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.
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.”
