A while back there was a post about he origins of hockey at Miami. Thought
this would be of interest. Connections to Bowling Green, St. Lawrence,
Wisconsin and others. For your perusal, if interested. Now, if they can
only get past the first round of the NCAA. Bob Hamilton
By Kyle Nagel Cox News Service
OXFORD — A call came to the hockey office at Bowling Green State University
in August 1976. On one end was Jack Vivian, the newly hired director of the
soon-to-open Goggin Ice Arena at Miami University. On the other was Ron
Mason, the BG coach and arguably the most influential person in college
hockey history.
“Got any young guys there who can coach?” Vivian asked.
Not long after, 23-year-old Steve Cady, a Bowling Green assistant, drove to
Oxford to interview. Miami was hiring a club hockey coach and professor in
the physical education department.
Miami president Phillip Shriver and vice president for finance and business
Lloyd Goggin grilled the young coach on his qualifications. They told him
hockey would never be a varsity sport at Miami, that it wouldn’t be
supported enough for such consideration.
“I said, ‘If I come here, hockey will be a varsity sport; we will join the
CCHA, win the CCHA championship and win an NCAA championship,’ ” said Cady,
now Miami’s senior associate athletic director. “Well, three of those four
have occurred.”
Since rising to varsity status in 1978 — two years after that interview —
the Miami program has fought geography, budget restrictions and low
expectations to become arguably the hottest program in the country.
The RedHawks, already the Central Collegiate Hockey Association
regular-season champions and ranked No. 2 nationally, enter the CCHA
Tournament as one of the favorites to complete Cady’s four-point plan with a
national championship.
In its 28-season existence, the same hockey program that lost its first game
against a varsity team 15-0 and went 15 seasons before its first (and, until
this year, only) CCHA championship has battled through its tiny rink as one
of the southern-most hockey schools in the country. There have been some
notable seasons, but not near the consistency Cady envisioned during that
interview 30 years ago.
Now with momentum under coach Enrico Blasi — who, as a Miami player, was
part of the most pivotal recruiting class in the team’s history for
ground-breaking coach George Gwozdecky — and a new arena set to open next
season, the RedHawks are on the verge of becoming one of the real powers in
college hockey.
“It’s amazing,” Vivian said, “to think of all the things that almost didn’t
happen.”
Humble beginnings
In 1976, Vivian was the vice president and general manager of the World
Hockey League’s Cleveland Crusaders. The man whose promising playing career
was derailed by a broken kneecap at 17 lost his enthusiasm for the pro game
when the Crusaders were not accepted into the National Hockey League as part
of the merger with the WHL.
He wasn’t yet a maverick ice-arena constructor and manager who later would
become known in hockey circles as “Dr. Ice.” He was a guy looking for a job.
Soon, Vivian became head of the Miami arena and phoned Mason at BG.
Cady was in Bowling Green as an assistant only because his college teammate
from St. Lawrence University, Jacques Martin, had turned down the position.
Martin would later coach the St. Louis Blues, Ottawa Senators and,
currently, the Florida Panthers of the NHL.
Once Cady got the Miami job, things were bumpy. On the day of his first game
as coach, he had to drive to Cincinnati to pick up the team’s equipment. Two
years later, during its first varsity season, Miami was in the process of
being smoked 15-0 by No. 5 Bowling Green when one of Cady’s players skated
to the bench before a face-off.
“Coach, do you have a puck back there?” the player said to Cady. “I was
hoping to have one we could touch.”
Time for change
By the late 1980s, after Cady led the team to a 121-126-12 record in seven
seasons and Bill Davidge — now a radio announcer for the Columbus Blue
Jackets — went 39-111-3 in four seasons, Miami hit a tough spot. The team
was losing, support was down, and some school officials questioned whether
the program should be maintained.
The team needed a drastic change. Gwozdecky was the perfect man.
A tough native Canadian, he learned hockey as a walk-on at Wisconsin under
coach Bob Johnson — known in hockey history as “Badger Bob” — and as an
assistant for Mason at Michigan State.
Once he accepted the job, as far as he knew, Gwozdecky was the only coach in
the country also teaching a class. And he took a pay cut to become a head
coach.
“When you compared apples to apples,” Gwozdecky said, “the field wasn’t very
balanced.”
Then came the critical recruiting class. In 1990, Miami finally joined the
rest of the league in awarding 18 scholarships. Gwozdecky went into the
homes of those recruits and told them, “You will be the future of this
program.”
The present, though, was brutal. With the key class as freshmen in Gwozdecky
’s second season as coach, the RedHawks opened 1990-91 with an 11-1 loss to
Michigan. The next night, it was 9-3. Other losing scores that season
included 11-4, 10-1 and 8-0.
“I remember sitting in the dorm with four or five freshmen just basically in
tears,” Blasi said. “We were thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’ ”
Winning message
That season, at least, they were losing. Miami finished a program-worst
5-29-3 as the growing pains from the beginning of Gwozdecky’s tenure became
excruciating. It remained clear, though, that the freshman class of 1990 was
the future in his mind.
“To be honest,” said Chris Bergeron, who was a sophomore on that team and is
now a Miami assistant, “he was trying to run guys out.”
The next year, the 1991-92 season, those pains started to pay off. The
RedHawks finished 18-16-6 and gained some respect. Then, with Blasi as a
junior and Bergeron a senior captain, Miami won the CCHA championship in
1993 at 27-9-5.
Gwozdecky left in 1994 for the University of Denver, which has won the past
two NCAA championships. Under his watch, Gwozdecky built Miami into a name
program nationally, and recruits started to notice.
“The guys who went there then wanted to be part of something,” said Dan
Boyle, a Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman who in 2004 became the only former
Miami player (1995-98) to be part of a Stanley Cup-winning team.
The high from the CCHA championship team eventually faded, and Miami was
looking for a coach again in the summer of 1999. Blasi emerged from the
candidate pool and started spewing the same speech to recruits that he had
heard from Gwozdecky.
“It was really kind of the same story, 10 years later,” Blasi said.
Only this time, the RedHawks hope to keep their footing. With a 23-7-4
overall record, including 20-6-2 in the CCHA, Miami has remained one of the
best stories in college hockey all season.
And so, from the team that once was welcomed back to Oxford at 2 a.m. by the
cheering university president following its first victory against a ranked
team in 1980, Miami has grown into a program used to big victories.
“It’s time now,” Blasi said, “to be consistent.”
http://www.middletownjournal.com/sports/content/sports/stories/2006/03/03/mj
030306qa.html
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