Tag Archives: hockey

Hounds Hockey History II: The Glenn Rolle Era (1954-1967)

This is the second post in a series on the history of Duluth East hockey. See Part One  (the introduction) here.

Duluth East’s rise into hockey relevance began in the 1953-54 season, when the Hounds went 9-2 in the regular season and swept to the District 26 championship, the first banner won in a major team sport by the new high school. The arrival of two new faces to the program made the shift happen. The first was Glenn Rolle, a teacher at East who would coach the Hounds for the next fourteen seasons. Rolle’s Greyhounds won (approximately) 232 games while losing 81, and made four trips to the State Tournament, including a state championship in 1960.

The second man was Robert Fryberger. While Fryberger is probably best remembered (and perhaps cursed, in some circles) for having a frigid Duluth arena named after him, his legacy extends far beyond that one sheet of ice. A Duluth native and Dartmouth hockey alumnus, Fryberger coached his sons’ PeeWee team to a national championship in the early 1950s. In 1954 twins Bob and Jerry Fryberger made the East team, and their father donated an outdoor rink to the program, giving the Hounds their home for the season. While the records may not be complete, the Frybergers are the first Hounds I can find who went on to college hockey; both went to Middlebury in the late 50s and early 60s, where they played on a line with their younger brother, Dates. With the Fryberger Line carrying the load, Middlebury put together a dominant team in 1961, and Dates’s 56-goal season remains among the highest totals by any NCAA skater ever. He later played on the 1964 U.S. Olympic Team, becoming the first of three East hockey Olympians. Community-based programs are often built on the backs of fathers and sons and brothers sharing their love of the game with one another and roping in their friends, and the Frybergers were East’s first great hockey family. For their services to Duluth hockey, Robert and his wife LaVerne are two of the four people enshrined in the center ice mural at the Hounds’ current home rink, the Heritage Center.

The Hounds’ 1954 season came to a crashing halt in the Region 7 quarterfinals in a 6-2 loss to 1950s powerhouse Eveleth. Shortly thereafter they suffered the further indignity of watching the team they’d beaten for the District 26 crown, Duluth Central, become the city’s first State Tournament entrant. But the foundation was in place, and under Coach Rolle’s steady hand, the results grew steadily better. In 1955 they knocked off an Iron Range team (Greenway) to advance to the region semifinals for the first time, and in ’56 and ’57 they repeated the feat, coupling the regional success with two more district titles.

In 1958, East broke through to its first State Tournament berth. The honor was rather anticlimactic, as the Hounds lost the Region 7 final to International Falls by an ugly 8-1 score.  But between 1948 and 1964, the MSHSL filled out the tournament field by awarding the Region 3 championship to the loser of the Region 7 and Region 8 title game on a rotating basis. The even years belonged to Section 7, and thus East’s quarterfinal victory over Virginia and semifinal win over Duluth Denfeld were enough to lock up a State berth. The so-called “back door” through Region 3 was one of many unusual playoff methods used in this early age of high school hockey; Regions 4 (St. Paul schools) and 5 (Minneapolis schools) also had their own back door until 1959, and it expanded into a four-game playoff including the runners-up from Regions 2 and 6 from 1960-1968. Even more strangely, some regions experimented with any number of systems of byes and automatic berths, and the 1946 Section 5 coaches decided they’d rather vote for a team than hold a playoff. The ’58 Hounds were hardly alone in making the Tournament via a curious path.

East’s first stint at State didn’t produce much in the way of happy memories, either. After a scoreless first period, St. Louis Park erupted for four second period goals and buried the Hounds, 5-1. Their consolation round experience was no better, as St. Paul Murray rolled to a 3-0 win. It was a stumbling but necessary first step.

The 1959 season proffered mixed results for the Hounds; their twelve losses were the most in the Rolle era, but they also beat state power Eveleth for the first time, and coupled a pair of solid senior UMD-bound defensemen, Ed Sutton and Jerry Udesen, with a sophomore core that would carry the team for the next several years. East played and beat Baudette 6-2 in a game at Williams Arena before a University of Minnesota game in a sort of forerunner to the contemporary Hockey Day in Minnesota. The season came apart in Districts, when they lost a tight game with Duluth Central in the semifinals and were then inexplicably blown out by Duluth Morgan Park 8-1, not long after beating that same team 8-0. This left the Hounds with a first-round Regional game against International Falls, which promptly whipped them, 10-3.

The 1960 team was built around five future UMD players: juniors Dave Stepnes, Bill Savolainen, Bill McGiffert, and Dick Fisher; and sophomore Bob Hill, a future East coach. While the Fryberger brothers (Middlebury) and Tom Wheeler (Hamilton) traveled east to play their college hockey, East High effectively served as a pipeline for the University of Minnesota-Duluth hockey team during the Rolle era. Between 1956 and 1967, no less than 17 Hounds went on to suit up for the Bulldogs. Jim Ross, Mike Hoene, and Bill Sivertson also appeared to play prominent roles on the 1960 squad, and while the team did not boast any future household names in Minnesota hockey, their depth appears to have been as good as any team’s in that era.

The team went 17-3 in the regular season, splitting two meetings with Eveleth and avenging a loss to Central in their drive through District 26. They collided with Eveleth for a third time in the Region 7 championship game, and while they lost, 5-4, the close score made them a much more worthy back door State Tournament entrant than they had been two years prior. In their State quarterfinal, the Hounds faced Minneapolis Washburn in a battle of back door teams, and fell into a 3-1 hole in the third. The team then rallied for four goals in a five-minute span late in the period, including two by Ross. East had its first State Tournament win, and the first round offered additional good news: Eveleth had also lost, and would lose again in the consolation round to Edina, which was making the first of its 19 trips to State under coach Willard Ikola.

The Hounds faced another familiar Minnesota hockey name in their semifinal, in which future University of Minnesota coach Doug Woog had a goal and an assist for South St. Paul. But East overwhelmed the Packers with three goals in both the second and third periods en route to a 6-2 win, with Sivertson logging a hat trick in the process. The state title game matched East against St. Paul Washington, and Sivertson continued his torrid scoring pace with a goal four and a half minutes in. McGiffert struck a minute later for a 2-0 lead, and though the Presidents scored early in the second, a Mike Hoene goal in the third iced away Duluth East’s first state championship.

The 1961 Hounds returned with most of their title-winning core intact, and loaded up their schedule in anticipation of another championship run. They played Eveleth and South St. Paul twice each, and also took on two Minneapolis teams, White Bear Lake, and the University of Minnesota-Duluth Freshman Team in addition to their usual slate of Duluth and Iron Range area high schools. They finished 16-4 in the regular season and marched through Districts and the even the Region, until they met International Falls in the final.

The region championship in Eveleth was a clash of Minnesota hockey titans, with the Falls ranked #1 and East at #2. With no back door open to Region 7 that year, it was do or die for the Hounds’ four D-I seniors and a star-studded Falls roster that included such Minnesota hockey greats as Mike “Lefty” Curran and Keith “Huffer” Christiansen. The game was a thriller, and East pulled out a 3-2 win for its first proper Region 7 title and third Tourney berth in four years. The most memorable part of the game, however, may have taken place after the final buzzer sounded. Frustrated Falls star Jim Amidon whacked East’s Mike Hoene in the head with his stick, prompting a small fight on the ice. The players didn’t drag out the action, but the fans at the sold-out Hippodrome had other ideas. In perhaps the most epic high school hockey fight ever, 30-40 fans leapt on to the ice and did battle with one another, with some fans even going after the East players. A furious Coach Rolle declared he’d never schedule the Broncos again, and the Falls’ famed coach, Jim Ross, ordered each of his players to go over to the East locker room and apologize afterwards.

With the Falls out of the way, East entered the Tourney as favorites to repeat. In the first round, East battled a strong St. Paul Johnson team into overtime, and in the end, Sivertson broke the scoreless draw to send East back to the semifinals. There, the Hounds suffered their first State Tournament upset. The culprit in this case was South St. Paul goalie Gary McAlpine; despite a 37-18 edge in shots, East fell, 2-1. They bounced back the next day with another low-scoring victory, this time edging North St. Paul 2-1 in overtime. The offensive power outage at State seems to have done the Hounds in, though they bid farewell to their deep senior class knowing they’d made East a presence on the state hockey scene.

The 1962 and 1963 seasons stalled out in the regional semifinals in one-goal losses to Greenway and International Falls. The mid-60s were the Falls’ time to shine, as they put together one of the state’s greatest dynasties, winning titles in 1962, and 1964 through 1966, and losing the 1963 championship in overtime to St. Paul Johnson.

The greatest threat to the Falls’ dominance in northeastern Minnesota, however, came from Duluth East. In 1964, East reloaded with another core of four UMD-bound players (Tom Ahrens, John McKay, Dave Maertz, and Ben Wolfe) plus future Hamilton standout Tom Wheeler. The result was the Hounds’ best regular season to date, as they lost only one game, though I could not find a game-by-game schedule. East and the Falls again collided in the Region 7 title game, and once again, East prevailed by a 3-2 score. As luck would have it, the Falls entered the Tournament through the Region 3 back door, and the teams met again in the State quarterfinals. This time around, it was the Falls’ turn to eke out a one-goal win, despite a 25-20 East edge in shots on goal. East thus became the last team to beat and the first team to lose to the Broncos as they began their record-setting 59-game winning streak, a mark that still stands today. They went undefeated through the next two seasons until they finally fell in a November 1966 game against Duluth Cathedral.

East lost 3-0 to Roseau in the consolation round, and went home without any hardware. The 1964 section title was East’s last trip to State under Rolle, and closed out what we might call the Bronze Age of Duluth East hockey: a seven-year stretch of four Tourney berths complete with a third place finish and a title. And though it would be another eleven years before East made its way back to St. Paul, they still had plenty of entertaining moments in the ensuing years.

East and the Falls met yet again in the 1965 final, though this time the Falls forsook the drama and creamed the Hounds, 8-1. A playoff format change gave East a second chance at the Tournament; instead of automatically handing out the Region 3 back door berth, the MSHSL debuted a one-game playoff between the runners-up in Region 7 and Region 8. East took on Thief River Falls for the right to advance but came up short, 2-1.

The 1966 team had another strong regular season, including a series split with third place State finisher South St. Paul and a one-goal loss to runner-up Roseau. The Hounds marched to yet another District 26 title and won their regional quarterfinal against Virginia, but rising power Greenway proved too much to handle in the semifinals. The Raiders would go on to finish fifth at the 66 Tourney before winning back-to-back titles in 1967 and 1968.

By the late 1960s, East was not only struggling to match Region 7’s finest; they were no longer the best team in the city of Duluth. The team that supplanted them was not a threat in the playoffs, however; it was Duluth Cathedral, which participated in the private school tournament until 1975. Cathedral won five straight Catholic school titles under coach Del Genereau from 1965-1969 and featured such stars as NHLer Phil Hoene and Steve “Pokey” Trachsel. East did not beat Cathedral during that stretch, and was on the wrong end of perhaps the most famous Duluth high school game that decade. In the final game of a 1966-67 season sold-out high school tripleheader at the newly minted Duluth Arena (later known as the DECC), East was tied 3-3 with Cathedral in the second when Hoene scored a natural hat trick in all of 27 seconds. As frustrating as those games must have been for Hounds fans, those Cathedral teams were deeply intertwined with East’s future: they included current Hounds head coach Mike Randolph and his longtime assistant, Larry Trachsel.

Cathedral losses aside, the 1967 season was a strong one for the Hounds, as they beat state powers International Falls and Roseau and sailed through the District 26 playoffs to an easy title. The team’s five regular season losses in Coach Rolle’s final year were all narrow defeats against top-end teams, and the Hounds appeared primed for another deep playoff run. But the tables turned in the first round of the region playoffs, and Rolle’s tenure concluded, rather fittingly, with a 5-0 loss to his longtime nemesis, International Falls. Rolle is, at last report, still alive and living in Duluth, and looked quite sharp several years ago when he took part in a ceremony at the Heritage Center honoring the 1960 State champions.

Next week: East under coach Don Bourdeau (1968-1984).

Hounds Hockey History I: Introduction

Lest my hockey-writing development lapse while other hockey writers work hard on their craft in summer training programs, I’ve decided to launch a series on the history of Duluth East high school hockey. I will still have non-hockey content; this will just be a weekly feature. This project is quite some time in the making, and there are still a number of holes in the record books (especially in the early years) that I still hope and plan to fill. Research for this project draws from a variety of sources, including:

-My own memory, for roughly the past ten years.

-The Duluth-News Tribune online archives, which date to 1995.

-Several other stray articles written in the past 10-15 years, most prominently a series of columns by former Star Tribune writer and Duluthian John Gilbert.

-Video of East section finals and State Tournaments since 1991. (Yes, I own just about all of them; no, I am not making copies; I have given some thought to getting them onto Youtube, though that is not a priority right now.)

-Archives of historical data provided by Lee at MinnHock, the Hill-Murray website, and the 2000 book Let’s Play Hockey Presents a Complete History of the Minnesota Boys and Girls High School Hockey Tournament, 1945-2000.

-Duluth East yearbooks, though I was unable to get my hands on copies from 1951, 1962, 1963, and 1964.

Since I have no memory of most seasons and am constructing this history backwards, there are bound to be plenty of holes, assumptions, and selective readings of history. That’s the only way to make this work. I welcome any information that might fill in some of the gaps, and different perspectives that I might not be aware of. That said, the purpose of this project isn’t a data dump, but an attempt to build my own narrative through 64 years of hockey history. At this point I’m envisioning a series of nine parts or so, with most of the emphasis on the past twenty years, which offer the most source material, the juiciest storylines, and probably the greatest reader interest, too. I’ll devote the remainder of this post to the origins of East hockey.

One quick note: rather than write out every season as two years (e.g. “2012-2013”), I abbreviate it by using simply the half of the season in which the playoffs are held. That is, if I say talk about the Hounds’ achievements in 2013, I’m talking about the 2012-2013 season, not 2013-2014, or the calendar year of 2013.

The story of one of Minnesota’s most prominent high school hockey programs begins some five years after the birth of the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament in 1945. With the city’s population on the upswing, Duluth East Junior High became a high school in the fall of 1949, and put together a hockey team in its first year. Teacher Frank Hart took the helm as the head coach, and his team’s first game was against Floodwood, a tiny town west of Duluth that no longer fields a hockey team. The Hounds won, 6-0, and followed that up with a 9-3 win over Duluth Cathedral (now Marshall) and a 19-1 win over Hermantown. (Some fans might be surprised to learn that Hermantown, now a State Tournament regular, was a complete doormat until the late 1990s.) They wound up with a 7-1 record at the end of their regular season, though they appear not to have participated in the playoffs. The sole loss was an 8-1 pasting at the hands of Duluth Denfeld.

The Hounds’ most common opponents in those early days were the teams that went on to become members of the now-defunct Big Ten Conference of northeastern Minnesota. If these Proctor baseball historians are to be believed, the conference officially formed in 1959 as the Big Nine, and eventually evolved into the still-existing Lake Superior Conference. Members appear to include the four Duluth public high schools (East, Central, Denfeld, and Morgan Park); the city’s western neighbors of Cloquet, Proctor, and Hermantown (eventually—I think they were the team that turned the Big Nine into the Big Ten in 1963); and two towns on the north shore of Lake Superior, Silver Bay and Two Harbors. Duluth Cathedral also appears to have been a conference member; however, as a private school, they had their own playoffs prior to 1975. Otherwise, the conference seemed to line up with District 26, which fed its top four finishers in its district tournament into Region 7. In the eight-team Region 7 Tournament, the Duluth-area schools competed against (and were often slaughtered by) teams from the Iron Range and the far reaches of northeastern Minnesota in search of a State Tournament berth.

Records are spotty for the next few years, and East lurched through a couple of middling seasons. All I have for 1951 is a 4-6-1 record, and the 1952 yearbook suggests the listed 4-2 regular season record is incomplete. The Hounds did make their first regional tournament in that year, and promptly lost to eventual state champion Hibbing in the first round. From 1952 on I have rosters for every season but 1963 and 1965, but with these early teams, it’s hard to find much evidence of post-high school careers, unless the player in question is particularly famous or a certain college has its own database. At any rate, the 3-4 result under coach Alvin Ness in 1953 was the last losing season on record, meaning the Hounds wrapped up their 60th consecutive winning season in 2013. While the results of those first few seasons weren’t awful, there wasn’t much to suggest the Hounds could become a state powerhouse, either. First, two key people would need to leave their mark on the program.

Up next week: a post on East’s fourteen years under coach Glenn Rolle, who guided the Hounds to their first brush with glory.

On Developing Hockey Players in Minnesota

The NHL playoffs may be nearing their close, but the hockey season never really ends. For top-end Minnesota high school players, this means the junior league camps are just around the corner. The players will have to decide if they want to forgo the remainder of their high school careers for hockey opportunities in other cities. Some will do so to get out of, say, a bad relationship with a coach, but most will do so in pursuit of better “development” as a player. The better junior leagues have longer seasons and older players, which offer increased competition and challenges that may not be available in high school. Unsurprisingly, this also results in heated and vitriolic debates over which path makes the most sense; I’d guess that over half of the disciplinary actions I have to take on the hockey forum I moderate relate to these arguments.

The number of players choosing different development models shot up dramatically in the late 90s, and though it has since leveled off somewhat, the hockey scene will never be the same. Across the Twin Cities, a proliferation of summer hockey programs has given rise to several that have moved into the winter season and now, whether directly or indirectly, antagonize the Minnesota hockey model. (While the pre-high school, community-based youth associations technically have nothing to do with high schools, the two work in such concert that I will conflate them in this piece.) The new programs attempt to group together elite players on teams that play schedules that are far more intense than anything allowed by the powers that be—whose responses  to such challenges, as one might expect out of a many-layered bureaucracy, have often been rather slow and lurching. Canadian Major Junior leagues now eye young American players with relish, and there is something of a silent war going on between the Canadians and the proponents of high school and U.S. college hockey. (Playing Canadian Major Juniors leaves players ineligible for the NCAA.) The Alec Baer incident this past winter was probably only the opening round in an impending battle of development models.

Putting myself in the shoes of a hockey parent, I understand the shift. If I someday have a kid who loves hockey, I doubt I’d hesitate to give him or her the best development opportunities my money can buy, and I wouldn’t hold an ambitious kid back from heading off to another league if it were a good fit. Sure, I love the high school game more than any other level, and in my perfect world, no kid would ever leave. But perfect worlds aren’t necessarily good guides for what to do in the real one, and I also can look at this game from a far enough distance that I have no desire to sacrifice the goals of others to the altar of community-based hockey.

Still, two issues leave me with some reservations.

The first comes from Herb Brooks, the Minnesota hockey legend and coach of the U.S. national team that won the gold medal in the 1980 Miracle on Ice. Brooks envisioned hockey development as a pyramid, with a broad base of community-centered hockey propping up the top players. By its nature, this model is somewhat inefficient; it doesn’t allow the top players group together to maximize their development. But it also recognizes that culture matters, and that the long-term health of hockey in Minnesota requires attention to the things that make hockey more than a game. It is near-impossible to measure the value created by the bonds of community loyalty and the mystique of the ever-so-Minnesotan high school tournament, but it certainly exists, and I sincerely doubt the dream of playing for a team in Alberta or the 2004 Birth Year Team Minnesota Wolfpack Sponsored by Car Dealer X would be able to match the pull of playing for Edina or Roseau or Hill-Murray High. The reason football is so embedded in the American psyche is because its sole development model touches just about everyone who goes through a traditional American high school; kids who have minimal interest in the game still show up on Friday nights to join their friends in a rite that venerates the players but also lets each and every fan participate, an experience passed forward through schools and families and generations. The same is true for Minnesota hockey in many communities, and losing that cultural cachet in the interest of efficient development would be a real loss.

This is especially true for a sport that, due to high equipment and ice rental costs, has largely come to be the province of the wealthy. Hockey has big enough image issues as it is. In this day in age we like to pretend that any choices we make that are “best for our kids” don’t have any consequences beyond said kids. They do. People who act according to strict self-interest are naïve if they think others will not judge them for abandoning a community or having different priorities. I’m not saying it is right for those considering leaving to abandon their aspirations under communal pressure, but if they do not understand where the community is coming from, conflict will ensue. Culture matters.

The second issue has to do with the very notion of “development” itself. Many critics have wondered whether young hockey players are mature enough to leave home early, or whether the rigors of an intense training regimen will lead to burnout or injury. These are real concerns that have affected some players who seek different development paths, though they can be mitigated in various ways. Still, my questions are a bit more profound. We can justify just about anything claiming that it leads to better development, but development is such an abstract term that any serious contemplation of what it means requires some distance. Sure, more ice time will almost certainly make a player better, but we have a very limited grasp on the degrees to which it can help. At what point do we hit the point of diminishing returns, and can a different path fundamentally change the trajectory of careers that are also dependent on genetics and work ethics and other issues that pop up in life? Advocates of models have lots of anecdotes and select statistics they like to throw around, and plenty of them do make intuitive sense. But until someone can put together a study with a huge sample size that takes players and compares their career trajectories and isolates as many variables as is humanly possible, we are all groping around in the dark.

I can go even further on the development front. Does the arms race for better hockey development have an ending point, or will it simply go on until the end of time, with more and more opportunities that are less and less accessible to most anyone? On an even more existential level, is youth hockey always a means to an end, or is there more to it? Is childhood a constant progression from one step to the next, or does thinking of hockey players as crops to be grown and harvested somehow impoverish our understanding of them—and if so, in what ways?

I don’t pose any of these questions with the hope that they will lead anyone to have a sudden change of heart. I just hope people might consider them with as much objectivity as possible, instead of running away from them because they are too deep and complicated, or trying to cram knee-jerk responses into a preexisting worldview. Our inability to be completely objective is no excuse for not trying.

For the Minnesota kids who do choose to leave this offseason, I’ll be rooting for all of you. But I do have one simple request: remember where you came from. Even if you bounced around for a bit or didn’t quite fall in love with your particular program the way some people do, it is a part of you. If you love hockey, you are in some way indebted to the many people who keep it going at each and every level.

Take the example of Zack Fitzgerald—a player who is not from Duluth (his family moved there when his older brother, a future NHLer, was in high school), and left Duluth East High for Canadian Major Juniors after his freshman year. He has had a successful career as an enforcer in the American Hockey League, one step below the NHL, and got into one game in the big show. Yet he spent his formative years in Duluth, and this summer will find him back home, running a hockey camp along with his older brother. There are countless ways to help, whether through volunteer work or philanthropy; God knows schools (both public and private) need all financial the help they can get. I’d also advise donors to look beyond one’s alma mater, as means allow; for example, the need for support at Duluth East, while real, is far less pressing than it is for the dwindling program of their crosstown rivals, Duluth Denfeld. Sustaining the hockey culture in Minnesota requires a broader perspective, and programs that get financially disadvantaged kids on skates can help in ways that go far beyond the rink. So long as the base of the pyramid remains solid, I am at peace with players pursuing their hockey careers in any way they see fit. And if that base isn’t solid, before long it won’t much matter which paths players take.

A Coaching Controversy Revisited

 

 

 

Today marks the ten-year anniversary of the most infamous day in the history of Duluth East hockey. It wasn’t a loss in a game, nor an embarrassing off-ice incident. In truth, the stunning news of April 24, 2003 didn’t affect the team’s performance in any measurable way. But the decision handed down that day attracted statewide attention and dominated Duluth’s news for the next year. The Duluth East administration chose not to renew the contract of head coach Mike Randolph, effectively firing the state’s most decorated coach.

ImagePhoto credit: Duluth East High School Hockey Facebook Page

At the time, Randolph was a hockey icon. In his fifteen years at the helm of the Hounds, he turned a perennial underachiever into one of Minnesota’s premier hockey programs, guiding them to eight State Tournaments and two championships. East hockey had become a breeding ground for Division One hockey players, abandoning its conference to play the most difficult schedule possible and attracting talent from across the state. Randolph had a reputation as an intense, fiery leader; a brilliant hockey mind who demanded excellence at every turn. His will to win was unquestioned.

But as is so often the case, the very traits that made Randolph great were also his downfall. He pushed his players so hard and was so unrelenting in his demands that some lost their passion for the game. He had to cut many players over the years, and he never was one to mince words in doing so. In his efforts to balance the development of his stars and playing time for all, he’d inevitably made a number of enemies. Fixated on his team, he delegated team fundraisers to his assistants, and some accounting issues sprang up. Randolph, his critics argued, had lost sight of what high school sports were supposed to be. Down came the axe, with no explanation given: data privacy laws allowed the administration to dismiss him without cause.

If Randolph’s tale were a Greek tragedy, the story would have ended there, with the hero felled by his tragic flaw. But Randolph, a fighter to the end, demanded answers. His legions of supporters mobilized against the alleged injustice, and the coach waived his right to privacy and threw open his confidential personnel file for the world to see. His supporters had responses ready for each and every charge, and claimed conflicts of interest at every turn; many of the complainants were parents of cut players with axes to grind—including the East principal—and a leading Randolph critic on the school board had prominent ties to East’s private school rival, Duluth Marshall. No one seemed to have an objective account of what really went on in the East hockey program, and no one’s testimony seemed entirely trustworthy. All of the intrigue culminated in several explosive exchanges with the school board, which ultimately voted to uphold the administration’s decision.

For one year, anyway. That fall, the fate of a hockey coach became an election issue. Three school board members who had opposed Randolph’s reinstatement either lost their bids for re-election or retired. In April 2004, shortly after East’s 3rd place finish in that year’s Tournament, the board declared it had erred the previous year. Randolph had his job back.

Naturally, people with little interest in hockey found the whole affair absurd. Duluth public schools faced declining enrollment and tough budgetary decisions at the time, and yet the only thing that inspired any passion was a man in charge of an extracurricular activity who made $4,000 a year. And even if Randolph had been wronged, why drag out a fight that would only serve as a distraction?

To some, it was a matter of justice, pure and simple. To those who took a longer view, it raised crucial questions about the meaning of high school sports, and even a high school education in general. The debate over whether the program was “too big” probably deserves its own post, but there are plenty of other things to consider. There’s no doubt Randolph was (and is) a tough coach, and that he is not for everyone. But he wouldn’t be controversial if it didn’t work. Is high school too soon to place a hockey team under the command of someone so demanding? Are the claims of burnout enough to invalidate the testimony of those who cite Randolph as one of the most important formative figures in their young lives? Even if the administration had just cause to can Randolph, were there issues with their methods? Should the wronged party (whichever one it might have been) ever stop fighting an injustice for the good of the team, or the community? Where are the lines between demands for perfection and emotional abuse, between intensity and depravity? Would we rather have coaches who push us to the limit, or ones who take things as they come? When framed in those terms, the questions become near-existential, and it’s not so hard to see why the Randolph saga enjoyed so much attention in Duluth. In the beginning it was only about hockey, but by the end came to mean so much more.

So, what verdict might we pass on Randolph’s return to Duluth East? Naturally, it’s in the eye of the beholder. I’ve been through nearly every press clipping, talked to many people around the program, watched every old State Tournament game on DVD, and done my share of eavesdropping at the rink, and I’m not still not sure I have an easy answer. East has been to six State Tournaments in his nine years back on the job, though the third state title has eluded him, and there have been a few playoff disappointments along the way. Moreover, the scrutiny brought on by the 2003-04 saga has left him under the microscope ever since, with controversies at every turn: an accusation of physical abuse (unsubstantiated), players leaving high school for junior hockey (some citing the coach as a reason), Randolph’s criticisms of those who leave, alleged favoritism when his own son was on the team (untrue, in my opinion), claims of recruiting, and scheduling controversies, along with the typical disputes over playing time and cuts that plague most any high-profile program.

On more than one occasion, I’ve wished he might find some way to ride off into the sunset so that we could leave all of this behind and move on to the next coach. But that, of course, wouldn’t be Randolph’s style, and for the time being East hockey is wedded to him, both in victory and in defeat. And even if I grumble from the stands from time to time, I can’t quite picture East hockey without Mike Randolph stalking the bench behind his players, arms folded, glower in place as he barks at his Hounds, orders them to begin that patient cycle that so enthralled me as I watched from the stands in his first season back on the job. I was a freshman back then, and without his quarter century of work, I doubt I’d care about this sport half as much as I do.

Complexity, Causes, and a Championship

Time to use some hockey to make a point about complexity and causes.

Here is a replay of the triple-overtime championship-winning goal in the 2011 Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament. In that game, Eden Prairie defeated Duluth East, 3-2. (Sorry for the grainy video, but it’s the best I can do.)

This is about as straightforward as it comes in a sport: the puck goes in the net, one team wins, the other one loses. So, what caused that goal? What decided the 2011 championship?

At the most basic level, you have the excellent effort by the goal-scorer, Kyle Rau, diving to swat the puck into the net. There are also two Duluth East miscues: the goaltender letting the puck squirt through him, and the defenseman, Andrew Kerr, fanning on his attempt to clear it.

Others might point to luck or fate, too: as later replays showed, after Rau made contact with the puck on his dive, it hit the goalpost, bounced out, and deflected off Kerr’s skate before sliding into the back of the net. It was a great play by Rau, who was the state’s best player that year, but not even he could have planned something like that.

But why stop there? Let’s rewind this play a bit: you have the initial shot from the Eden Prairie defenseman, and the sequence of events from both teams that led up to that shot, of which you see only a fraction in this clip. And for Rau to even be in this position in the first place, countless other events had to fall in line. Both teams had scoring chances throughout the three overtimes, and in regulation as well. With East up 1-0 after two periods, one of their best defensemen went off with an injury. The second East goal was fairly soft—one the Eden Prairie goalie would have normally saved. The referees also played a role; they called only one penalty in the entire game, much to the chagrin of Eden Prairie fans—Kerr put together a complete highlight reel of vicious checks on Rau before the fateful play at the end. Any little change in a play, and this moment doesn’t happen. And that doesn’t even touch the months and years of preparation that led up to this game.

Keep in mind that hockey is, conceptually, fairly straightforward. It follows set rules, has a limited number of actors involved, and the goal is obvious: put the puck into your opponent’s net more often than they put it in yours. It has been studied by enough people over the years that we now have a reasonably good idea of what it takes to win a championship. We can know what to look for in individual players, and how they fit within the coach’s scheme; computer models can weed through the flood of information and statistics and predict outcomes with commendable accuracy. We can correlate many things with success.

But nailing down a precise cause; the exact catalyst that left Eden Prairie dancing in delight, and Duluth East flat on the ice in dejection? That’s an entirely different story.

And if it’s so difficult to do in hockey, how can it be any easier in any other realm of human affairs; ones with more actors, less clear goals, and fewer sets of rules we can all agree on? From politics to warfare to those mundane events that pop up in our daily lives, how can we pin down a sequence of events with any degree of accuracy?

Now, this train of thought could easily lead to a sort of causal nihilism. I don’t want to go there. The point here isn’t that it’s impossible to label a single cause. It is that finding these causes is a lot harder than it may at first seem, and that anyone who looks to study this sort of thing needs to go at it with a proper dose of humility. Any sort of analysis or study that tries to end the conversation, whatever the merits of its arguments, suffers from a conceit that does its audience a disservice. At some point, of course, we need to make a decision and move on. But social science, for all its explanatory power, is not a hockey game. Anyone who approaches it with the intent to win or lose has missed the point, and that can be a serious problem.

So, what does this Duluth East alumnus think caused that goal? My philosophy is that one has to boil it down to what one can control, which in this case means pointing out the two plays the East players could have made, but didn’t. There is no shame in taking that responsibility, especially for two otherwise rock-solid players who had fantastic high school careers. They were minor mistakes, but in a game that was so dead-even that it almost had to end on a fluky play, those two in tandem made the difference. Hockey can be a cruel sport, but, well, so can life. That’s my opinion, and while I doubt I’ll change it, it doesn’t invalidate the many other accounts of this game.

At any rate, this is the mindset I hope to use on this blog. Tomorrow, we’ll add some politics to the discussion.