Tag Archives: duluth east

A Midsummer Night’s Hockey Notes

We’re over halfway through the long, dark tunnel of summer without high school hockey, and there have even been some summer tournaments in recent weeks to give a faint glimmer of what’s to come. Still, there’s been no shortage of news of late, so it’s worth rounding some of it up here.

Coaches Come and Go

It hasn’t been a quiet summer on the coaching carousel. Two longtime coaches with 13 State Tournaments between them, Russ Welch at Hastings and Erik Setterholm at New Ulm, made their way to the exits. Welch’s nephew Adam takes over along the Mississippi, while the kings of 3A have gone with Ryan Neuman. Aaron Weber, long a polarizing figure at Lakeville South, gives way to newcomer A.J. Bucchino. Some familiar names came in to help teams return to glory or seek it for the first time: Grant Clafton at Greenway, Billy Hengen at Providence Academy, and Mark Parrish at Orono. (Maybe a big name here will placate the Orono parents in a way their last thirty-seven coaches failed to do.)

Scott Brokaw, an active figure in the offseason training world, moves from Providence Academy to Mounds View. In the theater of the bizarre, Matt Funk takes over at the head of rising St. Paul Academy after Bill Owens got the can in the middle of the playoffs, while Scott Steffen takes the place of Tom Benson, who was rewarded for taking Spring Lake Park to its first Tourney with a pink slip. St. Cloud Cathedral, a regular Class A contender, has a vacancy after Erik Johnson’s retirement. As I covered in an earlier post, John Rothstein left Grand Rapids, and well-regarded bantam coach Trent Klatt has taken the reins.

Exit Tyler Palmiscno

The biggest, and perhaps most unexpected, retirement came from Tyler Palmiscno, the coach of two-time defending Class A champion East Grand Forks. It was a prolific 7-year career for Palmiscno; he came along at the right time, as the Green Wave surged in talent and peaked in his three final years. But his growth over that time was very visible to anyone watching. They went in to the 2013 Tourney raw and survived a Rochester Lourdes comeback in the first round, and after skating fairly evenly with dynastic St. Thomas Academy early in their semifinal, a train wreck ensued. It was 11-0 by the time the carnage was over, and the Green Wave lost the third place game to Breck. Their coach struggled to find words to describe what had happened.

The Green Wave rolled back in with added power in 2014, and this time around, there were no Cadets in the way. A visibly more composed Palmiscno projected a low-key determination as his team marched to a clearly deserved title. And then, in 2015, they came into the Tourney with a team that clearly wasn’t the most talented, but was the most complete team. This is my style of hockey: they weren’t the perfect team, but they knew their strengths and weren’t afraid to flaunt them. Their performance against Mahtomedi was a message to Hermantown, and the rest of the state: the Hawks weren’t in some league of their own. “We wanted to turn it into a man’s game,” Palmiscno told the press after the win. The Green Wave had the swagger of champions, took the game to Hermantown, and had the composure to respond like coolly when things did fall apart in the final minute of the third period.

For now, it sounds like Palmiscno is content with his work and on to other things in life; one hopes there is no more to this story, and that his departure isn’t a rude shock to his program. And if I’m sad to see Palmiscno go, I can’t help but relish the possibility that Scott Oliver will climb back into the saddle. Oliver has a state championship ring from his days at the helm at Roseau, and these Green Wave teams bore his unmistakable mark. The talent pool is thinner than the past few years, but they still have a couple of top-end players, and should be right there with Thief River Falls in the hunt for an 8A title. If they can make it back to St. Paul, they know what to do once they’re there.

Elite League Rosters

The fall Elite League rosters came out last week. As usual, there’s room for some wrangling, especially when it comes to the younger players selected. Unlike some, I’m not one to deny underclassmen roster spots if they’re legitimately good enough to hang with the seniors, but one does hope that no seniors are being left without places to pay because they’ve been cut. Of more concern is the tendency of a handful of teams to dominate the list, and the fact that large portions of the state seem to get shut out; like it or not, this will lead to cries of nepotism.

The biggest surprise is Stillwater’s six players in the league, a figure that ties them for the most in the state. None of these Ponies are can’t-miss studs (pun intended), but it’s worth remembering that their bantam team was one of the two or three best in the state two years ago. There’s no reason that city can’t develop a front-line program, and it may finally be happening.

The others with six are Benilde, always near the top of this list no matter how the team does, and Hermantown, peaking in upper-class talent and a northern team. Team North draws from the smallest pool of players—it’s basically 7A and the four northern 7AA teams, plus the East Grand Forks kids who can’t play for Scott Oliver—so team numbers at the top schools will look inflated. It is here that the choosing of younger players can be most extreme: three of Grand Rapids’ five invitees were bantams last year. (Duluth East is an exception to that trend; all five Hounds are seniors, and I can’t remember a sophomore Hound participant despite some worthy contenders over the years.) When the number of schools is smaller (and alternatives more limited, thanks to geography), there are going to be some more odd figures—even though North has no trouble fielding a competitive team.

The Metro and southern part of the state, meanwhile, has six and a half AA sections and (ostensibly) four Class A sections feeding in to four teams. Given that tight competition, there’s going to be some extra scrutiny on the handful of younger kids who make it, and the lack of variety among the teams represented. I don’t watch the tryouts so I won’t judge if anyone else should be there, but the Elite League could do itself some favors by pulling out some of the people with the most blatant ties to high school programs.

As always, some of the omissions are the most striking, as they clue us into who is playing in the USHL during the fall. Whether they’ll stay there over the course of the season may be another story. No matter what, though, it looks like there will be significantly fewer early departures this season than in recent years. I’ll wait to judge that until we know if it’s a trend or a one-year blip, but it’s worth noting.

Pre-Pre-Preseason Ranking Talk

It’s never too early to get this going, is it?

A vague consensus seems to be forming around Eden Prairie as the top team in AA. Michael Graham (assuming he returns) and Casey Mittelstadt alone are enough to make them a factor, and with the program’s considerable depth, they’ll be well-supported. Add in the past success of Lee Smith’s Eagles when blessed with teams that clearly lead the way in raw talent, they’re the cautious favorites.

Still, this promises to be one of the more open years. Defending state champ Lakeville North returns a fair amount of firepower, but has to replace its heart and soul, that dominant blue line. They’ll be the favorite in 1AA, but it’s hardly the cakewalk it was the past two years. Speaking of cake, Edina is still Edina, but has to replace far more than usual; St. Thomas Academy is also in reload mode. Wayzata or Benilde-St. Margaret’s, if either one can fix long-running and obvious shortcomings at one end of the rink, could dethrone Edina in a retooled 6AA. In 2AA, Minnetonka pushed Eden Prairie to the brink last season, and Prior Lake’s steady rise could continue, too. I have some issues with the new sections, including the indefensible imbalances the MSHSL has left in the number of teams across sections and a couple of weird placements, but I do think the new 2AA and 6AA are more equitable than they were in the past.

Realignment has also given the Cadets the only serious threat to their primacy in a weak 3AA in the form of Bloomington Jefferson; the baby blue, freed of a road to State through Edina, may be relevant again now. Aforementioned Stillwater, and perhaps White Bear Lake, will give Hill-Murray a run in 4AA. 5AA, while lacking an elite team, should be competitive among the familiar faces, and Centennial’s future looks very bright. Up north, Grand Rapids, Duluth East, and Bemidji all return substantial chunks of teams that showed that they—at their best, at least—could hang with the state’s top squads. The well-balanced Hounds need to prove last year’s run wasn’t just a fluke, while the future is now for the Thunderhawks and the Lumberjacks. Both will have their deepest and most experienced teams in quite some time.

In Class A Hermantown remains the perpetual favorite; with a weaker bantam class feeding in they may not be as deep as this past year, but the front-end talent is all right there, and Wyatt Aamodt may be the best player in the class. Hibbing may be good enough to give them a decent run in 7A, but anything less than another title game appearance would be a disappointment in Hermantown. In the Metro, defending section champs Mahtomedi and Breck return good cores, though should have good competition. With their defending champions realigned, 1A and 5A are wide open, while Luverne will try to atone for last year’s slip-up in sections in 3A. The usual suspects will duke it out in 8A.

For my money, though, the best story in Class A this coming year will be St. Cloud Apollo. The Eagles, semifinalists a year ago, return a lot of talent, including three elite-leaguers. They should be the favorites in a competitive 6A. Their program is also fighting for its life. The youth players in St. Cloud aren’t being distributed equally, and Apollo could face a legitimate, unexpected numbers crisis as early as the 2016-2017 season. One hopes they get some exposure and the resources necessary to keep a good thing going on the west side of St. Cloud.

Hockey Day in Duluth

In an announcement sure to delight any Duluthian, Hockey Day in Minnesota will take place in Duluth this year, with a pair of high school games in Bayfront Park on February 6. Denfeld will play Eveleth-Gilbert in the early game before East takes on Lakeville North in a rematch of the AA state championship. The first game, if not as crisp as the one likely to follow, should be a competitive one for a pair of 7A teams with some good history to their names. The East-North game, meanwhile, could well be a top ten clash. No matter what happens, it probably can’t be worse than East’s last Hockey Day appearance, and it will be hard to beat the site. Let’s start the countdown.

Denfeld’s Missing Students

Less than ten years ago, Duluth embarked on a controversial school restructuring plan. I won’t rehash the bitter debate here, but the decision to close Duluth Central High did bring one promise with it: the new, two-school arrangement would help make sure that one Duluth public high school wouldn’t seem to dwarf the other, as Duluth East so often did to Central and Denfeld, both in terms of enrollment and in academic and athletic achievement. Yet here we are in 2015: Duluth East’s enrollment has been climbing steadily higher over the past half-decade, while Denfeld’s has sagged. East now clocks in around 1,500 students, while Denfeld can’t scrape up 900. How on earth did things get so lopsided? I dove into some census data to find out.

First, though, I should start with the things that the census can’t explain in full detail. The first is the poverty rate, which, while imperfect, tends to have very strong implications for how likely kids are to finish school. I calculate the poverty rates at 14.0 percent for East and 21.3 percent for Denfeld, respectively; that’s a pretty substantial difference. Moreover, I suspect the data over-reports actual poverty on the east side due to its large population of college students; for example, the poverty rate for the Hunter’s Park and Hartley areas, which I would have guessed are among the most well-off in the city, is actually over 15 percent, or nearly triple that of neighboring Woodland. Unity High School, the District’s alternative high school option, almost certainly draws in more west side kids, further driving down the numbers. Transience, which is not well-studied, also plays a huge role, with the constant disruption in students’ lives preventing lasting commitments to schools. Simply based on its demographics, Denfeld is going to end up with fewer students than East, even if the lines are drawn to give east and west side schools the same number of students.

Moving the Line

The boundaries, of course, are not even. The current line, which heads up 6th Avenue East and Kenwood Avenue, gives a majority of Duluth’s land area to Denfeld. Even so, East’s attendance area has about 1,000 more K-12-aged kids (6,900 versus 5,900) in the area it draws from. This hardly explains the whole difference, but it certainly explains some of it. As one west-side politician frustrated with the imbalance once told me, just move the line east!

If only it were that easy. When the Red Plan was put into place, 6th Avenue wasn’t the dividing line. It was noticeably further east, at 14th Avenue East, and having it in that rough area would effectively equalize the populations (6,394 in the East area versus 6,427 in Denfeld’s). However, some people quickly noted that 14th Avenue East was the old red-lining boundary in Duluth—that is, the line used to enforce a racial zoning code that prevented minorities from buying houses on the east side. Understandably squeamish about harkening back to that legacy, the District moved the line to 6th Avenue. The neighborhoods between those avenues are among Duluth’s poorest, with poverty rates all in excess of 30 percent; the 6th Avenue line made East more diverse and gave it a greater number of low-income students. While reverting back to a line somewhere in the mid-teen avenues would perhaps be the easiest fix for the enrollment disparity, it would only exacerbate the have-have not dynamic between East and Denfeld, lowering East’s poverty rate to 10.5 percent and raising Denfeld’s to 23.6 percent.

The only alternative line-drawing method to equalize populations would likely have to go north, reaching into Rice Lake Township and perhaps beyond. It’s a bit of a gerrymander that would make for some long bus rides or drives, but it would still make some geographic sense, and has the added benefit of pulling from a fairly wealthy township with a relatively large student population. But exactly for that reason, it might prove less politically possible: hell hath no fury like wealthy members of a township who are threatened with possible contact with other types of people, especially when it comes from the dictates of an urban bureaucracy. This is the planner’s paradox, as they aim for both equity and public participation, and often find that the two are at odds.

Bad Projections?

The school district might also have incorrectly predicted future population trends. In my digging, I stumbled across a very detailed mid-2000s population projection requested by then-Superintendent Julio Almanza. In typical ISD 709 fashion, it was a total mess: upon receiving it he chose not to share it with anyone because it was “confusing,” which understandably had the School Board feeling a bit insulted, and everyone was left in disagreement and nothing got done. (Some related press clippings are at the end of the PDF.) The researcher expects a loss of over 30 percent of the school-age population in East’s attendance area between 2000 and 2015, while the rest of the city loses maybe 10-15 percent. If this seems baffling, well, it should: my calculations show that Denfeld lost slightly more between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, with both hovering around an 18 percent drop. The narrative does flip some if we use the (somewhat less reliable) 2013 ACS data; East’s decline rate increases a tiny bit to 20 percent, while Denfeld suddenly adds a few potential students thanks to growth in Duluth Heights, and its 2000-2013 decline rate is only 15 percent. Still, one data point that breaks from longtime trends is hardly vindication, and with the reports of overcrowding in east side elementaries, I remain a skeptic that this uptick in the Heights will lead to a sizable shift in high school populations down the road. Whether or not the Keith Dixon administration employed these stats in the making of the Red Plan, they do not appear to be a reliable guide.

I’m not trashing the researchers; their methods are standard and solid, and they hit all the right caveats. The thing they can’t account for is human nature. This includes internal migration trends, and the extent to which the east side remains the home of Duluth cake while the west side retains a Rust Belt stigma. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in school choice, where people flock to the “good” schools and flee the “struggling” ones. The fate of one’s own children is often where the faith of some of the greatest believers in equity goes to die—and, to an extent, I can’t fault anyone for that.

The Weakness of Boundaries

Still, if this is why East is gaining students while Denfeld sheds them, it must be coming from people who physically move; the District’s internal open enrollment numbers show only a very modest net gain for East. Marshall doesn’t seem a likely culprit for imbalance either, given its hefty price tag more easily paid by east side families. Charter schools might explain some elementary disparities, but Harbor City is Duluth’s lone charter high, and it too draws from both sides. Of course, that will change when the new Edison behemoth opens up on Rice Lake Road, most likely furthering the disproportionate whacking of Denfeld’s numbers. If it can make its enrollment projections (and this is no guarantee), it may be as large as Denfeld once the dust has settled.

The real cause of the missing Denfeld students has to be open enrollment out of ISD 709 and into neighboring communities. The only readily available numbers are from 2010, which was probably the top year for bailing on Duluth amid Red Plan upheaval, but they are stark. (I suppose I could ask for newer data, but considering the District’s record on data sharing, I might get it by 2047 if I begged really nicely.) The biggest beneficiary of open enrollment is affluent Hermantown, which is at capacity and building its own new facilities to accommodate more Duluth transplants. They alone gained over 200 Duluthians (grades K-12) in 2010, many of them from Piedmont and Duluth Heights, where some homes are closer to the Hermantown schools than they are to Denfeld. But there’s also open enrollment into Proctor, which is well over half Denfeld’s size despite drawing from an area that has at best one-quarter the population. It goes into Esko, the wealthiest municipality in northern Minnesota (yes, you read that right). And into tiny Wrenshall, practically kept afloat by Duluth flight. There’s a steady drain out of the District and into these neighboring towns, and demographic analysis has serious limits in this era of free school movement. By their nature, open markets create winners and losers; in Duluth’s case, the loser is obvious, and it is up to each person to decide if the gains are worth the costs that will be borne by the losers.

The Red Plan’s Shadow

I suspect Duluth would have lost kids regardless, but it probably didn’t have to be this way, and this hints at what is, ultimately, the most enduring damage of the Red Plan saga. It’s not the price tag; without re-opening the debate over the various plans, Duluth needed a fix, and it wasn’t going to be cheap. That, along with the refusal to put the Red Plan on the ballot, has largely blown over, as the results of recent elections show. It’s not the architecture, much as we amateur critics may complain. It’s not quite the decision to sacrifice Central, that ugly and inefficient box on an isolating piece of prime real estate, though that’s getting closer to the truth. It’s not in an exacerbated east-west divide; East’s shadow over the other high schools has always been long, and moving its boundaries further into the Hillside actually made East more economically diverse than it had been.

The Red Plan’s greatest damage came in the disruption it caused for so many students, fostering just enough chaos to drive many from it for good. The vicious cycle goes from there. It was school restructuring as shock therapy, as it took the axe to neighborhood schools and gave Duluth a bunch of pretty, hulking shells with large attendance areas. (What better exemplar of the trend than the new Lincoln Park, which lords over the west side at the top of its steep hill, nearly inaccessible by foot and drawing from Kenwood to Fon du Lac.) In a laboratory the new lines and divides would have been fine, but the Dixon Administration and its allies failed to account for how their drastic plan would disrupt families’ incentives. The old order may not have been sustainable, but the rollout of the new one was poor, especially on the west side, where students were jostled from Denfeld to Central and back to Denfeld to accommodate construction. But even now that the dust has settled, East has added students in recent years, while Denfeld dwindles. The damage has been done.

Still, the Red Plan happened, and it’s done now. Readers of my past ISD 709 stuff will know that there’s nothing I hate more than continued belaboring of that old, stupid argument. Duluth needs to hope that the surge was temporary, and not the start of a snowball rolling down a west side ridge. But more than hope, it needs action. There have been baby steps, from some of the events at Lincoln Park to the intense focus on Laura MacArthur. Perhaps if more data were readily available, it would help us amateur students of ISD 709 and lift the perceived veil of secrecy deployed by the District. Ideas like exit interviews and further studies get tossed around at Board meetings in the rare moments that people behave like adults, but those moments are frustratingly rare, and usually buried behind ledes about the dumb things people are yelling at one another. I’m sorry to say that I’m guilty of perpetuating that, and would love to see other people who cover the local education scene focus on what really matters instead of the ongoing personal battles. I’m also not sure that either of those would help; while exit interviews wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think the reasons behind departure are any great secret for anyone with their ears to the ground, and the District definitely shouldn’t waste money on consultants when a lazy grad student can bang out an analysis like this in a couple of days.

What Next?

Even if the recent uptick in school-aged kids on the west side is a blip on the radar, its long-term prospects are probably the best they’ve been in a quarter-century. Duluth is shaking off its long era of decline and stagnation, and with an active focus on west side development and some large chunks of undeveloped land, there’s good reason to suspect the school-age population on the west side will grow in the coming years. The question is, in an era of high-volume student movement that is unlikely to change, can the west side schools stem the flow outward into alternative destinations? A bit more leadership from the top would obviously help, and there are certainly opportunities to better connect with the opportunity and raise test scores. There are no excuses for the District not doing everything it can.

Still, there are only so many top-down things the District can do. Fundamentally, it comes down to parents believing in Denfeld and investing themselves in a school that, traditionally, has overcome demographic destiny and built a solid community. If that goes, the school will fail. This is hardly a brilliant policy prescription, but I have some faith in it, and I think it’s the only one that can counteract the existing incentives. The solution must come from within. Otherwise, the steady losses will continue, the vicious cycle will feed on itself, and those who have the means to get out will do so. It would be a loss for the west side, a loss for any sort of belief in public education, and one could only pity the kids left behind.

The Hounds’ Run for the Ages: 2014-2015 in Review

The Duluth East season is at an end, though Greyounds young and old are still trying to figure out what exactly happened over the past two weeks. The Hounds took us on a ride for the ages, as a mediocre season culminated in a second place trophy. The streak included one of the greatest comebacks in State Tournament history and one of the greatest upsets in State Tournament history on back-to-back nights, to say nothing of one heroic goaltending performance and yet another crazy comeback in sections. Much of the praise for the run, some of mine included, has been directed at Mike Randolph, and he certainly deserves the credit for devising a system that turned a defensive sieve into a trapping machine that shut down Edina’s bevy of forward talent. The old Hound found new tricks, even in retirement.

Importantly, though, Randolph gave all of his praise to the players, and it was those players who made it happen. It was largely forgotten after the first half struggles, but East was ranked in or around the top ten by most people in the preseason, and while there may not have been any can’t-miss D-I upperclassmen, over half of the players on this team will have the chance to play some hockey after high school if they so choose, some of them at a fairly high level. This team was deeper than many, including all of 7AA; by the end of the season they had three competent lines that could score, and rolled six defensemen for the first time in several years. As Edina so often shows the rest of the state, depth kills, and any team with confidence in its full bench is in a position to outlast teams that may have a few more front-end stars.

East didn’t score much this season, but the numbers there are a bit misleading. Thirteen different skaters recorded a point in the State Tournament, and while it was only ever a Plan B, they did show some genuine offensive talent when they had to, rallying back against teams like Blaine, Minnetonka, Elk River, and St. Thomas Academy. Luke Dow and the Altmann brothers are high-quality high school forwards, while Ryan Peterson was one of the stars of the Tourney, and Brian Bunten was a consistent presence. Garrett Worth has the potential to become the next in a line of great East snipers, and Ian Mageau and Ryder Donovan will likely join him in some offensive prowess in the coming years.

This East team had its issues, though, with only one returning defenseman who played defense last year. There were signs of promise from the whole corps, but sloppy or boneheaded moments often did them in; a number of East’s losses involved two reasonably good periods that were undone by one abysmal one. In net, Gunnar Howg hit enough speedbumps to see two other goalies cycled through the job before winning it back with a stellar performance against Lakeville North. A young group including three freshmen and a sophomore slowly found its way against that typically brutal schedule. The first half was a laundry list of can-you-top-this frustrating games: a narrow escape against St. Michael-Albertville, a blown lead in Centennial, a 7-1 shellacking (despite nine power plays!) at the hands of Edina, a loss to Eastview in a winless holiday tournament, and then rock-bottom, a 5-1 home loss to rival Grand Rapids.

It is hard to pin down any one turning point in East’s season. Nick Altmann pointed to a narrow loss to Eden Prairie in January, a solid effort in a bounce back from the Grand Rapids game two days prior; immediately after that came Howg’s performance against North. But there were still bumps. A loss to Anoka led to the adoption of the radical 2-3 forecheck that was the star of East’s best regular season game, a tie at Elk River that proved they had a shot at the section. But even though that scheme played a huge role in some of the Hounds’ wins down the stretch, there were other games where they never really got it going or had to drop it to make up for big deficits.

To pull off this run, this team needed to have something else going for it, some intangible quality that takes all of those clichés about sports and makes them real. Grit, heart, character, determination, belief: whichever word you like. Randolph’s line from the 2014 section final reappeared: “deny losing.” They played each of their six playoff opponents during the regular season, and didn’t beat a single one of them. But yet they got it done. They took down a goalie with a bright future who’d flustered them in a regular season tie, an archrival out for their blood that threw everything they had at them, the Mr. Hockey winner and his team of section destiny, high-powered St. Thomas Academy in its AA Tourney debut, and then the two-time defending champions, a team that had lost just once in its previous 37 games.

The heroes were different every night: Howg against Grand Rapids, a couple of third-liners against Elk River, Ryan Peterson against St. Thomas, the Altmann brothers against Edina. A big hit from Bryton Lutzka here, or desperate goal line clearances from back-checkers there; Alex Spencer throwing it down with Parker Mismash, showing Edina that East wasn’t going to take his agitation lying down. It was a total team effort, and while they exceeded my wildest expectations, after each win, the next one didn’t seem like it would be so implausible. They’d done it before, so why not do it again?

Luck played its part, as it must in every miracle run. There were so many pipes, trickling pucks, and convenient bounces. Dylan Malmquist’s injury will forever be an asterisk on the Edina game. Even so, the Hornets had more than enough firepower to win, and the Hounds made Edina’s other stars look ordinary with their discipline. Their reward was, hands down, the best sports memory I have ever had: 21,000 people in a record-breaking crowd, rising to applaud the darlings of the north. (Call it the East fan’s paradox: we spend the entire regular season as the Evil Empire of 7AA, only to come down to St. Paul to adoration.) It helped that they took down two of the most hated teams in the state, but it was a run that reminded many why it is we love this Tournament so much, and why Minnesota high school hockey has no equal.

The final against Lakeville North wasn’t to be: the Panthers were too good, too precise, and too smart to fall into some of the same traps that others before them had. East lost to one of the all-time great teams to come through the state, and did a decent job of hanging in there, giving some faint hope for yet another comeback. There was no shame in the effort, and while the fourth title remains elusive, another big-time trophy is on its way back to Duluth, none more improbable than this one.

And so we bid farewell to our seniors: Nick Funk, Matt Lyttle, and Evan Little, all of whom came into their own as regular forwards down the stretch, and chipped in big plays in the playoffs. Backup goalie Lucas Hedin, who gave a delicious salute to St. Thomas Academy after East finished them off. Bryton Lutzka, whose experience and big hits led the way on an otherwise green defense. Gunnar Howg, a two-time Tournament goalie who found his niche as a Hound. And the captains, Brian Bunten and Nick Altmann, two hardworking longtime linemates who drew their coach’s highest praise: “you see those two guys right there? They drive the bus.” We wish them all the best, whether in hockey or in life beyond dear old East. Together, they made some memories to cherish.

For the rest of the team, meanwhile, it’s back to work: time to hit the weights, plan an offseason regimen, and probably enjoy some free time away from the rink, too. This was a pretty young team, and there will be a lot of talent coming back next year. Grand Rapids will be loaded, Elk River will be out for revenge, Cloquet is still there, and Marshall is joining the AA party. Seven in a row is nice and all, but eight has a pretty good ring to it, don’t you think?

My annual State Tournament reflection essay (which also, unsurprisingly, includes some stuff about East) is available here.

The Golden Years of Mike Randolph

Three years ago, one of the most loaded teams in Duluth East history finished off a 4-1 win over Eagan on a Saturday in early March. That game, however, was not at the Xcel Center in St. Paul; it was at a consolation final in front of a half-empty Mariucci Arena. Their pride was intact, but Greyhounds Nation was left wondering what could have been. Mike Randolph, the Hounds’ longtime coach, made his way across the ice to salute the East fan base, as he always does at the end of the season.

I made sure to preserve that sight in my memory. At the time, there was good reason to think Randolph would call it quits after 23 seasons; his son was about to graduate, and he had just hit 60. Had he left then, his legacy might have been a somewhat complicated one. Yes, any reasonable observer would acknowledge his work in building up the program in the 1990s, and his two state titles with those loaded teams back then. But after that came a wacky saga that saw Randolph dismissed for a year before getting his job back, a series of section playoff upsets, and two bad upset losses once they did get back to State, the most glaring of those the 2012 affair that had wrecked his best season in over a decade. Every year, there was some grumbling from the stands, and while I had plenty of respect for Randolph, I would have been fine starting off a new era, too.

Randolph, however, came back. The results since have been nothing short of golden. Tonight’s 5-4, 3-goal comeback, double-overtime win over heavily-favored Elk River is the crowning moment of one of the all-time great runs in Minnesota high school hockey history, a streak of seven straight tournament berths, each more impressive than the last.

Sure, he still has plenty of talent to work with—though it’s gone down some each year. And yes, whiny southern fans, the section final is in Duluth. But anyone who thinks for a moment that this is at all a fluke or a function of game location isn’t paying close enough attention. In watching this team closely over the past three years, I’ve picked up on so many of the little things he does, so many of the little strengths he brings to the table that no other coach in the state does.  It helped that I had a chance to sit down with him and pick his brain for a while during that stretch, but it took careful observation to realize the totality of his control, and just how unique it is. Minnesota high school hockey fans are in the presence of a master at his craft.

Did anything change over time, to turn those disappointments into three straight thrilling Tourney berths, each more improbable than the last? Probably. Randolph sure thought so, saying “everything” had changed in how he handled his players over the course of his career. After the 2013 run, a few players joked about his wry sense of humor, a side of him I don’t ever recall hearing about when I was in high school. I told friends that he was going soft in his old age; I don’t know if the current players would agree with that after one of his famed bag skates, but whatever it was, he found a way to strike the perfect balance between pushing his players to give all they could without going overboard. This is the essence of good coaching, and performance in any sphere of life: to know how to push things to the limit and stay there, getting the most out of one’s own unique strengths.

He’s pulled just about every lever imaginable over the past three years, though I don’t doubt that there’s something else left in the bag of tricks. The 25 regular season games are merely a training ground for those three in late February that decide East’s fate. He preaches his systems, and makes his players believers, even when down 3 goals in the first period to a more talented team. 2013 and 2014 saw the creation of the most lethal power plays in the state, using East’s handful of top players in perfect positions to make up for a relative lack of scoring depth. Defense always comes first, and yet East never falls too far back into its shell, and by season’s end he’ll turn them loose on the attack when need be. This current season tested the limits of his ingenuity, with the radical adoption of a 2-3 forecheck after the defense was repeatedly shredded early in the season—only to abandon it at times in the section final against Elk River, when necessity demanded that they throw players forward. They hold back until they know they have the other team doubting themselves a little bit, smell blood, then strike.

Randolph will ride his top players at times, but everyone on the team has a role, knows it, and it’s no surprise to see some of them coming up big in the clutch. The second and third lines each scored twice in this year’s section final against Elk River, and in each of the past two seasons, players who I would have benched, being my impatient self, have made key contributions. It’s a complete cast of characters, from lunch-pail senior Nick Funk scoring the tying goal to freshman phenom Garrett Worth popping in the game-winner. He’s even played goalie psychology perfectly, benching both Dylan Parker and Gunnar Howg after struggles in their senior seasons, only to give them back the starting job with something to prove down the stretch. Both have taken the Hounds to the Promised Land, with Howg’s heroics in the semifinal against Grand Rapids the latest testament to that success.

The Hounds head to the State Tournament greater underdogs than they’ve ever been, and with an otherwise loaded field taking shape, it would be easy to shrug and say that this is enough of an accomplishment this year. And yet Randolph will surely demand that his team “deny losing” once again, and nothing is assured as they head into a first-round matchup with one of the state’s three elite teams. And even if the favorites advance, no matter what happens, a legacy is intact. It is one of brilliance, and we East fans are spoiled to enjoy it once again.

East Side Ingenuity

The final week of the high school hockey regular season begins next week. For Duluth East fans, this season is lurching oddly toward the finish line, filled with more uncertainty than any time in recent memory. There have been signs of progress along the way, as they’ve held two of the of the state’s best offenses under two goals, and had a few more offensive outbursts lately, but on the whole they are still a .500 team, headed for their first serious section quarterfinal game in over 15 years.

The most encouraging outing came on Saturday night in Elk River, when the Hounds played the Elks dead-even on the road en route to a 1-1 tie. After a slow start, a crushing hit by Alex Spencer jolted East to life, and the Hounds took it to the Elks for a majority of the rest of the game, bottling them up superbly and generating their own share of chances. A shot in the final minute of overtime might just have slipped in under the crossbar—no one will ever really know—but the statement mattered more than the final score: when they play well, East is on par with the section’s best.

The game showcased Mike Randolph’s spurt of ingenuity this season: a 2-3 forecheck, with the center manning the point along the blue line between the two defensemen. It’s something I haven’t seen out of a prominent high school program before, but it makes intuitive sense: with a struggling defense and a lack of talent to maintain the dominant forecheck of years past, the Hounds have resorted to doing everything they can to bottle up the opposition in its own zone. This approach comes at the obvious expense of bodies down low—with only two forwards deep in the zone, the offense runs the risk of becoming a very predictable series of passes around the perimeter—but it can make it difficult for even good teams to break out with any rhythm, and protects the defensemen from overexposure. The presence of the center on the blue line also frees the defensemen to pinch more freely than they might otherwise, keeping some semblance of the classic East cycle alive. To give an idea of its effectiveness, Elk River hadn’t been held under 3 goals all season long, but needed a late power play just to tie this game at one.

That cycle was on display again on Monday. East continued to work the 2-3 in Cloquet, a decision that may have sacrificed a chance at a win in the short term in the interest of preparing the system for the playoffs. They kept Cloquet bottled up for long stretches of the game, to the point that the Jacks’ offense degenerated into a string of icings, but the go-ahead goal never came, as East never generated quite enough in front of the net of sophomore Eric Newman. This is the weakness of the system: it gives East a shot against most anyone, but it also lets less skilled opponents hang around, and that is an especially important concern given the likely first round match-up against Andover, a team built around a great goalie and the occasional offensive surge forward.

The lack of offensive zone presence wasn’t an issue on Thursday against Blaine’s porous defense, but the sloppy defense reared its ugly head again, especially in the opening twelve minutes of the game, when East spotted the Bengals a 3-0 lead. While they showed their mettle as they battled back to twice tie the game, the game was already being played on Blaine’s terms, and that did not bode well for a team built around defense first. It was a second straight toss-up game with a top-ten team, but these track meet games are too volatile, and reminiscent of their most recent losses in sections, a 6-5 loss to Cloquet in 2008 and a 5-4 loss to Grand Rapids the year before, when East lost control for long stretches before coming back and ultimately failing to close the deal. Blaine is a top-ten team and deeper offensively than anyone in 7AA, but Grand Rapids and Elk River certainly have the firepower to get East into that sort of game (as Rapids did in January) and render all of this pining for systems useless.

The East defense remains the most profound concern. There are too many blown assignments and bad decisions leading to odd-man rushes, and occasional long stretches stuck in the defensive zone quickly deflate momentum. Stupid penalties have also been rally-killers at times. Gunnar Howg has won the goalie job back for good and has proven a savior at times, though he can’t do it all himself. I’ll avoid naming names, but a couple of players are frequent culprits, and must avoid the lapses that may end up costing this team its season.

The offense is showing more potential after a slow start. The longtime top line combo of Nick Altmann and Brian Bunten creates the most chances, many of which come agonizingly close but don’t quite make their way into the net. The all-junior second line, after leading the way early on and going a bit cold midway through the season, erupted in the Blaine game, giving some hope there. Luke Dow is certainly the most dynamic of the centers, and can run things from the point when East sets up the 2-3 in the offensive zone. The third line, usually featuring freshmen Ian Mageau and Garrett Worth with Matt Lyttle playing the high center role (with occasional Nick Funk and Ryder Donovan sightings) is now scoring with some regularity as the young snipers come into their own. The three freshmen on the roster have all come along nicely as this season goes on.

And so the Hounds head for their reckoning. They have two games in the final week, both against higher-ranked but beatable teams, Lakeville South and Minnetonka. Between those two games is the 7AA seeding meeting, which should be put on pay-per-view, but is most likely to hand the Hounds a 3-seed and a first round date with Andover. (There’s an outside shot St. Michael-Albertville could poach the 3 and leave East playing Cloquet in the quarterfinals, but I’ll be surprised if their schedule gets much respect at the meeting.) It doesn’t matter a whole lot, since the section is such a mess. Elk River has its best player in Jake Jaremko, but the depth, especially on defense, is not phenomenal, and Amsoil Arena has not been kind to them. Grand Rapids is bipolar, looking like world-beaters one moment and sickly the next; who knows if they can string together three straight wins. STMA is reasonably deep and hungry to prove themselves, but venturing into uncharted territory; Dave Esse has hard-working Cloquet rising to the occasion down the stretch. Andover has a goalie and a handful of skaters who can be difference-makers, and are plenty capable of stealing a game or two. Even Forest Lake, despite a poor year, has a history of doing well against Rapids, whom they are almost certain to play in the first round. And then we have these Hounds, trying to find that right balance and get back that East side energy and confidence that have kept them atop this section for the past six years. We’ll see if this group has it in them.

Learning How to Win

It’s been an unfamiliar sort of season for the Duluth East boys’ hockey team. With a new core and the burden of history, they’re off to a slow start, and there’s been a bit of declinist hysteria (all from outside the program, from what I’ve seen) surrounding a team that would, in a vacuum, simply be finding its way through a difficult schedule. But this is the burden of putting on the jersey of a six-time defending section champion with a target on its back. That burden can also be a source of inspiration, as was the case last season, when 7AA’s confident bluebloods stole a section title away from rising Elk River. Which story will be that of the 2014-2015 Hounds? My visit to Duluth this past week coincided with three of their biggest home games of the year, a stretch that included a decent win, an ugly loss, and a quality effort in a losing cause. As we enter the second half of the regular season, here’s my report on the state of the Hounds—a team that, in the words of its coach, is still “learning how to win.”

The week began in front of a packed Heritage Center for the yearly renewal of the crosstown rivalry with Duluth Denfeld. Long cannon fodder for the Hounds, the Hunters surged to relevance two years ago when they beat East and made the 7A section final, and this year’s team looks to be on par with that one. The Hunters came out fired up and led 2-1 after a strong first period, but East regrouped in the locker room and went on to play solid system hockey the rest of the way. The only real issue from then on was special teams; Denfeld briefly tied the game on a late second period goal, and East squandered numerous power plays in the 3rd before giving the Hunters a breath of life with two late penalties of their own. Even so, they limited chances effectively, and held on for a 4-3 win.

The stakes grew higher on Thursday, when Grand Rapids came to town in a crucial 7AA battle. The Hounds embarrassed the Thunderhawks in Grand Rapids last season, and Rapids was only too pleased to return the favor this year. Once again, a poor first period was East’s undoing, as they were completely worked over by the Rapids forwards and down 2-0 at the intermission. Once again they did a reasonably good job of getting to their systems in the later periods, but another defensive breakdown made it 3-0. The Hounds got one back in the third and the momentum seemed to swing, with history creeping back into everyone’s minds, but an ill-timed penalty allowed Rapids to score the back-breaker, and they added an empty-netter when Mike Randolph pulled his goalie with 3 minutes to go. The power play goal and the empty-netter were Rapids’ only two shots on goal in the third period, showing that the Hounds could stifle Rapids when they did get to their game, but they took far too long in getting there, and it doesn’t take much for the Thunderhawks’ top forwards to leave their mark. The 5-1 final is more reversible than East’s 5-0 win in Rapids last season was, but it’s a mountain to climb.

Things only got more difficult on Saturday, when sixth-ranked Eden Prairie pulled into Duluth. Not only are the Eagles among the state’s elite, they bear a number of similarities to 7AA frontrunner Elk River with their dominant top line; to retain the section crown, East will have to beat a similar team. Finally, East had itself a good first period, grabbing an early goal and playing the Eagles even, and they kept that energy going through most of the rest of the game, ending with the most complete performance I’ve seen out of them this season. They were beaten on two moments of individual brilliance by Casey Mittelstadt, the state’s top sophomore, and despite plenty of chances, the tying goal just wouldn’t come. Mittelstadt finished his hat trick with an empty-netter, giving the Eagles their first ever win over East that did not require three overtimes.

East now sits at 6-7-1, and is at some risk of its first losing season since 1953. The nasty schedule continues on Tuesday, when the team visits undefeated, top-ranked Lakeville North. Things ease up somewhat after that, with five straight opponents outside the top 20, but this team can’t take any of them for granted, and every one will likely be a battle.

In trying to figure out the Hounds’ lurching start, the biggest difference is almost certainly the absence of Phil Beaulieu on the blue line. As Mittelstadt’s performance Saturday showed, a certain D-I player can make all the difference in a tight high school game. It’s also not coincidental that many of Mike Randolph’s greatest overachievers—1991, 1998, 2013, 2014—have been built around a fantastic defenseman or two who could run games from the back. Most fundamentally, the East system requires that defensemen be able to hold up one-on-one against other teams’ top forwards with relative frequency, for those moments when opposing teams do pierce through the clogged neutral zone. The East defense, young and unsettled, is taking baby steps in that direction, but when it has lapses, they are profound, and undo a team that is not built to overcome big deficits.

East’s meager 2.43 goals per game average might suggest offense is their biggest problem, but the numbers can lie. Randolph teams build from the back, and though they have decent forward depth, they don’t quite have the skill to win a shootout against Grand Rapids or Elk River. The Hounds don’t need brilliance from this fairly deep group of defensemen; they just need steadiness and intelligence, with no ill-advised pinches and basic competence in holding the zone. If they can move the puck effectively out of their own zone and limit the odd-man rushes, the chances will come; that’s when East can start worrying about cashing in on those chances, and improving the uncharacteristically poor power play. It’s a very achievable goal, but not a guarantee.

The other big part of the equation is the Hounds’ youth. With three freshmen and an eighth grader seeing ice time, there are going to be some rookie moments, as was the case on Middelstadt’s first two goals in the Eden Prairie game; the first came with an all-bantam-age third line on the ice, while he walked around defenseman Luke LaMaster on the second. The promise is obvious, though, as the young line had a very respectable showing in the offensive zone on Saturday, and LaMaster has shown some flashes as well. East has had some success over the years with the young guns when they grow up quickly enough (1994, 2000, 2005, 2010), though the last two seasons when they were not a top-3 seed—1993 and 1999, neither of which saw deep playoff runs—were also teams that had a couple of freshmen seeing regular ice time.

East has also had some unexpected goaltending intrigue, as incumbent Gunnar Howg’s rocky Elite League carried over into a pedestrian start. Ever decisive, Randolph benched the senior Howg in favor of sophomore Kirk Meierhoff, who has been reasonably good, if not quite a game-changer, ever since. It now seems to be Meierhoff’s job to lose, and we’ll see how he holds up against the Lakeville North assault on Tuesday. As with the young skaters, it is sink or swim for Meierhoff, and he will have to grow up in a hurry.

For all the travails, 7AA is winnable. Elk River is the obvious favorite with the record and ranking to match, but there are questions about its defense and goaltending, and Grand Rapids gave them a one-goal game. Rapids has the firepower, but appears an emotionally volatile squad capable of great peaks and valleys, depending on their psyche. Dave Esse has Cloquet improving, but they need a few more big wins to prove they’re for real; St. Michael-Albertville has a strong record against poor competition. Even Forest Lake and Andover appear modest upset threats.

Under Randolph, the regular season is a 25-game warm-up for three playoff games. It means learning a system, a process exemplified by the performance of Luke Dow, the junior center who had 34 points at Duluth Marshall last season. He has 12 at East so far, to lead the team; of course a tougher schedule makes things difficult—no 4-point games against Eveleth this year—but he’s also being asked to track back far more than before, and be a more complete player. The Hounds have also spread their scoring some, with the top two forwards, Dow and Nick Altmann, on separate lines to generate the depth necessary to keep pace with the top teams in the state. Player point totals do not tell this team’s story.

The goal is to have a balanced machine going by playoff time. It doesn’t work out every year, but as history shows, it does more often than not. The players simply need to keep the faith and keep at it through tough results, building on things like the Eden Prairie game, despite the loss. The margin for error may be smaller than ever, but they have the formula, and have had some sustained moments where they get there. If they continue to build on that and quickly get back to consistent execution when things do go wrong, they can play with nearly anyone, and if the clock is winding down late in a close game at Amsoil Arena, it’s hard not to like the Hounds.

Early Hockey Thoughts 2014-2015

The Christmas lights are up, Lake of the Isles has iced over, and a new high school hockey season is starting to take shape. In the AA field, eight teams have emerged ahead of the pack, locking down their places at the top of the rankings. The most anticipated regular season game has already come and gone, as Lakeville North took down the team that beat them in last year’s state title game. The Panthers’ top line of Poehling, Poehling, and Poehling gets the headlines with their unmatched chemistry, and goalie Ryan Edquist, a Shattuck import, stood tall against the Edina onslaught. But the real key to victory last week was the defense, whose three veteran seniors let them take control early and did enough to hang on as the game wore on.

Another team making an early move up in the rankings, Hill-Murray, follows a similar script, with four top-flight defensemen. These teams that control the blue line are often the ones left standing in the end, and while the two-time defending champs have no shortage of quality defenders, they don’t have anyone who can control games quite in the way of Jack Sadek and Matt McNeely of North, or Jacob Olson and Davis Zarembinski of Hill. Edina still has the depth to win it all, but Curt Giles must find the right ways to utilize it, or the run will come to an end. North is now the team to beat, and one senses that Hill, after two title game disappointments and a flop in sections last season, may be due to get their swagger back.

The remainder of the top eight includes yet-untested St. Thomas Academy and high-scoring Elk River, plus the usual slate of 6AA talent. Wayzata looks a bit more potent than years past, and if they can couple that added offensive push with their usual lockdown defense, they may be back at State for a second time in three years. Eden Prairie, despite the loss of two Mr. Hockey finalists, has reloaded overnight, with young gun Casey Mittelstadt leading the charge. Benilde-St. Margaret’s, meanwhile, has plenty of depth, but no superstar scorer as in recent years, and the defense once again is a bit too loose, with a host of flashy puck-moving prospects but no one to lock down in front of their own net.

The Duluth East Greyhounds are not among the teams off to a speedy start, and enjoyed the delights of a 6 AM bag skate this morning. The slow start isn’t entirely unpredictable, even on a team that returns four of its top five forwards from last season. They aren’t healthy on defense, and the defense was inexperienced to begin with. It will take time for a few freshmen to adjust to the speed of varsity hockey, though they didn’t look overmatched in the season-opening 3-0 loss to Wayzata, which is cause for encouragement. Similarly, new toy Luke Dow, the Duluth Marshall transfer who was declared eligible just this past week, may take a little while to adjust to a new system and level of competition. And, of course, slow starts tend to be the norm on East teams not blessed with overwhelming top-end talent. This is life under Mike Randolph, as December results are sacrificed for system integrity come February.

Even so, the bag skate suggests Randolph is hardly pleased with the results so far. Most concerning, perhaps, are the blown 2-goal leads in each of the past two games. When the Hounds stick to their formula, they should be wearing teams down late and grinding them into submission, not giving them lifelines. This is still an interesting team, one that should be fairly deep defensively once everyone is back, and has potential for two potent offensive lines. Goaltender Gunnar Howg is an asset no one else in the section has, and can steal a game when at his best. This team has potential for a seventh Tourney berth in a row if they can adapt to the old East formulas and add their own little wrinkles on top.

Section 7AA’s pecking order is slowly coming into shape, with the pressure on the Hounds’ dynasty greater than ever before. Elk River’s offense, as expected, is lighting the lamp at an incredible pace—one that may only be matched by the speed with which the Elks give up goals. They will presumably settle on a goalie in time, but winning 7-5 is not a championship formula, and Elk River will have to tighten up to survive a long playoff run. Grand Rapids was chugging along at a similar offensive pace before a loss to Warroad on Saturday; a battle with Lakeville North this week will give us a better idea if that Swiss cheese defense of a year ago really has improved. Andover, fresh off a tie with Duluth East, isn’t deep but has a few stars, the newest of which is goaltender Maddie Rooney, a UMD women’s recruit who stopped 40 shots against the Hounds. Rising St. Michael-Albertville makes the trek to Duluth this coming weekend, but not before the Hounds face off with archrival Cloquet, ever a threat even with the Jacks limping in on a four-game losing streak.

Things are usually a bit more rigid atop the rankings in Class A, but even the small schools aren’t quite as clear as usual at the start of this season. The usual suspects are all still there, but Hermantown has dropped a couple of games despite its unmatched depth, while Breck isn’t quite hitting on all cylinders yet, either. Defending titlists East Grand Forks are loaded up front but thin on defense, and even Luverne, undefeated in the regular season a year ago, took a tumble against St. Paul Academy. The teams making some noise early include Duluth Marshall, which has been stout in back despite a spate of departures over the summer, and Mahtomedi, whose ceiling may be the highest it’s ever been.

At this point, of course, nothing is set. Some will improve, some will stagnate, and there will be some late-season surprises that throw everything off. Time to sit back and enjoy the ride.

2014-2015 High School Hockey: The View from August

With the Elite League around the corner and a bunch of summer scrimmages in the book, hockey doesn’t seem so far off. It’ll still be a little while before I start seriously digging into preseason ranking research, but there’s been enough idle speculation that I can offer a few thoughts at this point.

On paper, this looks like it’s a pretty easy year to distinguish the early frontrunners in Class AA, and they’re the two teams that met in last year’s title game. Edina and Lakeville North both return hosts of front-line talent at every position, with Edina getting the early nod due to their depth and momentum. Add in a pair of relatively easy sections, and they’re both primed for another March showdown. The Hornets stand on the brink of the state’s greatest run since Bloomington Jefferson in the early 90s, while relative upstart North will look to peak with its best squad ever.

Beyond those two, though, it gets muddled. As usual, 6AA contributes a bunch of top-ten contenders. Benilde-St. Margaret’s has a stockpile of quality players, but lacks the truly elite forwards of the past couple years; they will likely have to adapt their freewheeling playing style to succeed in 2015. Wayzata, on the flip side, needs to find a bit more scoring punch without abandoning the defensive solidity that has become the hallmark of Pat O’Leary’s regime. But they’re not the only two contenders there, and I could trail on through each of the Metro sections, but the point would all be the same: things are pretty open for the taking. The same could be said for 8AA in the state’s northwest, where Roseau suffers heavy graduation losses. The real question is how well these teams can compete with Edina and North.

In the far northwest, meanwhile, a preseason Mr. Hockey favorite has passed up an opportunity to play a full season in the USHL to stick around in high school. Warroad’s Jared Bethune has chosen to play a before-and-after in the USHL, an arrangement used periodically by some players who want the best of both worlds; last season, Grand Rapids’ Avery Peterson and Duluth East’s Phil Beaulieu took that route. With a top line featuring Bethune and Kobe Roth, Warroad will put up some huge numbers, and is right there in the running for a Class A crown. Northern communities certainly aren’t immune to the early departure, but at times there is something in some of these towns that keeps kids at home when others might leave. It’s a trend especially revealing in players like Bethune and his Warroad predecessor T.J. Oshie, who are not natives of the town, but fell for it anyway. For good or ill, things often run a bit deeper outside of the Metro area.

The allure of that depth may have played some role in the offseason’s most significant coaching shift, as Dave Aus left Blaine after 13 seasons and moved up to Brainerd. He took Blaine to six state Tourneys over that time, building on the base of the Bengals’ 2000 Tourney win the year before his arrival on the scene. The past few years had ended in playoff frustration, however, and Aus elected to head north for an entirely different type of challenge, as he looks to take a rebuilding Warrior squad and get them to State for the first time ever. This first season may be lumpy, but there’s some decent talent in the Brainerd youth ranks, and 8AA could be ripe for the taking before long. The Blaine job, meanwhile, falls to Chris Carroll, a longtime Bethel assistant who will try to get the Bengals back atop 5AA and end that section’s ugly Tourney drought over the past five years.

Farmington and Forest Lake will also welcome in new coaches this coming season, while East Ridge has brought in a big name in former Wild captain Wes Walz to build up their young program. Up on the east side of Duluth, however, there will be no change: Mike Randolph returns for a 26th season, despite having passed retirement age from his teaching duties. His forward corps got a boost with the addition of former Marshall Hilltopper Luke Dow, a small but shifty forward who put up huge numbers with the State runner-up East bantams two seasons ago. The mini-exodus from Duluth Marshall this summer cuts against the usual transfer trends in high school hockey, and the departures of Dow and Denfeld-bound Cam McClure sap some serious scoring from what would have been (and still well could be) the best Marshall team since their run of three straight Class A 2nd place finishes in the mid-00s. Whether it’s a disinterest in shelling out private school tuition when Hermantown blocks the road to State or something deeper, the Toppers have a rare opportunity to play the underdog card this winter.

Dow’s arrival at East, meanwhile, adds a new element to a crew of forwards that already returns most of its bigger contributors from last season. With the Altmann brothers Nick and Ash, Brian Bunten, and Ryan Peterson back in the fold, the Hounds should have two very productive lines; add a deep group of seniors with some experience and the usual infusion of a few quality bantams, Randolph has no lack of resources up front. East’s hopes at a seventh straight Tourney berth, however, likely hinge on the defense in front of goalie Gunnar Howg. Gone are the days of Nate Repensky, Meirs Moore, Phil Beaulieu, and Alex Trapp ruling games from the blue line and putting up huge points. This being Duluth East, there is depth and some talent here; they just need to sort it all out, and meld the parts into a cohesive hole.

For a second straight year, the team best-positioned to end the East run is Elk River. Jake Jaremko and Reggie Lutz lead the attack up front, while Matt Kiersted is the best defenseman in 7AA; their youth teams have been at least as good as East’s in recent years. Amsoil Arena has been a house of horrors for the Elks the past two seasons, though, and getting over the hump may take something extra. Grand Rapids, meanwhile, should have a thrilling top line, and their defense can only get better from where it was last season. If they can fill the gap in goal and generate some depth, they’ll be right up there with the big guns. Further down the charts, Cloquet looks to be rising back toward contention, and St. Michael-Albertville is also climbing into respectability. While Andover and Forest Lake may be on the downswing, they have the numbers to keep the middle tier of the section crowded.

Amid all this speculating about the future, I need to give a nod to the past: Glenn Rolle, the coach who first brought hockey glory to Duluth East High School, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 93. Coach Rolle led the Hounds from 1953-1967, earning four State Tourney berths and a 1960 state title; you can find a more thorough accounting of his tenure in this post from last summer’s series on East hockey history. Like so many of the midcentury Minnesota greats, Rolle was an Iron Ranger, growing up in Eveleth in its hockey glory days. He served in the military, graduated from the University of Illinois, and taught in Hermantown before making his way down the hill to a new high school on East Fourth Street. His teams did not always have the overwhelming talent of their Iron Range rivals, but depth and discipline allowed them to compete, and East slowly began to churn out hockey talent, first to UMD, and then beyond. He also served as AD during his time at East, and continued to teach after his retirement from hockey. Just two years ago, he managed to trot out on to the ice at a ceremony honoring the 1960 team at the Heritage Center. He and Bob Fryberger are the twin founding fathers of Duluth East hockey, and without that base they built, nothing would quite be the same.

Speaking of things not being the same, my hockey coverage this winter is in for a change. I’ll be operating out of Minneapolis for the next two winters. Being a Duluthian to the core, I’ll miss my hometown, but there’s much to be said for a venture down into the midst of all the Metro madness, and Duluth East’s travel schedule ensures that I’ll still see plenty of the Hounds. I’m excited to wander through many of the Metro-area rinks, and it’ll be interesting to see how things look from down in the tropics. Time to start the countdown and ready myself for some Elite League scouting. It’ll be hockey season before we know it.

Active Former Hounds, 2014

Elite League rosters are out, and summer transfer intrigue and early departure watches are underway…it’s time to start writing about hockey again. I’ll start on a light note by dipping into my Duluth East archives. Here’s a list of every active former Duluth East player that I’m aware of who played at some post-high school level last season. Asterisks denote players who left East early.

Nick Anderson (’97 F) Anderson’s hockey career is a testament to persistence and hard work. He wasn’t a star at East, playing a regular shift only as a senior, and even that was mostly in a supporting role on the ’97 2nd-place team. But he stuck with it through 3 years of juniors, played 5 years at Minnesota-Duluth (there must have been a redshirt in there), and went on to spend time in the ECHL, Germany, Italy, and the UK. He didn’t finish out last season with his British team, so the run may finally be over, but no matter what, it’s been an admirable one.

Nick Angell  (’98 D) Angell, the star defenseman of the ’98 state champ Hounds, played 4 years at Minnesota, winning a national championship as a senior. He went to Europe one year after graduation and has primarily played in Sweden since, though he also had stints in Germany and in the elite Russian KHL. He had a productive season in Sweden’s second-tier league in 13-14.

Zack Fitzgerald (’04 D)* Fitzgerald left East for the WHL after his freshman year (00-01) and played there for 4 years. He got a single-game cameo in the NHL with the Canucks in 07-08, but has spent most of the past nine years as an AHL enforcer, racking up massive penalty minutes and the occasional point in the process. He’s the younger brother of ’91 East alum Rusty Fitzgerald, who played parts of 3 seasons in the NHL.

Cade Fairchild (’07 D)* An offensive defenseman, Fairchild left East after his sophomore year for the National Training and Development Team, and went on to play at Minnesota. Like Fitzgerald he’s had a cup of coffee in the NHL, but has spent most of the past 3 years in the AHL.

Josh ‘Podge’ Turnbull (’07 F)* Turnbull transferred to East from Hayward, Wisconsin as a sophomore and spent two years in red and grey before a year of junior hockey and a 4-year run at Wisconsin. He’s bounced around various minor leagues for the past 3 seasons, most recently landing in with the Pensacola Ice Flyers of the Southern Professional Hockey League.

Keegan Flaherty (’08 F)* The much-hyped Flaherty played 3 years of Hounds hockey but left for juniors after flat-lining some as a junior. In the USHL he reinvented himself as a hard-working depth player and had 4 serviceable years at UMD. He was Turnbull’s teammate in Pensacola last winter.

Max Tardy (’09 F) Tardy just wrapped up his 4 years at UMD, and will be best remembered there for his goal in the 2011 national championship game. His overall UMD career was a mild disappointment as he sometimes struggled to crack the lineup in his upperclassman years, but he played with good energy when he did, and could likely catch on somewhere if he so desires.

Alex McLean (’09 D) McLean, one of the more defensive defensemen on the ’09 squad with 4 D-I D-men, played two years of juniors before catching on at Ohio State, where he’ll be a senior this coming year.

Jake Williams (’09 D) You’ve probably never heard of American International College, but it’s based in Springfield, Massachusetts and is a D-I program in the Atlantic Hockey Association. Williams has been a regular there for the past 3 years and will be a senior this coming year.

Julius Tamasy (’09 F) Tamasy transferred to East as a senior and, after a stint in juniors, went to D-III Nazareth College in New York, and was its 2nd-highest scorer in its inaugural season. He’ll be a junior there this fall.

Derek Forbort (’10 D)*  The most hyped of all the Hounds on this list and the school’s only ever 1st-rounder, Forbort played for the NTDP and spent 3 years at North Dakota before making the jump to the AHL this past season. There have been occasional questions along the way, and his NHL debut has probably been delayed somewhat by being stuck in the Kings’ organization, but it should come in due course.

Andy Welinski (’11 D)* Welinski, another highly touted defenseman and a 3rd-rounder, played 2 years in the USHL and will be a junior at UMD this coming fall. His development has been fairly steady.

Phil Johnson (’11 F) Johnson, a stalwart on the 2011 runners-up, has had 3 productive seasons a D-III St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota.

Hunter Bergerson (’11 D) Bergerson played one year in the NAHL and has spent the past two seasons playing some for D-III St. Scholastica in Duluth.

Nolan Meyer (’11 F)* Meyer transferred to Cloquet for his senior year, but had two seasons of modest production as a Hound. He is now at D-III Augsburg, where he has played sporadically over the past two seasons.

Dom Toninato (’12 F) A Maple Leafs draft pick, Toninato had a very strong year in the USHL before coming to UMD. He didn’t have huge points in his freshman year, but was often matched against others’ best lines and more than held his own.

Jake Randolph (’12 F) Mike Randolph’s son followed up a quality first year in the USHL with a monster one, breaking the league’s assist record and being named forward of the year. He’ll make his debut at Nebraska-Omaha this winter.

Trevor Olson (’12 F) The third member of the phenomenal Class of 2012 top line, Olson’s progress has been slowed somewhat by injuries, but he looked sharp when healthy at the end of the past USHL season and will start at North Dakota this fall, a school that should fit his edgy style well.

Nate Repensky (’12 D) Like Olson, Repensky’s had his injuries, but was very productive in the NAHL, and was named its defenseman of the year. He’s headed to Yale this coming school year.

Paige Skoog (’12 G) The first goalie on this list, the Forest Lake transfer was primarily a backup in his season in red and grey, but has had two reasonably good seasons in the NAHL.

Conner Valesano (’13 F)* Valesano has had two reasonably productive USHL seasons, but has yet to grab a D-I offer, meaning he’ll likely be back in the USHL this coming year.

Meirs Moore (’13 D) The shifty defenseman had a slow start to his USHL career, but came on toward the end of the season. He’ll spend a second season there before heading to D-I Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

Alex Toscano (’13 F) Toscano spent his first year of junior hockey shuttling between the USHL and NAHL.

Jack Forbort (’13 F) Derek Forbort’s younger brother put up decent numbers in the NAHL this past year.

Andrew Kerr (’13 D) Kerr had a strong NAHL rookie season, scoring more than he did in high school, mixing things up, and was picked in this spring’s USHL draft.

Hogan Davidson (’13 F) Like Kerr, Davidson picked up his share of penalty minutes as he bounced between a couple of NAHL teams.

Ryan Lundgren (’13 F) Lundgren had been set to play in the NAHL before suffering a season-ending injury. Depending on his recovery, he has some shot at playing at a higher level.

Dylan Parker (’13 G) Parker spent most of the past season in the NA3HL and was briefly rostered in the NAHL, but did not play.

Red and Grey Till the Day I Die

The Duluth East Class of 2014 made its plodding way across the DECC stage tonight, the students’ last names butchered one last time before they are released out into the world. Six years out from my own graduation, despite a new building and a maze of budgetary travails, my love affair with that school burns as much as it ever has.

East’s strengths are nothing otherworldly. Like any school it has its cliques, both exclusionary to those on the outside and giving rise to tunnel vision for those on the inside. Teenagers still do normal teenage things, and East couldn’t save a number of them from some truly damaging situations. (Anyone who expects a school to be the primary line of defense against these things has a rather disordered view of how these things come about.) Some will no doubt look back on their time there and remember the requisite high school awkwardness and ignorance, blaming the school for those bad memories. No doubt East can do better, as any school can.

East is also fairly homogenous, and many of its comforts stem from the good fortune of being situated on the wealthy, old money side of a town that values education. And that dominant culture can indeed be problematic for those who don’t naturally slide into it: witness Duluth’s brutal achievement gap, along with some of the concerns about diversity voiced in this recent video. (I could mount a nuanced critique of all of this if I wanted, but I’ll save that for another day and say simply that East has its issues. The school supports the troublesome Robert Putnam study that says that, traditionally, a relative lack of diversity correlates with social cohesion.)

And yet, even as it produces plenty of kids who are entrenched in that comfortable majority, East manages to be more than a factory of bourgeois culture. There’s enough questioning of that culture, both from the children of the east side elite free to ask Big Questions and the salt of the earth folks who don’t quite see the point of the whole rat race. (Interactions with the latter are one of the real merits of public education, reminding us relatively pampered kids that there are entirely different worlds out there that we can’t ignore.) It manages to blend the dominant culture necessary for success (under its standard American middle class definition) with allowances for some individual dalliance. There are people actively fighting the isolation felt by those who don’t quite fit in. When I was a Hound, the cliques came down without too much trouble, and the best of the teachers really were transformative. When I went off to college and talked about my high school experience with college friends—some of whom attended some of the country’s most “prestigious” high schools—I still came away with the sense that there was something different about East. Without trying very hard, it put out kids who were ready for most anything to come after, from elite colleges to the local schools to the armed forces to jobs straight out of school. It breeds that success with minimal pretension or self-satisfied claims of greatness, and does not cater to vogue tests or metrics of success while doing so. It doesn’t need to sell itself. As a school, it simply works, and anything that works that well ought to be preserved.

All else held steady, East allows its students to age at their own pace. Sure, some will be living lives of hedonism as freshmen, and most will make gradual forays down that path as the years go by. But it was possible to live another way and not suffer any serious social repercussions if one so chose. Any East alum from my generation will recognize the phrase from the daily announcements—and I do hope they still use it, much as it all drove us all to roll our eyes at the time—“make it a great day or not, the choice is yours.” The message sank in. East grads were subject to the same social pressures as kids all across the country, but we Hounds always seemed to have an intimate awareness of our own agency. And for those of us who were a bit too aware of our own uniqueness, it helped bring us back to reality.

In some ways, East does its job too well. I know plenty of my classmates left with everything they needed to succeed anywhere; as a result, East is now just some source of distant nostalgia, with many of its brightest farmed out far beyond Duluth. It’s something to remember, fondly but not worthy of a second thought; something to acknowledge from afar, but not something worth repeated return visits or donations to its foundation. I was very close to heading down that same path, and the painfully earnest quotes from some old high school diaries prove it. I had to go away to realize how lucky I was.

My fervor is that of a convert. When I wandered into its doors as a freshman, I scoffed at all of the “school spirit” pageantry, and was content with fairly insular group of friends. Sure, I had some public school pride after touring Marshall and coming away unimpressed, but East was just a means to an end, four years to get over with as quickly as possible so that I could get out and do what I really thought I wanted to do. By the last day of senior year, I was crying buckets as I walked out its doors, leaving behind the first place I’d genuinely called home.  I’d decided I might as well befriend everyone, branching out enough to try to be that kid who went to every single grad party. I didn’t always fit seamlessly into its culture, but I found that level of comfort necessary for asking bigger questions and pushing my limits. East fed my relentless ambition and got me into Georgetown, but at the same time, the education I got there was complex enough that I was unconsciously starting to question everything about my world while at the same time acknowledging that it had made me who I was. The searching, probing, and frustration of the next five years makes no sense without East at its starting point, and in the end, that journey led a kid who’d been so eager to study international affairs straight back to the east side of Duluth.

Was I a sellout? I suppose I was, after a fashion. I neglected an old friend or two in my rush to climb the ladder, and at times spread myself far too thin. I abandoned a few morals, which left an overly uptight kid with no lack of inner conflict. I’m now more likely to spend a cold winter night watching an amateur hockey game than I am to be tracking election polls in South America. The long journey that began and ended with East led me to back away from earlier grandiose dreams of saving the world and settle for living fully within my own world. And yet I couldn’t be happier. I still ask those big questions and follow those world affairs, but I no longer let them consume me. Everything has its proper place.

Things started falling into place over the second half of my senior year. From academics to extracurriculars to following the exploits of the hockey team, I was at home. As Stuff happened in life beyond school, I began to understand the real power of a community, and what a support it can provide—a lesson doubly important for a kid who was consumed by the solitary pursuit of success. I am forever indebted. In a dream world I’d settle down here and raise a few more little Hounds while working for the betterment of Duluth, but I’m not sure quite what life will throw at me yet, and it’s hard to know where I’ll end up. No matter what, East’s presence will endure. As I wrote in a good-bye note some time after graduation:

No reason it has to be an abrupt good bye to East—because what is East, really? Some reified, odd concept—in a way, it’s the building, but building didn’t make any memories for us. Of course it’s the people, but they’re not static either—some will change, some will drift away, some will die. All we’re left with is a pile of memories. Little snapshots frozen in time, immutable, unforgettable. How can we miss something we never let go of? We can’t. And so long as we let life change with us, and hold on to what we can, we can always go back.

To all of my fellow Hounds who made those memories possible, no matter how large of a role they played: thanks again.