Tag Archives: steve pitoscia

A Winter to Remember

It is never easy to say goodbye at the end of a great run. None of it quite feels real, even if we know this was it, that everyone must ultimately go their separate ways for the world to go on. This season’s Duluth East boys’ hockey team went on one of those runs, exceeding every expectation I had and bringing me a barrage messages from hockey friends across the state: are we really going to see those black jerseys and red breezers in St. Paul again? (The jerseys aren’t black anymore, I patiently explained.) Suddenly it seemed possible, a rebirth at hand. But the time for those goodbyes arrived abruptly, one step before a team could reach its ultimate dream.

But if it wasn’t going to be a storybook ending, it was still a tale to remember. A 5-1 December win over Andover served notice that Duluth East hockey was back, and a 6-0 blitz of Grand Rapids slew any demons with that old rival. The team was potent, fun to watch, going off on lesser competition and rattling off a 17-1-1 stretch ahead of the section final. Two improbable wins near the end, a dramatic comeback against Champlin Park and a defensive survival against powerful Rogers, gave off team of destiny vibes. This team didn’t have top five talent, didn’t run some genius scheme, but it just seemed rock solid from top to bottom, free to play good hockey, a whole host of good things running together and building toward playoff success.

I had my lurking doubts that I didn’t dare voice too loudly. The less charitable interpretation of the Champlin Park and Rogers games would suggest they struggled with a borderline top 15 opponent and couldn’t quite skate with one of the state’s elite. The offense was clearly a beat off after Thomas Gunderson’s injury in the final game of the regular season, and though he gave a valiant effort in the section final, the prolific top line never quite got on track against Andover. The regular season meeting had perhaps given the impression that the Hounds could skate stride for stride with the Huskies, but when Andover’s three bringers of doom came off their leashes in the second period, there was no keeping up. The Hounds started to press too hard, while the Andover defense, noticeably improved since their December effort, swatted aside the comeback push. Before long it had spiraled out of reach, a rare laugher of a playoff defeat for a good Hounds team, and a tough pill to swallow after all they had built. For all the steps taken this season, the final one was a bridge too far.

It is the nature of these season wraps to linger on what could have been, but what simply was did the job this year. Coach Steve Pitoscia and his staff buried the ghosts of last season and built a team that played exciting, clean, consistent hockey. The ever-ratcheting pressure of the Mike Randolph years was conspicuous in its absence; this team was going to win or lose with what it had, no more, no less. What they had was considerable, and such a positive season should dispel much of the peddling of decline and fall, or any instinct toward exodus at the youth level. This group can now confidently build toward the future now, and while the East of the mid-90s or even the mid-teens can’t be remade overnight, they can continue to build the foundations and open the doors for another virtuous cycle of upcoming and inbound talent.

As always, I thank the seniors. There are the four defensemen, all varsity players for at least three seasons, who leave behind a large hole: Grady Downs, the puck-eating redemption story; Aidan Spenningsby, the dangling sparkplug; Henry Murray, so often the steady rock who blossomed into a great high school defenseman this past season; and Grant Winkler, who played five years for the Hounds, by the end becoming the two-way force at the center of everything the team did. Nathan Teng was the fan favorite, Hunter Cooke put in the work, and Boden Donovan had his bursts that sometimes reminded me of another Hound who once donned number 22. (How strange will it now be to have the Hounds without a Donovan boy?) Makoto Sudoh developed into a true horse, logging heavy minutes and making his presence felt. And Cole Christian was the true catalyst, a long way removed from his pretty freshman dangles as he exploded with a monster senior year that I’d hoped would get him more Mr. Hockey Finalist consideration but at the very least showed the world what he is capable of.

With belief in this program restored, next season looks bright, even without Christian and the four stalwarts on D. The team brings back an interesting array of offensive toys, including Gunderson, Wyatt Peterson, Noah Teng, Caden Cole, and Ian Christian. Kole Kronstedt offers stability in net, and his backup, Drew Raukar, will also be back in the fold. There are a few other pieces worth a look from the ranks of the JV and the swing liners, and a respectable season from the bantams provides added reinforcement. Moreover, 7AA is in flux, with comings and goings amid opt-ups and an excess of teams to begin with. Andover will remain the favorite as long as it is still in the section, but it does have to replace its sublime trio, which is no small feat. Grand Rapids will be on the young side, down the rigid back side that kept it relevant this season; Blaine’s rebuilding road is long, Coon Rapids still has some gap to close, and Rock Ridge has to prove it can hang in AA. Even with the defensive rebuild at hand, East is in good shape to be right there again next season.

* * *

I close this postmortem on a personal note. After three straight rough seasons, I had begun to wonder if it was time to start taking some steps back from this East hockey fixation of mine. I have plenty of other demands on my time, so many things I want to do, and producing content on bad hockey felt less and less compelling. The team’s success this season helped correct for some of that, of course. But it went much deeper.

This was the sort of season that took all of that blather about community in hockey, the sort of thing we reserved skeptics are supposed to shrug off or pick at, and made it real. It came through Mom Bus road trips and late night beverages with the dads, via chaotic karaoke and casual warm-ups at Clyde. Whether through the works of the old hands looking to restore a program to its former glory or the newcomers seeing it with fresh eyes, and by all accounts through the concerted effort of a very tight group of boys, it all became what so many of us dream a sport can be. And in that final week, which was among the toughest I have ever lived, hockey became a balm and an escape for me, the final result in no way dimming the glow of a brilliant ride. Thank you, fellow Greyhounds, for a winter to remember, and even for those who are moving on, let’s come back together again next season. These goodbyes, it turns out, are never truly the final word.

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Racing Hounds

For the better part of three decades, Duluth East hockey had a particular brand. Aside from the occasional exploits of a Dave Spehar or a Garrett Worth, there were certain things one could always expect out of those black jerseys. A tough, gritty style. A firm defense. A willingness to wear down the opposition, to outhit them and grind them up with an intense forecheck and a suffocating neutral zone. There were wrinkles here and there to adapt to the talent at hand, some of which yielded great results, but even in relative down years, people in the stands knew exactly what to expect.

In 2023, Duluth East hockey bears little resemblance to that age. Gone are the clogged neutral zones, the yells for the second forechecker to beat a hasty retreat back to the blue line. Even the black jerseys are gone. (Sorry, Coach, I’m going to struggle with that one for a while.) This team is a group of racing Hounds, flying up and down the ice, and behind a surging top unit and a Mr. Hockey finalist-type season out of Cole Christian, East is 13-1-1 in its last fifteen, back among the serious contenders in Minnesota.

No team ever wins anything in early February, but these Hounds have already made real progress. The air has fully cleared from the misery of the past few seasons, and the hockey is just straight-up fun to watch. Anyone who wandered away from East hockey after the past few seasons and has not yet come back is missing out. The Hounds bury lower-tier opponents with regularity, and even if they have an off period or two, they have the firepower to come roaring back. The offensive output has been like clockwork, never really slumping, even if they do get caught deep and sometimes bleed a few too many goals for comfort. The signs of potential were there in a 3-5 start; frankly, they were there at times last season too, albeit buried beneath a lack of discipline and long periods of slop. This team has always had talent at every position, and the pieces were there, just waiting to be unleashed. In his second year as head coach, Steve Pitoscia has engineered a reversal.

In mid-December I posed a few scenarios on how East, then 1-4, might rise out of the realm of moral victories and start logging real ones. One of these involved the stars putting the team on their backs, and that has most certainly happened. Christian’s heroics (58 points in 23 games) have led the way here, but Thomas Gunderson has developed some good chemistry with his linemates over the course of the season, while Wyatt Peterson does some of the dirty work that frees up Christian and Gunderson to fly. They may not have the sheer high-end potency of Worth-Donovan-Mageau or Randolph-Toninato-Olson, but they are carving out a space among the great Greyhound lines, with few able to keep up such a ferocious pace. On the back end, Grant Winkler has become a dominant force, and Henry Murray has also grown into a reassuring presence. The East top unit can now stack up with just about anyone’s.

There has been growth in other areas too, with players like sophomore Caden Cole making his way into double-digit goals and Makoto Sudoh throwing his weight around, along with some respectable lower line work and a stable second defensive pair. In December I also said the team needed to prove it could win a big, close game, and it has started doing that down the stretch, holding off pushes from Centennial and Cloquet and, most recently, mounting a stirring comeback against Champlin Park in a game in which they’d looked dead to rites for a spell. These Hounds continue to check box after box, finding ways to win and bringing the Heritage Center back to life.

It all started with a win over Andover in December. These Huskies are not the Huskies who won the state title a season ago; gone are the leaders of a stout defense, the Brimsek-contending goalie. But their top line remains otherworldly, and the program is gushing with talent that should allow it to fill holes with relative ease. But when the Hounds took it to them in a 5-1 home win, it was clear the gap in 7AA was not what most of us thought it might be. When East followed that up with a 6-0 win over Grand Rapids on Friday Night Ice, the Hounds were off to the races. Their only loss since came at the hands of top-ranked Minnetonka.

Andover, after a choppy start to season, has joined the Hounds in finding an offensive groove. The Hounds and Huskies are clearly the class of 7AA, as Grand Rapids has flatlined some; the Halloween Machine’s early defensive prowess has not always held up under relentless pressure, their offense too hit-or-miss to sustain a top 20 status. Still, the Thunderhawks remain ominous, capable of finding the formula to shut down a semifinal opponent. A feisty Cloquet team, meanwhile, has scored a few respectable wins, and will look to leave a mark in its final season in AA. The section is far from the state’s deepest, but it provides some intrigue, and if it does come down to East and Andover on a Thursday night at Amsoil, it will be another great heavyweight fight.

This team isn’t a finished product yet. Goaltender Kole Kronstedt would no doubt appreciate fewer odd-man rushes coming his way, and a few fewer stretches where they lapse into chasing teams around their own zone. The top line plays a lot, and long shifts always unsettle me. A rigidly structured opponent can leave them struggling for answers, though other than Minnetonka, not one of them has managed to keep East down for three periods since early December. Regular season winning streaks mean nothing in late February or early March, when teams truly leave their legacies. But belief is a dangerous thing, and after three seasons in the hockey wilderness, these Hounds have restored it on the east side of Duluth.

Embarrassed

In my correspondence and conversations following Duluth East’s 6-2 loss to crosstown rival Duluth Denfeld on Wednesday, the word “embarrassed,” sometimes augmented by colorful adjectives, repeated itself often. Those with a stake in the future worried about the optics. Loyalists of former coach Mike Randolph, on a spectrum from grim observation to vindictive pleasure, lamented his absence. Some said they felt sick, and wondered whether all of this was actually worth it. None of these comments had anything to do with the score.

The proceedings at a packed Heritage Center were not an isolated incident. A ragged affair in Champlin Park the next night marked East’s eighth consecutive game with over ten penalty minutes. The Greyhounds took thirty minutes of penalties in a win over Superior, including a pair of five-and-game penalties for fighting. They took twenty minutes against Cloquet, the bulk coming on a two-and-ten after the buzzer at the end of a period. The gamesheet for the Denfeld game shows fifty-three minutes of penalties, and it may be missing a misconduct or two. It became hard to keep track as the referees dismissed a succession of Greyhounds to the locker room. Those statistics do not capture the full-game suspensions associated with game misconducts. The extent of the deterioration against Denfeld, which carried on past the bludgeoning behind the net through a series of gratuitous excesses as time wound down, exceeded that of any I have ever seen in high school hockey. One of the state’s great programs had become the Bayfront Bullies.

I am far from a scold about decorum. I have always had a soft spot for the Garrett Worths of the world, the kids who earn some right to be cocky with their performance; I relish the long tradition of Greyhound sparkplugs and enforcers, from Andrew Kerr to Alex Spencer to Ricky Lyle. I ate up just about every bit of the Cloquet game, from the intensely hostile crowd to the Hounds’ dogpile atop the Lumberjack logo at center ice after the overtime game-winner, all of which felt edgy but within that tradition. In isolation, I can stomach the Superior fight, which seemed to spark the team from its slumber that night; every team will go overboard from time to time. Referees will inevitably get some things wrong, and sometimes the other team is the obvious aggressor. But when a trend emerges, so do the more fundamental questions.

The questions have complicated answers. After a few years of mediocrity, the hunger to win can slip; stakes lower and focus fades, and hockey becomes one big romp with the boys instead of the pursuit of a section title or a next level opportunity. There remain some parents who will make any excuse for their spawn, and some will even egg on that general mediocrity. The players who do care deeply can get frustrated or sucked into crimes of passion as they boil over. These kids have also gone through two years of Covid hell, and I am convinced a more virtual and isolated life has only fueled certain antisocial tendencies, only led more people to retreat inward and then explode in anger when reality intrudes on that inner world. Perhaps no group has suffered more than kids currently in adolescence, who have a hard enough time navigating those waters in normal times. And, yes, in the absence of the unflinching taskmaster and disciplinarian who ran this program for decades, a man who had no qualms about ordering even his greatest players to the bench when they crossed the line, a new culture was bound to emerge. At times that new culture has actually felt freer, but now that looseness is showing its ugly dark side.

In a December post I said I would not judge new coach Steve Pitoscia much this season. I did not want to nitpick about penalty kills or line-rolling as he learned the ropes. He is getting some flak he does not deserve; he played no role in his predecessor’s ouster, and, whatever history may exist between the two men, he has only said the right things in public about him. Even the greatest coaches cannot control everything, as incidents from Hill-Murray to Eden Prairie have shown this season. But if this is the baseline, we will need to see improvement. I was not around for the years preceding Mike Randolph’s tenure, but the tales I’ve heard of those days—two coaches lasting two years each, a program mired in undisciplined chaos—could sound eerily like the present unless things change.

After the Cloquet game, I was halfway done with a piece on this team’s halting progress, on how I was still enjoying myself, even as the product bore little resemblance to the East hockey of five years ago. My loyalty to the institution and the many great people who are a part of it remained strong. Those fundamentals are still there, and somehow, if healthy and composed, this team could still pull a surprise or two in sections. (If they do, the cheeseburgers are on me.) But this week, the results on the ice seem secondary to the escapades in a program that has, for so long, stood for so much more.

Uncharted Territory

For the first fifteen years or so of my time following Duluth East hockey, I had the pleasure of generally watching this sport at its peak. For the next two, I watched a lot of ugly hockey, but at least much of that was by design. Now, I am rubbing my eyes in bafflement at an 0-6 start, willing to give away my kingdom for a clean breakout. How does a program that ruled northeast Minnesota for decades pick up the pieces?

Duluth East 2021-2022 hockey opened after a profoundly weird offsesason that saw the exit of Mike Randolph as head coach and an exodus of players from a program that for so long had been a destination. Into the void stepped Steve Pitoscia, who combined a long East pedigree as a bantam coach with a stint in junior hockey, a solid résumé worthy of the position. But recovery from what this program has undergone over the past two years or so will take longer than a few games and require more than some fresh vibes. Duluth East hockey is in a strange, difficult place, and the task ahead is not one for the faint of heart.

I intend to cast very little judgment on Pitoscia and his staff this season. They are new, and many of the greatest high school coaches never would have gotten anywhere if they were judged on their first season alone. Pitoscia has the unenviable position of following a larger-than-life icon whose final stanza at East left a very sour note, both for those who supported him and those who opposed him vehemently. No rational observer can pretend the talent level here is what it has been, thanks to both a slip in the product coming out of the youth system and an exodus, both pro- and anti-Randolph, over the summer. As far as I’m concerned, the new staff is free to do as much tinkering as it would like, and I ask only for signs of progress.

The talent is not all gone, either. A junior core of Cole Christian, Grant Winkler, and Aidan Spenningsby is a decent foundation, and sophomore Thomas Gunderson looked sharp before promptly suffering an injury. We await the return of Wyatt Peterson, who showed some offensive potential as a freshman last season and has yet to play a game. There are enough other respectable defensemen that the blue line corps could be a relative strength. In goal, Zander Ziemski has had a couple of yeoman’s performances, holding up under heavy barrages and at least giving his team some chances. No one will claim this is a top seed contender, but they have enough to be a very pesky section team that could pull an upset or two.

In the games to date, the tales of woe are mounting, one after another. A Thanksgiving road trip to the Twin Cities gave the Hounds two season-opening losses, a tight contest with White Bear Lake whose final score made it look lopsided and a lopsided affair with Chaska whose final score made it seem somewhat tight. The home opener against Grand Rapids provided its share of hope; while Rapids dominated for about a 25-minute stretch in the middle of the game, East held serve in the first period and mounted a plucky comeback late in the third that made it genuinely interesting. Giving the top team in 7AA a good run in the playoffs suddenly seemed very possible.

The good feelings did not linger. A home game against Bemidji should probably have been the first win, but the game slipped away late and wound up in an overtime loss. A weekend trip to Wayzata offered nothing in the way of bright spots. The snowball rolling down the hill then collected the Forest Lake game, which had some strong play early and a 2-1 lead after two before a four-goal burst in the third buried East yet again.

One suspects that half the battle will be mental going forward, as the team tries to find itself in this murky new territory. Perhaps a remnant of Mike Randolph’s black magic lingers in the Heritage Center, one final curse cast to haunt the program that drove him out. But one thing concerns me more than any game that got away against Forest Lake or any humbling against Wayzata: the current peewee and bantam teams have all started poorly, an almost baffling lack of success given the size of the youth program. At this rate, this team could be one of the better Hounds editions of the next few years. This leads me to ponder several possible futures for Duluth East hockey.

The first sticks with an old phrase I used when talking about predicting high school hockey: “the Edina of the north.” Among Minnesota high school programs in urban areas, only the Hornets compare in their ability to stay good decade after decade, defying the seeming laws of urban expansion and family moves. But it hasn’t been entirely consistent: take the start of the decade of the 00s, for example, when, under a relatively new coach named Curt Giles who’d gone to state in his first season there, the Hornets then went six years in which they only once made a section final and never went to State. East’s descent is already probably lower than that (the Hornets did not have a losing season in that stretch), but even the most dominant program in the state hits the occasional lull. Waves come and go, and by the late 00s, the Hornets were setting the bar again.

But maybe a better comparison is Bloomington Jefferson, starting around the same point in time. The Jags were, of course, the preeminent program in the state in the early 90s, and remained one of the top two or three through into the early 00s. Their bleed was long and slow: first the defection of Greg Trebil and some talent to Holy Angels, then the retirement of Tom Saterdalen; later, some teams that might have won other sections got stuck behind that return-to-glory Edina. They were still quite good, and consistently ranked. But as the 2010s went on that started to slip away. Now, they are often a punching bag, proud of their history but potentially looking at a merger with Bloomington Kennedy, which has struggled even more. Despite some committed alumni and some okay youth talent, a return to glory in the current environment looks like a real reach. West Bloomington is now one suburb among many, a pleasant enough place but no singular attraction for hockey.

That brings us to another possible future, one that reaches even further back: Minneapolis Southwest, long the class of Minneapolis hockey and a state champion in 1970. Southwest is still a pretty well-regarded public high school, situated among the affluent neighborhoods that surround Lake Harriet; as demographic changes have come to other parts of Minneapolis, it has, if anything, seen only a greater concentration of resources. But the pressures on other programs in Minneapolis had a direct effect on Southwest. Its hockey identity is dead; while it lasted longer than the rest of the Minneapolis schools and is the primary feeder for Minneapolis hockey, it has now merged with all of them to field a single team. The good hockey players in the area frequently wind up at private schools, if they stay in the city at all, and hockey just isn’t as big of a part of the community culture. Southwest hockey is a relic of history, and the sport rarely more than a feel-good story in the city, and while there are ways to imagine that changing—the resources are there, in a way they may not be in Bloomington—they are still a long way off.

There are reasons to think all of these are possible. The east side of Duluth still has a bunch of lakefront and ridgetop real estate, a bit of new construction and a some grand old history. It has the committed alumni base and the picturesque youth rinks, and the youth association is making some changes at the squirt level that accept a changing reality. It should continue to have decent numbers and the demographics that support hockey, perhaps even some growth if certain real estate trends persist. On the other hand, the east side of Duluth is no Edina clone: it includes swaths at more middle and even lower incomes, and shares a district with Denfeld. Does East just become a feeder for some of its neighbors? Can Denfeld stay viable, or will the East identity be the casualty of a merger? These are the longer-term questions that concern me much more than a bad goal conceded to Bemidji.

For the players on this year’s team, though, these questions are far off in the mists of the future. They need to get healthy, they need to find some combinations that work, and they need to accept that they now have the ability to write this next chapter of Duluth East hockey. There is far too much here, past and present, for the Hounds to roll over dead.