Huskies grad O’Donnell on NHL track ... as a ref
The guy who took the two minutes probably didn’t share the feeling, but Conor O’Donnell says he “got lucky” when one player flagrantly tripped another, right in front of him.
“A trip is a trip, and anyone could call that one,” says the 29-year-old Hamilton native who had a long junior, university and pro playing career.
But, the anyone who called that particular one had only just a few minutes earlier pulled on a referee’s game jersey for the first time. Ever.
It was early autumn, 2017, and O’Donnell was working an AHL exhibition game shortly after attending the NHL Exposure Combine for prospective on-ice officials. He had really gone “just to check it out” at the request of Al Kimmel, the league’s director of scouting and development for officials.
The Exposure Combine was born in 2014 when the NHL realized that it wasn’t finding, or developing, as many good officials as they required, quickly enough.
The game had grown exponentially faster and the same robust skating skills required of players were now also mandatory for referees and linesmen, just to keep up to the play.
So, at the direction of vicepresident for officiating Stephen Walkom, the NHL began actively recruiting former high-level players with good skating and hockey-sense skills for its officials combine. And the best prospects have been fast-tracked.
“When I went to the combine I was probably in the best shape of my life,” recalls O’Donnell, who’d spent the previous fall with the ECHL Colorado Eagles before coming home to play senior hockey for Stoney Creek, helping the Generals reach the 2017 Allan Cup tournament in Bouctouche, N.B.
“They liked my skating and hockey knowledge, but I had to learn to the position …. and I’m still learning. I thought that I’d probably start in the OHL, but right away I worked on an AHL game-to-game contract and did about 50 games.
“The first game was super nerve-racking but when I called that first penalty, I settled in.
“After 15 to 20 games I felt comfortable with my role. But, I was still kind of seeing the game as a player, so I’d be a bit hesitant to call certain kinds of penalties. Twenty games in, I finally said to myself, ‘I’m a referee not a player. I need to do my job, they need to do their job.’”
Growing up on Kent Street then Herkimer Street, O’Donnell attended St. Joseph Catholic Elementary School, then St. Thomas More while playing AAA hockey for the Hamilton Huskies. He credits his parents Chris and Carolyn for setting a strong example and for making sure he and his brother Wyatt managed to play all the hockey they needed.
O’Donnell spent four years in the OHL with Brampton, Guelph and most memorably Windsor, where he was on a Memorial Cup championship team coached by Bob Boughner that included future NHL luminaries Taylor Hall, Adam Henrique and Freelton’s Ryan Ellis.
He used his OHL education fund to attend Nipissing University, where he became a top CIS scorer. His coach was the highly-regarded Mike McParland, a friend of Walkom, and they suggested that he keep a refereeing career in mind.
“But I wanted to play, not officiate,” O’Donnell says.
After two seasons of pro hockey overseas in Germany and France, he returned to North America to play for Colorado, then Stoney Creek, and found himself at the 2017 amateur combine.
Four months ago he was supplementing his AHL income with a summer construction job when Kimmel called and said he should attend the combine again.
Usually officials don’t go to that camp twice, but at the end of it, O’Donnell was offered an NHL contract. It’s often referred to as a 40-40 contract meaning that, eventually, the official could work half his season in the AHL, the other half in the NHL. There’s usually a five-year window for a prospect to reach the big league.
“I got that NHL contract on the last day of the amateur camp,” he says. “I didn’t know it was coming and I got pretty emotional.”
Six days later he began working NHL exhibition games. The first had Nashville against Florida, with his former teammate Ellis playing for the Predators and Boughner coaching the Panthers.
“Boug said, ‘Holy bleep O.D., it didn’t take you long to get here,’ ” O’Donnell laughs.
After finishing the NHL exhibition season, which included stops at Madison Square Garden and Montreal’s Bell Centre on a Saturday night, O’Donnell has returned to the AHL. History shows first-year signees usually get between one to five NHL games that season and if they show progress, can reach halfand-half by their third season.
While he doesn’t find officiating games that involve former teammates or opponents a problem, “one of the hard adjustments is that as a player you travel with a team and usually get close to a few guys, eat dinner with them go out with them all the time. As a ref I do a lot of my travel alone, and you work with a different guy every night. But I do value my time alone.”
Earlier this week, he moved from Toronto to Hamilton, not far from where he grew up.
“I’ve lived all over the world,” he explains. “And I just always loved coming back here. ”