Halli Krzyzaniak preserving a program’s all-round picture

(Photo courtesy of UND Media Relations)

Halli Krzyzaniak only needed to stand for her first Canadian national team portrait in 2014 to tell an as-yet-unfamiliar world what she was — and still is — all about. Her choice to keep on her eyewear for that particular shoot set her apart from her teammates, fashion-wise. Three years later, it retroactively symbolizes her status in the program, namely as a graduated, yet unfinished student.

Two months into her sophomore year at the University of North Dakota, and barely eight months after her country corralled its fourth straight Olympic gold medal, Krzyzaniak cracked Canada’s roster at the 2014 Four Nations Cup. This meant missing a weekend of intercollegiate action, plus a week of classes in Grand Forks.

But she did not ditch her best intellectual persona in the process. Trade the red and black for blue and red, and the maple leaf for an “S”, and one would think Kara Danvers neglected to complete her transformation out of haste. 

For the customary stickblade-in-the-camera and stick-behind-the-shoulders poses, Krzyzaniak proudly sported Hockey Canada’s 100th anniversary patch on her No. 25 jersey. Above all of the visible gear, she sported a pair of rectangular glasses with frames almost as bold and black as the shoulder caps on her jersey. 

The hockey equipment signaled that Krzyzaniak has the athletic potential of Meghan Mikkelson. The spectacles signified that she, both superficially and within, has the head of Alex Dunphy.

Six semesters and eight IIHF events later, she does not quite have the superstar ceiling of Hayley Wickenheiser. But she does bear the same basic, all-round aspirations as the five-time Olympic puckster who is now embarking on medical school after hanging up her skates earlier this year.

Krzyzaniak is chasing her first Olympic roster spot on the heels of obtaining the WCHA’s postgraduate scholarship. The scholarship entails a $7,500 grant toward continuing education, which Krzyzaniak plans to pursue en route to a career in orthopedics.

For her alma mater, which saw its final shift of NCAA women’s hockey action for the foreseeable future March 4, the scholarship makes for one last bragging-rights bow.

“Receiving this scholarship from the WCHA definitely helps my pride in coming from the WCHA and playing in such a great league against some of the best players in the world,” she said in a phone interview with Pucks and Recreation.

Krzyzaniak is far from the last bastion of the North Dakota women’s hockey program, which the university administration euthanized in late March. All players with remaining collegiate eligibility are free to disperse to other programs. At least nine have already transferred to another NCAA Division I school, while two others are going to the Canadian Interuniversity system.

Among the alumnae, twin sisters Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux are gunning for their third go-round with the U.S. Olympic team. Michelle Karvinen and Susanna Tapani could both represent Team Finland next February, as could undergraduates Anna Kilponen, Emma Nuutinen and Vilma Tanskanen. Amy Menke is an NWHL prospect for the New York Riveters.

But barring an eventual replenishment, Krzyzaniak will be a part of the Fighting Hawks’ last graduating class. She will be a part of their last cluster of captains, having sported an “A” over her heart her junior and senior season.

And whenever she resumes her studies, she will be the last student-athlete in the program’s run to attend school with financial aid that she earned as a direct result of contributing to UND.

 “Especially with everything that did happen with the North Dakota program,” she said, “it’s really nice to know that I can still be a continuing part of the WCHA even after my graduation and coming out of our hockey program.”

Krzyzaniak came into the UND women’s hockey program when it was coming off its first two NCAA tournament appearances in 2012 and 2013. (Both runs ended in quarterfinal losses to league rival and national dynasty Minnesota.) She came in with three years of experience with the Canadian U-18 national team, plus an ornate background with Team Manitoba already to her credit.

Krzyzaniak entered the rigorous UND pre-health studies program with a desire to emulate her mother, Kelly, a family physician in their rural Manitoba hometown of Neepawa. The same way a conventional Canadian catches a craze through the tales of their ice-going idols, she acquired her additional ambitions through her mother’s stories of medical school and getting to know a community through an essential service.

“I guess I kind of grew up around her and just seeing what she did…the day-to-day happenings and knowing what she does and having so much pride in her occupation is mostly what’s drawn me towards that,” she said.

Though the Fighting Hawks never returned to the national bracket with Kryzaniak’s input, they finished .500 or better overall in each of her four seasons. As a sophomore and junior, her individual impact translated to a spot on the all-WCHA third team. In each of those two years, the conference also recognized her as a scholar-athlete and an all-academic honoree.

In 2016-17, Krzyzaniak was one of only four Division I women’s hockey players to make one of CoSIDA’s academic all-district scrolls. She was her sports only representative in District Six, which covers all of the women’s WCHA’s territory except Ohio State.

Theoretically, that made it easier for the UND athletic program’s veteran faculty representative, Dr. Sue Jeno, to nominate the university’s candidate for the league’s postgraduate scholarship, which she has done in 11 years on the job.

Four other hockey players (two women’s, two men’s) had previously won continuing financial assistance with Jeno’s good word. With Krzyzaniak’s selection, she gave Jeno and her team a third, plus a repeat following goaltender Shelby Amsley-Benzie’s honor in 2016.

And now, along with 2012 OSU alumna Natalie Spooner, she joins 10 other WCHA ambassadors — all of whom represent UND’s perennial on-ice superiors from Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth and Wisconsin — on Canada’s centralized roster. She does so as the only one with a selective league-issued academic scholarship waiting patiently on the backburner.

Head on a swivel

While working out with 27 other Olympic candidates in Fredericton, N.B., Krzyzaniak admitted her education will continue at a school to be named later. At present, she is tempted to return close to home by enrolling at the University of Manitoba. But the interim will be long enough for other enticements to emerge, and if there was ever a time that called for a gap year, the 2017-18 hockey season is it.

At the time of her debut with the national program’s big club, Krzyzaniak was one of 10 newbies joining the holdovers from the 2014 Sochi Games. In the wake of three straight silver-medal runs at the IIHF World Championship, her odds and desires for Pyeongchang have only emboldened.

But there are five cuts to come. At least two, maybe three of those will be among the nine centralized defenders Krzyzaniak stands with, including the Vancouver and Sochi veteran Mikkelson. 

As one of five blueliners without prior Olympic experience, she can ill afford an irrecoverable misstep in her protracted tryout. She cannot lose focus. With that said, if her retelling of the WCHA scholarship derby is any indication, she will have little trouble muzzling the scholastic hounds as necessary.

“I didn’t really think too much about it,” she said. “I was away at the World Championships at the time of the nomination, so for me it was kind of just an afterthought.”

Still, the same basic instinct that drew the syrup on her undergraduate sundae — multifold major in honors, biology and pre-health, 3.92 great-point average and all — can help her toward the big scoop she craves in her athletic dish.

Following a seven-week summer break, the Canadian women will reconvene in Calgary on Aug. 1, kicking off a six-month grind before the chosen 23 cross the Pacific. The broad timeline of the singular project resembles — if only vaguely — the senior thesis Krzyzaniak compiled over the last school year.

Per the program’s website, UND’s pre-health majors are expected to uphold following five pillars: “Complete any prerequisite coursework for the professional school or program of their choice as advised.” “Maintain a competitive cumulative GPA (3.0 minimum).” “Take the standardized entrance exam for their field of choice.” “Visit with the Health Sciences Advisor regularly.” “Visit with their major advisor regularly.”

One could liken all of those to, say, building and sustaining one’s Olympic candidacy through regular and visible involvement in the short-order Four Nations Cup and World Championship.

But after letting out an audible, contemplative, “Hmm,” Krzyzaniak singled out the colossal culmination as her defining stage in the pre-health program. Marathons of solitary research and one-on-one work with a professor would yield a page count in the triple digits on her thesis.

“Just having that self-discipline and time management and knowing that the due date wasn’t very close, but I still had to get this very large body of work done,” she said. “It really helped me to be disciplined enough to force myself work on it for a couple of hours every day make sure that I put aside enough time with my other coursework in order to finish the whole project.”

While her upcoming endeavor will not have the company of other commitments, but plenty of human company, it will consume Krzyzniak’s calendar in a comparable manner. In turn, she will again need to manufacture her own urgency in the opening month to prevent it from mounting on its own in the homestretch.

To put that another way, the willpower that fed the inner Alex Dunphy in the 2016-17 academic almanac must now go back to the Halli Krzyzaniak who made an impression at the Pursuit of Excellence Hockey Academy in Kamloops, B.C.

Prior to Krzyzaniak’s first Four Nations Cup, former POE coach Scott Spencer told Christine Ulmer of Hockey Canada’s website, “Halli’s work ethic is second to none. I’ve never seen someone as driven, determined and committed.”

But just as she balanced the Fighting Hawks and Team Canada with her course load, Krzyzaniak could still fetch a few breathers amidst the Olympic tryout. While she is in Alberta, she may take the opportunity to explore the University of Calgary, whose medical doctoral program has ranked among Canada’s top 10 by Maclean’s, the country’s premier college ranker.

As a 2016 draft choice of the NWHL’s Boston Pride, Krzyzaniak may also have long-term options below the 49th parallel. The Pride’s area code boasts three of U.S. News and World Report’s top 50 medical schools in Harvard (ranked No. 1), Boston University and Tufts.

“My main focus in hockey right now is training and competing to hopefully play in the Olympic Games,” Krzyzaniak insisted, before allowing, “That’s definitely something that I would look into, knowing that there are some really great medical schools out there. So if that was something that I would be able to work, so that I was able to play hockey and go to medical school at the same time, that’s something I would definitely look into.”

Plenty to ‘lean on’

Minus her mother, Krzyzaniak is not one to single out influences by name. The habitual team orientation that boosted her leadership credentials in the UND locker room also served to cut down the tales from the UND classrooms that ultimately yielded her scholarship.

“Really, all of the professors at UND were super great and super helpful,” she said. “Knowing the schedule that I had as a student-athlete, and then leaving fairly often for events with my national team, they were very supportive in helping me achieve the grades that I wanted to while missing so much time, and to be able to graduate within four years…I wouldn’t have been able to do it if they weren’t so helpful.”

The calls to give back some of that moral support have rang, if not early and often, then suddenly and harshly. On Nov. 17, 2014 — three weeks after Krzyzaniak traded her specs for her shield to skate in her first Four Nations Cup — North Dakota classmate and teammate Lisa Marvin sustained a multitude of gruesome injuries in a near-fatal auto wreck. 

As Pat Borzi of the New York Times articulated much later, “It would be three days before Marvin’s teammates washed the gasoline and blood out of her hair.” For months thereafter, Marvin lacked physical autonomy as she healed from a host of bone, ligament and nerve wounds.

But after missing the balance of her and Krzyzaniak’s sophomore season, then all of 2015-16, she returned to game shape and saw action in 24 contests this past year.

“With Lisa’s accident, it put a lot of things into perspective,” said Krzyzaniak, who in a future vocation may one day have a role to play in another athlete’s long journey back to game shape. “Most of us had never dealt with something of that magnitude before.

“So to see something like that happen firsthand and to be alongside Lisa for all of her stay in the hospital and then through her very long rehab process, it made us all be able to better see the big picture of life and to know that she was just so lucky to be alive after that.

“But, really, the experiences we were able to have as student-athletes and as teenagers and young adults, that’s just something that you can’t take for granted."

As though any of the Fighting Hawks needed to learn that lesson twice, they were literally taking the ice at Ralph Engelstad Arena for a postseason practice March 29 when the word leaked that their work would be for naught. Menke, the last team captain, subsequently wrote in The Players’ Tribune that she heard the news through classmate Gracen Hirschy, who had learned it via social media.

“It was very abrupt, there was no warning, there was really no indication that something like that was even a possibility,” said Krzyzaniak. “We were a very tight knit group, though, so we had one another to lean on.”

Eight days before posing with Hirschy, Marvin and Menke at their commencement ceremony — her wardrobe uniquely punctuated with an honors’ gold medal — Krzyzaniak had her own social-media missive on the matter. The university’s official Twitter account had quoted President Mark Kennedy as follows: “Our alumni love UND. We are looking to keep it that way.”

Krzyzaniak’s reply: “Really?? Are you sure??”

When she elaborated to Pucks and Rec, she first spoke like the House or Senate leader of an opposition party. Then she switched to a supporting tone for her former teammates who, while she aims to represent UND through a higher than higher education and participation in the five-ring festival, will round out their Division I eligibility on other campuses.

“The president of the university made it very clear that reinstating wasn’t going to happen without an absurdly large amount of money, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us,” she said.

“But it was more just leaning on one another and knowing that there are going to be some tough days, and that no matter where the girls end up, they always have our support to lean back on.”

Not that Krzyzaniak is dipping too broad a brush into the grudge canister. After all, the athletic department and everything it provided in her time put her in a position to become UND’s first representative on the Canadian women’s Olympic team.

However strong that springboard proves in the sporting world, she will have her league-sanctioned cushion to lean back on. Dr. Jeno and company put her on the path to the last academic scholarship anybody will derive directly from playing North Dakota women’s hockey.

“They were nice enough to nominate me for this award,” she said. “To actually be awarded the scholarship was kind of a surprise for me."

Nothing like a pleasant surprise to brighten the picture so soon after a darkening shock.

Life After Hockey: Shawn Wheeler ‘not so silent’ as an active, adopted Charlottean

As a player, Shawn Wheeler led Charlotte to its finest hockey hour of the last 40 years. As a bench boss, he broke the ECHL’s coaching color barrier. And long after his ice evaporated, he has built on new means of continuing a mutually pleasing relationship with the community.

Shawn Wheeler cites the so-called “Bangin Shrimp” as his go-to crowd-pleaser.

If you met him in his first profession, then lost all first-, second- and third-hand contact due to a Y2K bug that — darn your luck — bit you and only you, the nickname might evoke an intrepid undersized checking-liner. Someone who embodies Don Cherry’s favorite saying about canine body mass versus dimension of aggression to the point where Wheeler cannot help playing favorites.

In reality, the former ECHL winger and one-time head coach has transitioned to a career in sales, and the Bangin Shrimp refers to a decadent decapod dish. As such, it is in no danger of arousing the rest of the roster’s jealousy.

And so, when pressed as to the signature menu item at the Firewater Restaurant and Bar in Charlotte, Wheeler distinguished it. “Of course, I would say, all our items are GREAT!” he wrote in an email to Pucks and Recreation. Upon mentioning the Bangin Shrimp, he added, “If you’re ever in town, it’s a must-try.”

A former fan favorite — a title confirmed, if not reinforced, by animosity from opposing cities — in his own right with the Charlotte Checkers, Wheeler has stuck around town for 17 years and counting since his ties with the organization ended. Little beyond the work setting and everything that comes with it has changed in his professional life over that span.

He once wore the double-billed lid as a player-assistant coach before becoming the team’s bench boss in 1998. Through that role, he became the first African-American head coach in the league’s history.

At his peak as a player, Wheeler had a way of loosening the label “assistant” when he served as the legendary John Marks’ skating sidekick. Through his achievements on the ice, he was less of an assistant and more of a pilot for a franchise that raked in the Riley Cup in 1996. That was the city’s first hockey crown in 20 years, following a previous Checkers team’s 1976 triumph in the Southern League. No titles have come since.

He still wears multiple hats, working full-time in pharmaceutical sales while collaborating with Firewater co-owners Ahmad and Wasef Mohammad.

Technically speaking, in his words, he is the Mohammad brothers’ “silent partner, but I’m not so silent.”

To that point, the way he was reached last week, Wheeler still exudes a hustle, energy and counting-every-second mentality he once left on the ice in a prior millennium. He accepted and filled out a questionnaire over his smartphone when he had a moment free. The ensuing transcript brandished speed, fervor and natural force through its abundant exclamation points and amused acronyms.

Overtime ombudsmen

Janssen Pharmaceutical’s customers come first for Wheeler, as they have since 2001. He characterizes his moonlight and weekend duties at Firewater as “an investment role.”

But true to his word about “silent” being the not-so-operative word in “silent partner,” he will personally illustrate his investment upon request. Three years ago, when Lake Norman Currents profiled Firewater, Wheeler philosophized, “Service to me is a home feeling. It’s a welcome feeling. It shouldn’t be challenging to sit somewhere and ask for a meal and feel like somebody’s granting you a favor. It should feel like it’s 100 percent their pleasure that you’re there.

In that same interview, he concluded, “If you can give people a neighborhood feel and the customer service that everybody deserves, that’s going to be the key.”

He once used the same sort of adamancy about leaving nothing unturned to make a dose of ECHL history in the winter of 1995-96. Marks singled out a 3-2 triumph over the Roanoke Express from that year when, in 2008, nhl.com’s Brian Compton acknowledged his distinction as the league’s all-time winningest coach.

On that night, Wheeler singlehandedly filled a 2-0 pothole within the final three minutes of regulation. “I recall scoring to tie the game on a backhand shot,” he told Pucks and Rec. “I love saying (that was) my signature shot.”

The ensuing shootout went to a previously unsurpassed 21st round after Wheeler, among many others, failed the bust the knot when the opportunity presented itself. He temporarily rued his failure to beat goaltender Matt DelGuidice — a rare right-handed catcher and a brief teammate the year prior — and his inferred subsequent benching as the extra innings piled up.

But the more the others missed, the closer his second chance to finish what he started came, which it did in that 21st inning.

“Marksy didn’t even look at me, he just yelled, ‘Wheels your up.’ I recall going in and looking at the same low corner as it was wide open, but I think (DelGuidice) was baiting me. So instead of shooting, I held a bit longer and I faked the shot. He dropped, and I stuffed it under the crossbar.”

Comeback complete. History made.

“You would think, after reading this, that I think about moments like this often,” Wheeler said. “And each time I do, it gets better and better.”

Friends close, enemies closer

Frank Anzalone, who coached Roanoke from 1993 to 1998, was no stranger to torment at Wheeler’s hands by the time the latter found his eventual adulthood home. The trend started with their first full overlapping ECHL season when both men found themselves in Virginia.

Wheeler was 27 years of age, and coming off his first (and ultimately only) season spent predominantly at the Triple-A level with IHL Peoria. Now back in the premier Double-A circuit with the Hampton Roads Admirals, he had garnered his first gig as a player-assistant coach under John Brophy. He justified the appointment by translating his exemplary leadership to a career-high 74 points in only 47 games played.

And in a Dec. 17, 1993 home date with the Express, he was singled out for sparking a decisive offensive eruption. On that night, Hampton Roads utilized its timeout at the halfway mark of regulation with a 1-1 deadlock at hand. Minutes after the Admirals absorbed an impassioned earful from Brophy, Wheeler bustled to the Roanoke cage and took multiple stabs before burying a floodgate-opening goal.

Following the eventual 7-4 Hampton Roads victory and a three-point effort by Wheeler, Anzalone enviously told Mike Holtzclaw of Virginia’s Daily Press, “That damn Shawn Wheeler. If we had that kind of effort, we’d be in the middle of the pack instead of last place.”

That season also witnessed one of Wheeler’s more memorable helpings of rough stuff in a home date with his old friends from Greensboro. A four-minute, 28-second YouTube upload immortalizes a series of scraps sparked two seconds after the opening faceoff.

When the majority of the melee slithered to the right corner of the Greensboro Monarchs zone, Wheeler was among those who lost his jersey. Hardly a shock considering he led the Monarchs with 301 penalty minutes in 1991-92.

Likewise, in his first year with the Checkers, he dressed for all 68 games and logged 226 minutes in the sin bin. He was second among the team’s PIM leaders with 210 in 1995-96.

By that time, another entity new to the league in 1993-94, the North Charleston-based South Carolina Stingrays, had come to match Roanoke’s distaste for Wheeler’s impact. In most years, South Carolina and Roanoke were in the same division as the three teams that Wheeler variously represented.

In their run to the 1996 Riley Cup, the Checkers dumped the Express to set a second-round date with the Stingrays. Wheeler’s personal highlight of the series had him polishing a play that took advantage of a South Carolina defensive blunder.

“We were losing, and I was forechecking their D-man, who I think was Scott Boston,” he recalled. “I went to chase him to the right of the net, and he skated behind and as he came around the opposite side, he fired the puck up the middle as they flew the zone. But Phil Berger was posted in the middle and batted the puck down fired a pass to me at the right side of net for a wide-open goal.

“Not sure why Boston fired it up the middle, when he could have skated it out of the zone. But it was a series-changer for which, it typical Berger fashion, he said if I would have missed he would have two-handed me."

Even the North Charleston media stoked the feuding flames, using Wheeler as the log in one memorable instance.

On the eve of a game at the North Charleston Coliseum, Wheeler kicked back in his room and tuned in to a local newscast. Going in, his plan was to simply soak in the sports bulletins for pleasure before drifting to rest for the action ahead.

But in an age before the Internet made the listicle a media staple, he perked up as the station sports director channeled an inner David Letterman with “Ten Reasons to HATE Shawn Wheeler.”

The following night, the Coliseum congregants greeted him with a classic surname singsong usually reserved for visiting goaltenders. Whee-ler, Whee-ler, Whee-ler, then the punctuation, “You suck!”

The recipient got a kick out of the acapella acrimony. “Man, it was loud, and they really hated me,” he marveled.

‘It was just time to call somewhere home’

Throughout Wheeler’s involvement, the now-nationwide ECHL was a predominantly Southern circuit, with a sprinkling of additional teams in Pennsylvania, Ohio and eventually Peoria, Ill.

As he came out of the Division III program at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, the then-fledgling middle-tier minor league was the best realistic recourse to launch a professional playing career.

Adjustments would be inevitable. Wheeler was born on the outskirts of the Bronx in Mount Vernon, N.Y. For two-plus centuries, Mount Vernon has logged a diverse slew of notable gifts to sports (e.g. Ralph Branca and Floyd Patterson), entertainment (Denzel Washington and Dick Clark) and literature (E.B. White). It was also the shooting location for Mean Joe Greene’s famous Coca-Cola ad when Wheeler was 13.

At age 18, Wheeler moved north and far west to Alberta to bolster his hockey career at the Junior A level. Two seasons there with the Hobbema Hawks yielded the four-year stay at Stevens Point, where he is still holds the single-season penalty-minute record.

Graduating in 1990, he met a new experience with a new decade, breaking into the pucks-for-pay realm while crossing the Mason-Dixon Line. He would be tasked with helping to sell the game to still-fairly unfamiliar audiences while regularly experiencing the continent’s historic epicenter of racial strife. While subjective offsides calls from the stands were not entirely new to him, crossing this line was all but sure to yield its share.

His first stop: North Carolina, where the Monarchs played at the Greensboro Coliseum, located three miles west of where the Greensboro Four staged their groundbreaking sit-in four months after the arena had opened in October 1959.

“Yes, things were extremely different,” he admits. “The South is a great place with a lot of history, but the racial aspect was at a different level, but please don’t think it wasn’t experienced in Canada or even Wisconsin. I’ll just leave it at that.”

With everything he brought to the rink, be it within or without his control, Wheeler was practically the P.K. Subban of his time and level. There was consistent rancor from Roanoke and South Carolina, but general endearment in the cities where he saturated each side of the scoresheet.

The last of those would instill the “neighborhood feel” he would one day strive to reciprocate via Firewater. And when Marks moved from Charlotte to the expansion Greenville Grrrowl in 1998, years of apprenticeship yielded a bigger nugget of ECHL history. Four years after the Atlanta Knights made John Paris, Jr., the IHL’s first head coach of African descent, another league achieved the same milestone in another Southern state’s largest city.

But as a testament to his long-established assimilation to the Checkers, Wheeler’s promotion had more of a formality vibe to it at the time.

“I don’t recall it being that big of a story compared to when I first signed as their player-coach,” he reflected. “Perhaps it was because I was already entrenched in the program and people were generally just happy I landed the job.

“I would say, it’s more talked about now, as I get requests to speak with youth groups or when someone recognizes my voice, and then it comes up.”

Wheeler was not merely entrenched in the Checkers. He was entrenched in Charlotte. But the test of that relationship soon landed before him in the form of severance paperwork.

After five winning campaigns from their inception onward under Marks, the 1998-99 Checkers were the first installment to finish below .500, albeit by only one game. The next season, on Jan. 11, 2000, a 7-3 home win over the Greensboro Generals — the Monarchs’ distant successor after the city’s AHL and NHL flings — improved the Checkers to a mediocre 14-18-3.

That would be Wheeler’s last hurrah in competitive hockey. The team sought a front-office shakeup for the second half of the schedule.

“It was a challenging two years behind the bench, but to make excuses is to fault others,” Wheeler said. “As a coach, you’re hired to be fired.”

Merely 33 at the time of his dismissal, Wheeler could have left Charlotte to stay in the game, either as a player, a coach or combination. But when no satisfactory opportunities stuck, he left the game in order to stay in Charlotte.

“It was just time to call somewhere home,” he said.

He would stay prominently on the local sports scene for another decade. Within three months of vacating his bench, he was hosting a weekday midday talk show, The Player’s Club, on WFNZ radio. By mid-February of 2009, when a Charlotte Observer blog ranked the city’s five best sports-talk specialists, one anonymous commenter cited Wheeler among the list’s glaring omissions.

That could help to explain the voice recognition and the “not so silent” inclinations.

Postgame ventures satisfy

In his first full year out of hockey and the first official year of the 21st century, Wheeler took his longstanding full-time job in pharmaceutical sales. But another key component of his past kept cropping up in Ahmad Mohammad, who first met Wheeler while working at Bentley’s restaurant, where Wheeler was a common patron in his playing days.

“We used to conduct speaker programs at Bentley’s and we began a friendship with him and his brother Wasef,” Wheeler explained. “They ventured on and I would run into them often. We then crossed paths again, while he was with Red Rocks and was in the process of opening a restaurant and bar close to my home, and we started talking about possibly going into business together.”

By the late autumn of 2012, under Wheeler and the Mohammad brothers’ direction, Firewater opened in Charlotte’s University City neighborhood.

In a pattern starkly reminiscent of the old Checkers’ fortunes, those enterprises have had their peaks and valleys. When Molly Reitter of Lake Norman Publications reviewed it in 2014, Firewater was on the verge of opening its third location. As of 2017, the original location is the only one under Wheeler and the Mohammads’ auspices.

Setbacks and searches for silver linings are nothing new to either partnering party. Ahmad Mohammad is an elder statesman in the locale and the industry, each of which he has been a part of for three-plus decades. As such, from Wheeler’s perspective, collaborating with him is not unlike aiding a John Brophy or a John Marks in their tutelage of a hockey team.

“Not only the leadership role, but more the failures or bumps in the road I experienced, helped me more,” he said.

As it is, if only by happenstance, the original Firewater represents both of the lives, eras and millennia Wheeler has spent in Charlotte. Mohammad’s fanaticism for football’s Carolina Panthers makes the bar section a hotspot for watching major sports telecasts (including, most recently, the NFL Draft). That allows for spots where people may be sporting athletic apparel and occasions where raw emotion is not unexpected.

Then there are other places in the building where business and formalwear are the norm. A private dining lounge hosts a multitude of gatherings that call for tablecloths, flowers, candles and less animation from the attention seekers and givers.

Another one of Firewater’s tamer sections is a “lake room” that lives up to its name through the view. The water in sight is warmer than, say, the ice at North Charleston Coliseum, and so are the hearts of the people looking down on it.

Even if there were sarcastic serenades in earshot, Wheeler’s turn to take and transform it has long passed. Likewise, the view of the North Carolina hockey landscape has evolved before his eyes from a unique perspective.

When Wheeler parted with the Checkers, the NHL’s Hurricanes were halfway through the first season at their new arena in Raleigh. They had spent the previous two at the Greensboro Coliseum, which forced the AHL’s Carolina Monarchs to cut their stay short.

By 2010, the Checkers brand got the same ECHL-to-AHL upgrade, as the Canes took the opportunity to move their top prospects closer to home. In turn, the current calendar decade has been the first in which both of the sport’s top two leagues have fielded a team in the state simultaneously.

Though he admits he does not frequent the current Checkers, Wheeler admires the way the local fan base has evolved.

“It has grown with the influx of Northerners who have relocated to the region,” he said. “Pool that with the old-timers who never left and former AHL Checkers who stayed and made Charlotte home, and it has given quality youth coaching and an excitement around the game.

“The Checkers moving to the AHL has helped tremendously, as there is the chance to watch future stars and/or reassignments of NHL players rehabbing.”

The transplanting Northerners and former players sticking around are two of Wheeler’s own demographics. But as the hockey gods would have it, one of the top figures in North Carolina’s icebreaking age could not garner similar gratification on the ice as the advocates have reaped off of it. Playing in the final stages of the pre-Hurricanes period, he logged 66 games in IHL and AHL call-ups.

Still, he delivered 70-plus points three times in as many cities where the sport was looking to cement a following. In his final year as a regular skater, he tallied 62 and added 11 in the playoff run to Charlotte’s Riley Cup.

And because he decided to keep the pegs down in the area, rather than the arena, he has easy access to moments that reopen the pleasure section of his memory bank. Case in point: December 5, 2015, when he, Marks and others savored a ceremony at an AHL game as part of their 20-year championship reunion.

“Which was nice,” he said, “and my kids really enjoyed the game and scoreboard interviews.”

The fanfare’s fleeting return satisfied his craving. These days, the Bangin Shrimp is more likely to command an encore.

“I do find myself thinking about what could have been, as I see old teammates and friends still in the game,” Wheeler said, “but I’ve been good about not living in the past.”

Alexis Crossley racing to sustain fitness — her own and others’

Just a little more.

Alexis Crossley comes from a household and neighborhood where craving, pursuing and doling out more enrichment is the norm. Especially if that enrichment comes via competitive exercise.

The way she recounts her upbringing in Cole Harbour, N.S., on the outskirts of Halifax — and the way she represents the place as one of its products — one might think anything less would draw a wave of concerned glances.

Reached by Pucks and Recreation nearly a full year after garnering her bachelor’s in biology from Boston University, Crossley is still suppressing senioritis in pursuit of another academic milestone. She is up for a master’s degree in urban affairs this spring.

Seven weeks after her final game as a Terrier, she is still following the daily springtime regimen of the program’s non-seniors. She has her first attempt at the Trans Am Bike Race in June to think about.

A second-year transfer out of New Hampshire, Crossley has already amassed five years of the college athletic experience. Most NCAA women’s hockey players will have decelerated to a studies-only regimen at this stage of their fourth year on campus. But with the rigorous cycling tour on the horizon, she has made a need out of a want by joining BU’s slated returnees for 2017-18 in the weight room.

“After finishing a college hockey career, it’s hard when all of the girls start off their postseason training and you can’t join them anymore,” she said. “But luckily, I’ve had something like the Trans Am Bike Race to motivate me and keep me competitive.

“And it’s nice to have it so close to after finishing my college career because, one, I’m still in really good physical shape from my season and from all of the training I’ve done over the course of last year for hockey. And two, I still get to get into the gym and see the girls all the time and watch them work hard and get better for next season, too.”

After a season that saw three senior forwards combine for 51 goals and Crossley lead the blue-line brigade with 21 points, BU will task as many as 16 holdovers with filling those spacious skates. Crossley has her own foundation in place for her next daunting-by-design endeavor. And she has not relinquished the team-based strings in the process, either.

In tandem with her father, Brad, Crossley will cover the 10-state Trans Am trail to raise money for the IWK Health Centre in Halifax. The two will be one of only seven registered pairs in an event that also features 146 individual racers representing 22 countries.

Six weeks ahead of the race’s June 3 beginning, the Crossleys have already fulfilled one-fifth of their $30,000 fundraising goal. “And that keeps increasing every day,” Alexis noted.

Meanwhile, the timing bar is set near the ceiling. Last year’s individual first-place finisher, Lael Wilcox, completed the tour in 18 days and 10 minutes. The tandem participants in the 2016 race took anywhere from 25 to 87 days.

“We’re aiming to get about 160 miles in per day, give or take a few depending on weather and other circumstances,” Crossley said. “The ultimate goal would be to finish in 26 days, but I guess maybe a more realistic one might be 28.”

At the time of her interview, her preparation rate was in a footrace with the pledge rate of Team Crossley’s supporters. As she continues to recover from a postseason shoulder surgery, she has yet to transfer her training from stationary bikes to the outdoors.

“Once a week, I’m trying to get in a long bike anywhere that’s above two-and-a-half, three hours, just to try and get my body ready to sit on the bike for 12-plus hours a day,” she elaborated. “Right now, it’s all about having my butt used to the seat and my head used to looking up ahead of me.”

On the figurative front, what is ahead is unclear to Crossley. With her fiancé accepting a job on the University of Arizona men’s basketball coaching staff, she will relocate to Tucson on the other side of her month-long bike tour.

For now, once there, she plans on shaping her near future on the fly.

“Hopefully, a future job opportunity will come my way and it’ll be something that I am passionate about,” she said. “I’ve always aspired to be a dentist, so I’m not counting that out of my future, either.”

Exemplary energy

For all of the mystery ahead, there are many well-defined motivators in Crossley’s background. The reigning BU co-captain is keen on continuing her exemplary leadership in a campaign to curtail childhood obesity.

Both of Crossley’s parents witness the best and worst effects of early life habits as elementary-level teachers in the Halifax Regional School Board. Her father has made physical education his day job for 25 years. Her mother, Leslie, oversees the fifth-grade class at Bel Ayr Elementary in Dartmouth, N.S.

“They have one of the most important jobs in our small communities, where they are creating the future,” she said. “And I think that their role in the education system also inspires me to want to make others around me better and teach people about important things, such as childhood obesity, obesity in general and the importance of living healthy, active lifestyles.”

Brad Crossley has set a straightforward precedent in his household. He will go into the Trans Am Bike Race with a smattering of previous intensive cycling excursions, including triathlons and transcontinental tours, already on his transcript. When the season is ripe for hockey, and thus for taking his gym-teacher’s instinct to the ice, pulling him away from the rink rivals shoveling two feet of wet snow in difficulty.

Alexis Crossley and her three brothers have each translated their inherited puck passion to college- or junior-caliber skill sets. Neither she nor any relatives have let obesity hang around their personal ponds since the puck dropped on their respective games of life.

Still, as Statistics Canada concluded in 2014, Nova Scotia was second only to Newfoundland and Labrador among the nation’s most obese provinces. The rate there was a startling 27.8 percent the time of the study. Neighboring New Brunswick was third at 26.4 percent.

Through her father’s work in the local school system, in particular, the comparatively inert behaviors of several students have never escaped Crossley.

“I noticed how much the current generation spends so much of their time indoors or playing on an iPad or asking parents to use their cell phones to play games,” she said.

“I wasn’t a little kid too long ago, but I can’t remember a day where I didn’t want to go outside and run around and play games. So I hope that through this we can help promote a little bit more of that and try to create some healthy, active lifestyle thoughts in my community at home and maybe in other communities surrounding that.”

Cole Harbour already bears multiple examples of exertion yielding exhilarating rewards, and both Brad and Alexis have been in on the production. Brad coached the Dartmouth Subways Midget AAA team when, in 2001-02, Sidney Crosby came through the ranks en route to NHL superstardom.

Nathan MacKinnon, who went first overall in the 2013 draft eight years after Crosby achieved the same distinction, is one year younger than Alexis. In turn, the two crossed daily paths at school and even played together in organized hockey before breaking off into their respective single-gender divisions.

“I was fortunate to grow up in Cole Harbour, where probably every other kid on my block played hockey in the Cole Harbour minor hockey association,” Crossley mused.

Of Crosby and MacKinnon, she added, “Just sharing the hometown with them and having such big role models come out of my town as far as athletics and sports goes, I think they are just extra pieces to the puzzle in this battle that new generations are facing in regards to healthy and active lifestyles, and hopefully my dad and I can contribute to that as well.”

In Cole Harbour, the phrases “Brad Crossley” and “contribute” have all but meshed the way the names “Sidney Crosby” or “Nathan MacKinnon” go with “highlight-reel play.” Beyond his gym classes, the elder Crossley has also served as an assistant men’s hockey coach at nearby Dalhousie University and devoted untold hours to youth programs.

In addition, Alexis noted, her father suggested the IWK Health Centre as the charity of choice when she first expressed interest in the Trans Am race a year ago.

“My dad had a contact with a player’s mother who works at the IWK, and he kind of brought the idea up,” she said.

“He has always gone above and beyond for everyone in my community at home or in the hockey world. He’s always spending hours and hours in the rink with local kids, teaching them some extra hockey skills or putting in an extra hour on the ice after a practice or renting some ice out for some of the local kids to go out and get better.

“So just watching him in that regard has motivated me to go above and beyond with my community, no matter where I am, and do anything I can to help people out.”

Crossley all but grew up together with the current incarnation of the IWK, which caters specially to women and children from the three Maritime Provinces. She was two years old when, in 1996, the old Isaac Walton Killam Hospital for Children joined forces with Grace Maternity Hospital.

The newly singular institution, whose website includes a 43-minute video on childhood obesity, has since built its reputation as a go-to center for family care. Through her proximity to Halifax and her strenuous upbringing, Crossley got to know that firsthand, particularly in the orthopedic ward.

“The IWK is somewhere I’ve unfortunately visited a few times as a kid due to injuries from being physically active,” she said. “But I hope that I can encourage others to be active and stay physically active and hopefully not have to visit the children’s hospital due to health concerns.”

Breaking away

The stationary bike Crossley has stapled herself to in her initial phases of Trans Am prep sure beats an IWK bed. But her competitive pangs will not taper off in full until she loses the confines of the gym and fully simulates her late-spring-to-early-summer plans.

The fourth annual Trans Am Bike Race will start on the first Saturday of June in Astoria, Ore., culminating in Yorktown, Va. In between, the trail covers Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky. Cyclists will soak in the likes of Yellowstone National Park, the Continental Divide and Mammoth Cave as part of their scenic odyssey.

“I’m excited to see different terrain and to climb some mountains, even though that’s going to be probably one of the most difficult parts of the race,” Crossley said. “I’m really excited to just take in the scenery and enjoy some fresh air and some peace of mind away from academics and the rigors of college athletics.

“It’s going to be a tough battle, but it’ll be a rewarding one and one that will allow me to have some of my own time and some thinking time and also some important bonding time with my dad, too.”

Yet even the hallowed landmarks of nature cannot fully tug Crossley away from the sense of a task at hand. The change of scenery may underscore a change of pace from her recent years of daily half-mental, half-physical biathlon in Boston. But she is using her last free moments in her adopted American community to prepare to join her father in representing their already famed Canadian locality.

Just a little more attention to Cole Harbour and a little more attention for their cause. That is the expressed greater goal.

“Even though it might not be to the extent that people may be aware of Crosby and MacKinnon, maybe we’ll be remembered for our efforts as well,” she said.

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.”