime or crashing for the night in a hotel room. Or you had a day off from your summer job.

If you were remotely into hockey, PBH was probably there to tempt you at any of those points.

With its format and implicit demographics, comparisons to the X-Games, which ESPN had launched in 1995, were inevitable as well. Commissioner Chris McSorley expressed as much to the Los Angeles Times before play commenced.

“We are creating a bridge between extreme skating and in-line hockey,” he told the paper. “All pro sports constantly review the structure of the rules of play and upgrade where needed to increase the entertainment value.”

Entertaining trimmings would be a must. With only one venue laid out at Huntington Beach, the six-team circuit was a high-profile house league. Except the house had no walls or roof.

As such, the action was a beachside attraction, hence the league’s moniker.

To this day, David McClane Enterprises, the eponymous company of PBH’s brain parent, acknowledges the short-lived experiment’s existence. On the its website, DME proclaims that it “felt the sport and the players could gain marketing credibility if new rules reflected what was happening on the streets and the game’s presentation combined the sex appeal of the beach with live music.”

For intermission entertainment, McLane channeled his old Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling show by enlisting the Slammin’ Dancers. Odds are that would not fly in a hypothetical late-2010s or early-2020s PBH reboot.

Given the caliber of play, the main attraction was dressed in loud uniforms representing gimmicky team names. While America Online was just breaking out, the PBH roll call read like the domain names on a primordial group chat.

In alphabetical order, you had the Dawg Pac, Gargoyles, Heavy Metal, Salsa, Web Warriors and Xpress. And because it was ESPN2 in the 1990s, those names were often typed in all lowercase.

But there was some delayed gratification. In April 2013, one PBH alumnus came within smelling distance of NHL action. Goaltender Rob Laurie took the Anaheim Ducks bench for precisely three minutes and 53 seconds, standing in while the real backup ran late after a short-notice summons from the team’s AHL partner in Virginia.

At the time, CBS’ Chris Peters took note of the then-42-year-old Laurie’s playing background. He had previously starred in Anaheim for the Bullfrogs of Roller Hockey International, a less flashy indoor league.

In addition, Peters wrote, “Laurie just so happened to play for one of the best-named teams in all of PBH, the Web Warriors. The Internet sure was neat and cool and mysterious in 1998, so why not name a team after it?”

Another ex-PBH stopper, the Salsa’s Brad Sholl, went on to run the L.A. Kings practice facility for a time. He also oversaw a Vegas Golden Knights youth program and raised a future goaltender in Tomas Sholl.

The younger Sholl, who turned four while PBH was premiering its first season, went on to Bowling Green. He turned pro last autumn, and has played for two teams apiece in the SPHL and ECHL. In between, in an interview with Pucks and Recreation’s John Morton, he credited California’s roller hockey craze for fostering his career on ice.

That is far from enough to make a remote revival realistic. But it is enough to make sense out of PBH’s presence on the archives of McLane’s website.

Given its essential equipment, which has no resurgence of interest in sight, PBH is a plain relic of its era. Yet some products of that era symbolize the worth of the fleeting one-hour game broadcasts, three-month TV seasons and three-year lifespan. McLane can also take a morsel of pride in formulating an early, unique kind of sports/entertainment/reality competition series.