The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Return home for NCAAs is worth the wait for Quinnipiac’s Smilanic
Ty Smilanic hadn’t been home in six or seven months. So what’s an extra six or seven hours, right?
The NCAA lined up a charter flight for the Quinnipiac hockey team to fly to Colorado on Wednesday for the NCAA West Regional and everything looked spiffy until … you know it. Mechanical problems.
The terminal for charters is small at Bradley Airport. Very small.
“So we hung out in the parking lot for five hours,” coach Rand Pecknold said. “Luckily it wasn’t raining or snowing.”
The guys played sewer ball, or two-touch, a favorite pregame activity for hockey players where they try to keep a soccer ball from touching the ground. The team had food delivered to the parking lot. Yep, a five-hour game of sewer ball.
“A little longer than maybe we wanted, but it was still fun, all good,” Smilanic said. “I played like two of the hours, but I couldn’t go the whole five or six of sewer. There were some guys really grinding, but I don’t think anyone pulled off the full time.”
They finally loaded up on the plane. All aboard. And there was another 90-minute wait before takeoff.
“Long day, long day, our marathon,” Pecknold said Thursday. “But it’s OK. We are excited. The glass is half full. Got to be safe. Nobody’s fault. We are happy to play hockey.”
While everybody else on the team was leaving for a 1,900-mile trip, Smilanic,
the highly recruited freshman, was heading home to the Rockies. His family lives just south of Denver.
“It’s a cool experience,” said Smilanic, tied for eighth in the nation with 14 goals. “I get to have my family here. They probably would have gone anyway, but I get to have cousins and a lot of people who haven’t seen me play in three, four years. That’s an awesome feeling.”
Each of the four teams playing at Budweiser Events Center in Loveland have an allotment of 84 tickets. With many families unable to travel such a long distance, Smilanic estimated he’d gobble up 15-20 of them for the 5 p.m. Saturday game against Minnesota State.
“Last night we got in, checked into the rink at midnight, 2 a.m. Eastern,” Pecknold said. “I asked Ty if he’d ever played here. Shockingly, he said he hadn’t.”
Smilanic said he has played in nearly every other rink in the Denver area.
“I’ve been up this way four, five times before, think I came to a game here once when I was little,” Smilanic said. “It’s pretty far north. It’s also kind of far from the mountains and it’s a cloudy day. It doesn’t feel like Colorado.”
Smilanic knows Colorado. His family had Avalanche season tickets. He was a fanatic. He idolized Joe Sakic. He even played on a team coached by Sakic when he was 8. What brought him East to Hamden? That’s a story that goes through Michigan, where he played the past two years for USA Hockey’s National Development Training Program.
“Ty could have gone pretty much where he wanted,” Pecknold said.
“We were pretty fortunate to get him. A big thing that helped us was Seth Appert. We’ve been friends for a long time.”
Appert, now coach of the Rochester Americans of the AHL, was Smilanic’s coach with the NDTP. He formerly was coach at RPI. Pecknold was on Appert’s staff when he coached the U.S. national team at 2018 IIHF Under-18 World Championship in Russia. They were together a month.
“What happened during the process was Ty was looking at all these schools,” Pecknold sad. “Seth sat him down, was like, ‘You need to get this commitment out of the way. We’ve got world championships coming up soon.’
“I wasn’t there, but he asked Ty ‘What do you really want?’ What came through was he wanted a couple different things. One was he wanted to play for a really good coach. Luckily, Seth likes me and said ‘I think you should look at Quinnipiac. I think you’ll like playing for Rand.’ I think he gave Ty two names.”
Smilanic said his final choices came down to North Dakota, Michigan and Quinnipiac.
“You go to Quinnipiac and hockey is the No. 1 thing on campus,” Smilanic said. “You go to Michigan, I know they kind of get spoiled there, but they’re not really well known, not the big thing on campus. You got football. You got basketball. Quinnipiac is known for hockey. I met the coaches and players here and I knew they had something special. I wanted to be part of something special, hopefully the first national championship.”
The Bobcats advanced to the finals of the Frozen Four in 2013 and 2016 before losing to Yale and North Dakota.
There’s little question of Smilanic’s talent. At one point, the 6-foot-1, 178pound forward was projected as a first-round pick in the 2020 NHL draft. He lost six weeks to mono in 201920. He broke a finger. He had a high ankle sprain. Even in the hours leading into the draft in October, most had him going no later than the second round. As he sat with his family at a hotel near campus, the Florida Panthers took him 74th, 12 picks into the third round.
“Seeing names pop up and seeing names being picked, it was kind of upsetting, but at the end of the day I got drafted by an NHL team,” Smilanic said that night. “I am here with my family and it is a pretty special moment.”
Pecknold has insisted the Panthers got a steal.
“He does so many things, it’s hard to pick (what he does best),” Pecknold said. “His ability to score goals, 14 as a freshman is a lot of goals. He does it in a variety of ways. He scored one goal against Colgate when he was basically upside down. He can one-time it. Put it under the bar. Tip-ins.
“The second thing, he is an elite athlete. He has NHL talent and those kids are hard to find. He’s had a really good year. He’s committed. He’ll take a huge jump next year, be even better, take a big jump just from a maturity standpoint. He’ll be one of the better players in our league; he’s already pretty close right now.”
College hockey is a fascinating animal. So many players compete in juniors before arriving on campus at age 20 or 21. Smilanic, who has a team-leading four game-winners, didn’t turn 19 until Jan. 20.
“Going against guys five or six years older, for me it has been a little more difficult at times because of the strength and maturity other guys have that I don’t,” he said. “I play with skill and I play with speed. Sometimes I lack in the defensive zone. Sometimes I don’t have the strength. Those are the two things I need to work on to be a full 200-foot player and hopefully play in the NHL.”
His family owns a construction business in the Denver area and Ty said his parents go back and forth between Michigan and Colorado. His brothers Nate and Justin have worked in Colorado. His younger sister Rachel attends the same high school in Michigan he attended and is finishing her senior year there.
Speaking of Rachel, Ty is a “Friends” aficionado, who has watched the entire series six times. Picked that nugget up watching the draft in October.
“My parents when I was growing up went to every single one of my games,” Smilanic said. “At most, they missed one each. And now they haven’t been to a single game in over a year. To have them come to a game and support me — not watching on TV — is pretty unbelievable. I’m more than excited to be playing here.”
As with NCAA basketball, hockey is subject to strict COVID protocols and Thursday meant remaining in the hotel all day. No practice. Didn’t dampen the coach’s enthusiasm.
“I was convinced we’d be in Bridgeport, maybe Albany,” Pecknold said. “It never crossed my mind they’d send us out West. But that’s how it played out. Would I have liked Bridgeport? Yeah, I drive by that rink on my way to work every day. But I’m not mad. We got cheated out of it last year with COVID. I felt bad for the seniors. I’m so excited just to play hockey.”
With a little sewer ball mixed in.