Quinnipiac coach on top of his game
During the runup to the NCAA men’s hockey tournament, Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold was asked for a fun fact about himself.
“My wife has two dogs, they’re little Shih Tzus,” he told reporters in Providence. “About eight pounds. I guess they’re my dogs, too. That’s the best I could come up with.”
So permit me to offer a fun fact or two. This time of year has become an annual reminder that Pecknold is one of the most effective coaches in U.S. college athletics today. Note the word athletics. Any sport.
Maybe he doesn’t have the high profile, Geno Auriemma’s big personality or Dan Hurley’s colorful quirks, but Pecknold has Quinnipiac, the defending national champs, on the trail of a repeat with a stirring start in an overtime win over Wisconsin on Friday. The Bobcats face a big hurdle in top-ranked Boston College with a trip to the Frozen Four on the line Sunday, but observers have certainly learned by now that Pecknold’s teams should never be written off, that big games, big brands and blue bloods don’t scare Quinnipiac, even if some announcers still struggle to pronounce it correctly.
“He’s the ultimate pro, on and off the ice,” Quinnipiac forward Sam Lipkin said. “He has a lot of pro habits. He comes to the rink with a great attitude every day and that definitely trickles down throughout the whole lineup. … How honest he is; he tells you how it is. From a coach, that’s all you ask for.”
Pecknold, 57, is a self-made coach. Played Division III hockey at Connecticut College and was only 27 when he took over at Quinnipiac, still a D-III program, in 1994. He taught history at Griswold and North Haven highs during the day, coached and recruited nights and weekends.
“It was a strength and a weakness to become a head coach at 27,” he said. “There are some great things about it, you learn by fire, and there are some bad things about it, I probably didn’t know enough when I came into it. I had to learn a little bit under fire, but I do a little bit of everything to try to stay on top of it.”
Each summer, Pecknold does a coaching exchange with NHL teams, though he took last summer off, he plans to resume after this college season is over. With his demeanor, one could easily envision him behind an NHL bench, if that were a goal.
“He keeps (pregame talks) short and sweet, a couple of keys to the game, what we need to do to win,” Jacob Quillan said. “He’ll reiterate that, stay true to our game.”
Learning as he was teaching, Pecknold developed his first-class hockey mind and built a program that rose to D-II and then D-I, first reaching a national championship game in 2013. After several runs, the Bobcats reached the top last season, beating Ohio State, Michigan and Minnesota along the way.
They began this tournament by adding a fourth straight Big Ten pelt to the collection. Victor Czerneckianair, a sophomore from
Southington, scored two goals, including the winner in overtime.
Pecknold’s unaffected manner reaches his players in big moments. When Quinnipiac went to OT in the championship game against Minnesota last April, he walked into the locker room and said very little.
“We kind of knew we were confident, we knew we had the momentum,” said Quillan, who would score the winning goal.
“He just kind of went in there and smiled. ‘Let’s just do this,’ and it hyped everybody up to get the job done.”
As Lipkin recalled, “He kind of came in, you’d think he’d be fired up, but he came in laughing, ‘This is why you play college hockey,’ The way he looks through the hockey perspective, to the personal perspective kind of catches with me and lights that fire within.”
The win Friday played out with eerie similarity. Quinnipiac tied it on Czerneckianair’s first goal, late in the second period, and had the edge in shots after regulation. Playing stellar defense, another Pecknold trademark, in front of solid goaltending, now from Vinny Duplessis, the Bobcats allowed only 20 shots, took 32, with an 8-3 edge in OT.
Another big moment, another reminder of Pecknold’s ability to find players able to handle them, and prepare them.
“We have a great group of young men,” he said after the game. “High-character, elite-character people.”
More for your Sunday Read:
Gambling with the future
Coaches throughout the tournament have been asked to comment on NCAA president Charlie Baker’s call to ban “prop betting,” or wagers on college athlete’s individual stats, nationwide. In Connecticut, it is banned for in-state college athletes.
“You worry about people getting close to the players,” Dan Hurley said. “Anyone involved in your program, whether student-managers or what have you, the antennas are up. You worry about the people around the players and how easily accessible it is. We play and practice at the XL Center, not far from a window where we can see the gambling going on.
“… With just how easy it is to gamble on your phone or, again, locally, I don’t think you can do enough that way. We’ve had internal conversations here at the athletic department about continuing to stress that to our student-athletes.”
Said Illinois’ Brad Underwood: “Concerns me a lot. We have one of the greatest games and the competitive integrity — I use that word a lot — can never be challenged. I’m so much in favor of what the NCAA is doing, Mr. Baker, in terms of coming out against prop betting. In the Big Ten, our commissioner, our athletic directors, put in place this year injury reports before games.
“Huge. So I think it’s something we’re always going to have to keep educating on. I think we’re naive if we don’t think it’s not happening everywhere. We’re not a pro franchise where we drive into buildings and drive into gated communities and nobody ever knows. We’ve got college kids wearing boots in dorms, you know, and being seen.”
‘Impact’ players in Connecticut
As the UConn men try for a repeat, Ryan Ellingwood, now 12, from Ellington was with them for the ride once again. Ellingwood, who has been fighting and managing a chronic immune condition, has been part of the Huskies since 2018, the match made by Team Impact, a not-for-profit organization which matches children facing serious illness and disability with college sports teams. He made it to Houston for the Final Four last season, and now is going for the repeat, a presence behind the UConn bench at TD Garden.
There are 62 Project Impact kids matched with college teams in Connecticut, a wonderful program that can’t help but put smiles on faces and the friendships last a lifetime.
Daniela Ciriello, from Plainville, joined the UConn women’s program in 2018. Now 11, Daniela deals with a life-threatening blood disorder known as Cooley’s Anemia.
Trinity also had supporters from Team Impact for its men’s basketball and hockey runs to the Division III Final and Frozen Fours. Brenden Lambert, now 10, joined the Bantams hockey team in 2022. He has a humoral immunodeficiency, which is a condition that keeps his body from making antibodies, so he requires regular infusions to fight off illnesses. The Trinity players surprised him with tickets for their Frozen Four games in Hartford last weekend.
Sean Chamberland of Wolcott, who has spinal bifida, has been part of the Trinity men’s basketball family for more than 10 years. When he aged out of the Project Impact program, coach James Cosgrove wanted him to remain a member of the team, so he comes to home games whenever possible and posed with the team after the Bantams punched their Final Four ticket earlier this month.
Sunday short takes
UConn’s history in Boston is surprisingly hard to track since team records don’t faithfully include the venues. Credit where it is due to Matt Edwards, who does a podcast devoted to UConn’s 1989-90 Dream Season, and has been on the case. In addition to games I mentioned in a story this past week, Edwards found newspaper accounts of three games against Holy Cross and BC played in the original Boston Garden in the mid-1950s, including a game in which Art Quimby scored 39 against BC in 1954, and a game against BC in 1988. By his count, UConn was
4-5 in the old Garden, and 0-1 in Fleet/TD before coming in for the regional this weekend.
Two UConn guys, shortstop Nick Ahmed with the Giants, and reliever Matt Barnes with the Nationals, made Opening
Day rosters and extended their careers. Ahmed, signed in the middle of spring training, started on Opening Day.
What am I missing? Why is it controversial for a coach, in this case Auriemma, to say his player, in this case Paige Bueckers, is the best?
The portal, by the way, has hit Bristol’s Steve Pikiell hard at Rutgers. Six players have entered, including Simsbury’s Gavin Griffiths, 6 feet 8, who was at the time the highest-ranked commit in program history, but averaged 17.8 minutes, 5.8 points per game. Griffiths is getting significant interest in the portal, NJ.com reports. The Knights have a big-time class coming in, headlined by five-star recruit Dylan Harper.
Two more portal notes. Next year, wait ’til after the NCAA Tournament is completed to open it up, please. Two, never thought Yale big man Danny Wolf would enter it, but according to ESPN’s Jeff Borzello, he has..
Last word
*Minutes have drastically dropped for UConn’s Andre Jackson Jr. since Jan. 29, when Doc Rivers, who tends to favor playing veterans, replaced Adrian Griffin as coach of the Bucks. Seems counterproductive to sit a rookie who had some promising stints, including a few starts, in the early months of the season, and it seems like they miss the energy and splash plays he was bringing.
Fixing what wasn’t broken, the Bucks were 30-13 when they changed coaches, 16-14 since, left in the dust by the Celtics in the East. And Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks are closing in on the No. 2 seed.