Last Updated on Sunday, 27 May 2012 18:31
By Andrew Vitalis
Let’s Play Hockey
When the St. Paul Highland Park Scots walked off the ice Tuesday night after falling toChisago Lakes 13-2 in the first round of the Section 4A playoffs, there wasn’t a single Park player who was hanging their head. There wasn’t a single fan in the stands disappointed in the Scots’ 2010-11 body of work, and there wasn’t one person associated with the program who wondered what could have been.
To everyone involved with the program, the Scots took down their most significant obstacle on December 1 when they stepped on the ice for the first time as a varsity hockey team since the 1987-88 season. Anything after that would have been a bonus. Sure, wins are nice, but atHighland Park, success is measured differently these days; at least for now.
“I didn’t realize there was such a gap between seasons until I heard that before the season started. That was pretty exciting,” Scots head hockey coach Tom Doyle said. “Hopefully, years down the line, the kids will look back on this season and realize they were a part of this. It’s a starting point. Wins are nice, but right now, it’s about improving every game and having fun. I have really been proud with what I have seen.”
“We knew it was going to be a process,” Pat Auran, Assistant Principal at Highland Park Junior High, said. “Of course, you would like more wins but we knew there was going to be some growing pains. We are going about things the right way and I think that’s important.”
Now with one season in the books, looking back on the process gives you even more of an appreciation of how everything came to be. Rewind the clock three years ago.
Pat Anderson, Highland Central Hockey Association president, and Auran, began working on the idea of resurrecting the Highland Park hockey program. Encouraged by strong numbers in the youth system, both thought the numbers were large enough to make it work.
They were right. From there, a junior varsity team was developed and a timeline was established.
“I was approached by people from the Highland Park hockey association about the idea,” Auran said. “I remember when I played at Highland (1982 graduate), we had two Bantam teams. They had four Bantam teams that year so I was pretty confident we had the numbers to do it.
”I remember going classroom to classroom, asking kids if they would be interested and we found out there was enough interest to move forward. We decided to establish a junior varsity team and after two years, we would move to the varsity level.”
Enter Brandon Ferraro who agreed to coach the junior varsity team for that pivotal two-year stretch. Although he knew he was going to step aside once the Scots moved to the varsity level, Ferraro used his time to prepare his underclassmen for the future.
Part of that responsibility included helping to find a head coach that would be a perfect fit for the program. He found that coach in Tom Doyle.
Citing Doyle’s experience as the junior varsity coach for Minneapolis East, along with his passion for coaching, Ferraro and the Highland Park hockey community didn’t hesitate. As they say, the rest is history as Doyle was eventually named the first boys’ head hockey coach at St. Paul Highland Park in more than 20 years.
“It was really important to find a coach, a little younger, who has experience coaching,” Ferraro said. “I knew Tom from his time at Minneapolis so I knew he had that experience. It was also important to find a guy who was going to emphasize fun and improvement as opposed to someone who was going to come in and expect wins right away. I recommended Tom to the district and they eventually hired him.”
Doyle, who calls himself a “city guy”, jumped at the chance. He played high school hockey for St. Paul Como and has seen the reemergence of inner-city hockey first hand.
Now one season in, Doyle looks back at his rookie campaign and grins with pride. Despite finishing the season with a 0-24 record while playing as an independent, he noticed improvement every time his team took the ice.
At times playing with a skeleton crew thanks to injuries, the Scots’ dedication to the game and each other made it easy for Doyle to come to work. And the improvements came in waves.
During the second week in February, the Scots lost by one goal in back-to-back games. The two losses where the closest Highland Park came to winning all season, and not surprisingly, they were the Scots’ final two games of the regular season.
That two-game stretch was also the best the Scots had done offensively all year, scoring a combined 11 goals. To put that into perspective, Highland Park finished the season averaging just over two goals per game.
If improvements were what Doyle and company had been looking for, they got it.
“To see the kids’ character throughout the season was amazing,” Doyle said. “The entire season, the kids knew where they were at. They knew we weren’t going to have a kid score 50 points. Each practice, the kids simply worked on improving their skills and getting better.
“My mentality has always been positivity; being positive wins out over everything else. Negativity will shut a player down. We talked all season about picking each other up, being positive and offering constructive criticism. It’s hard sometimes when you don’t see the results on the scoreboard, but we tried to win the small battles.
“When we were playing, we concentrated on winning that period and tried to build on those little improvements. When you have a group of kids like we had this season, it was easy to have that mindset. They deserve a lot of credit.”
“I remembered when I played, one season we won only one game and that was the best coach I ever had,” Auran said. “We had fun and that’s what it’s about. It was a great learning experience. Having fun and getting better is what’s important.”
In other words, a model was developed that will be used for years to come. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a program ... again.
With just six seniors on the team, most of the roster will take their 2010-11 experience into next year. While expectations will certainly be higher, the basics will remain the same. After all, St. Paul Highland Park plans on sticking around for quite some time.
“It’s been a great experience for me. It’s been great for all of us,” Doyle said. “They really came together (as a team) and that’s nice to see. They came together as a team and learned to appreciate one another. I don’t think the importance has been lost on any of them.
“It’s a starting point. You hope the program grows; the competition within the program grows. Through that, things are going to get better and wins are going to start coming.”
“You don’t always have to look at winning and losing when it comes to success. You can measure success in many different ways,” Anderson said. “The same number of kids finished the season as started the season. There wasn’t a single player who quit and that says a lot.
“When you look at where these kids have come from, that’s really important. I like to think that as long as the kids keep showing up, we should be able to maintain this. It’s a building process. Hopefully next year we’ll win a few games, keep on improving and go from there.”
