My son is officially mobile. His mother and I certainly didn’t
time his development accordingly though, because had this mobility developed a
little sooner we could have had a Knoxville Ice Bears baby derby champion
living with us. He’s fast. He's got the quickest knees in the Southeast for sure. A few months ago you could put him down on the floor
with a strategically placed item to distract him for a few precious minutes while you
crept away with the speed and nimble feet of a ninja to have a quick pee. These
days however, there is no creeping away from the little fella and he’ll be
right on your heels wondering what you’re doing. Objects and actions that are occurring
above him are the current target of his baby GPS and he’ll do just about
anything to raise himself up to the next level of the world so he can see and
be involved with whatever is going on in the air up there. Like cell phones,
loading and unloading of the dishwasher and yes – urinating.
The offseason has started off with a significantly different
tone this summer at the Craigen residence in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you dropped in and visited me in the evening this time a few years ago at my place I would more than likely have
been yakking on the phone with a prospective player, agent or member of my organization about the upcoming season. It was every day and night recruiting, planning,
plugged in, answering emails, texts, calls surfing Hockeydb.com and Elite
Prospects for the next wave of Ice Bears. These days, you’d better be careful
coming onto my porch because it’s littered with plastic barn animals, a Cookie
Monster saxophone, a pack n’ play, a plastic turtle that wobbles around playing
music before exploding plastic shapes all over the place and a very active 8
month old boy who is ignoring all the toys in favor of trying to eat the giant
beetle that he has been chasing around. My cabin in the woods that used to Ice
Bear hockey operations grand central station has been converted and remodeled to
accommodate the next 30/30 man in Major League Baseball who will also win the
Masters before he turns 20 and release an acoustic album that goes double platinum.
No pressure kid, but when you’re done
eating that beetle I’m going to need you to get crackin’.
 |
| This little guy is the best free agent the Ice Bears have ever signed. |
You would think along the way that my performance on the job is suffering from
this significant change and the more hectic and demanding personal life would
detract from my duties and responsibilities as the head coach of the Knoxville
Ice Bears. It most certainly has not. The little Chunk I have at home has been
the best thing that’s happened to the Ice Bears since Angela Swider told Kevin
she wanted to live in Knoxville after his first season here. He gives my hours
spent at work more clarity, more focus and much more productivity because I
want to be dialed in on him when I go home so I need to be razor sharp when I'm living in my other world.
Everyone knows that when you’ve got
a child that age, you don’t want to blink or be distracted because chances are
you’re gonna miss something. Whether it be a new sound – Chunk has perfected the motorboat sound as of late, btrrrrrrr
btrrrrrrr. Or maybe they’ve decided to be left handed that day – Anytime he picks something up I always put
it into his left hand because a left handed hitter is 2 steps closer to first
base and usually hits for an average about 10 points higher. Or
my favorite thus far, you better be paying attention when small words and
verbal communication start to formulate on their lips – My little guy has begun to recognize that his small accomplishments
during the day warrant celebration and when he stands up on his own or executes
a high five he lets out a “haaaaaaaaaah” sound that needs to be repeated by his
mom & dad or he’ll let you know.
I’m being 100% honest when I say that Ice Bear land has
benefited from this new addition to my life. I found myself thinking on
several occasions last season when dealing with players both on our roster and
vying to be,
“this is someone’s son.”, “someone
loves this guy as much as I love Chunk.” And I believe my compassion level
has been elevated without a doubt. Not that he’s made me soft by any means
J , being a father has just heightened my
awareness of how individuals who rely on you and look to you for guidance need
to be treated. You can still be strong and sensitive and you can certainly be
compassionate without being weak. I was really mad for half a second when Chunk
took a crap on my chest in bed on the weekend while we were enjoying the morning
sun beaming in the windows. Yes…. On my chest, and then begun to mush it with
his fingers while giggling madly. But ya’ know what? I should have had a diaper
on him, so the fault was squarely on me. And how can I blame him for playing
with the poop either, nothing is funnier than pooping and farting for a kid. (
And adults too really. Dougie Searle was one
of the best defensemen I played with in my entire career but he’s more famous
in my mind for his fart sounds during intermissions.)
 |
| Sign above the door in my office as a constant reminder. |
My player relationships
have always been a source of pride and my
modus operandi as a coach but having
a little human being in my life has really thrust my players and my
relationships with each of them to the forefront of my priority list and my
approach to the job day to day has shifted for the better. It has also brought back so many fond, special memories and valued time spent with some really incredible players over the past 6 years who have contributed to what we've built here in Knoxville and my career development.
Speaking of the Ice Bears! We’re excited for the summer
around here. June, July, etc is usually a pretty quiet time around the ole’
Civic Coliseum but this year things are going to be a little different. We've partnered with FieldHouse Social down on the strip to host some Stanley Cup Finals watch parties throughout the duration of the Penguins/Sharks series. Come on down and enjoy the game on one of their many televisions and enjoy a great menu and nightly drink specials. We’re
kicking off our Charity Golf tournament this week as well at Three Ridges
prior to the annual Cool Sports Adult Hockey Challenge hosted by our friends at
the IceArium. We’ll tee it up this Friday, June 3
rd with proceeds
going to Children’s Hospital and that will lead into a weekend of Men's League hockey with former Ice Bear and their opponents like
Kevin Swider, Jamie Ronayne,
 |
| 2015 Cool Sports Challenge Champs - "The Ice Beers" |
Mike Degurse, Mike Murray, Chris
Kovalcik, Jason Price, Nick Niedert and others as they battle it out all weekend. So drop in and see how much tighter all our pants have gotten.
The ice is also going down in July for a couple of weeks thanks to the City and
the wonderful new management group that SMG has put in place here downtown.
Starting on July 13
th we are hosting a slew of events at the Civic
Coliseum that is going to keep us busy through the second half of July and
hopefully get the hockey community involved during some of the hotter
temperatures this summer.
Our
Adult Hockey Clinic (you can click on
each of these links for more information about each) will start in the
evening on Wednesday, July 13
th where we’ll be running a hockey
fundamentals program for any adults who are looking to hone some skills, just
get started with their game and need a platform to develop under some fun and
laid back instruction. We plan on running it like a mini Ice Bear training camp
with on-ice sessions, video breakdown of both our Adult skaters and some Ice
Bear game tape to go over some systematic portions of the game in detail with all our attendees. It's a lot more enjoyable when you're watching live hockey or on tv if you've got a couple reference points to watch for and notice. I’m
looking forward to it because working with adults who have a love for the game
but just don’t quite have the ability yet is always a fun challenge. If you’re
interested and want some more information just email us call us at the office,
ask for
Cole Burkhalter or myself and we’d be happy to discuss.
Immediately following that Adult Clinic we’re hosting our summer
Free Agent Camp. With the success of the camp over the past few seasons and the
players we’ve not only rostered from it but who have made significant contributions
to our team, the camp has really grown in popularity for prospective Ice Bears.
Since 2010 when I first started running the camp, we have selected over 30 players to
compete in our main camp and 9 of them have played SPHL games for the Ice
Bears;
Lucas Schramm, Jake Flegel, Danny Cesarz, Mark Pustin, Jason Berube,
Brad Townsend, Bo Driscoll, Luc Kilgore and Jide Idowu. Our camp is the most
legitimate opportunity for any professional free agent looking to find an opportunity and
the results and follow through by our organization for the guys who attend our
camps is absolutely second to none and all the evidence you need to support that. We don’t just take your
money and give you a jersey here in Knoxville, we give you a genuine look,
feedback and support moving forward after your experience here. Ultimately, we're trying to find players who will help us be a better hockey team and the guys we've pulled from past camps shows that.
Once the Free Agent sessions are over, we will be transitioning
to our annual
Youth Camp the week of July 18
th through 22
nd.
After some pretty fun weeks in past years, our registration has been great this
summer already and we’re expecting a big turnout for July. Our camp ties all
the fundamentals of the game into a pretty enjoyable week that prioritizes fun
above everything else. We know that kids have a million things they want to do
during the summer between swimming, baseball, lacrosse and many other activities,
so trust me – we make
sure they have a good time with us. We have a bus pick-up
scheduled every morning out in West Knoxville for parents to drop their kids off
that week starting on Monday they 18
th and we take them all day
until 5 PM when we shuttle them back out and drop em’ off. No worries, no
hassle, just drop them off and pick them up and we’ll handle the rest of the
week for you with on-ice work, recreational activity off the ice, lunches provided, video segments, martial arts training and much more that will have your youngins' collapsed in a heap on the way home everyday. We’ll be rolling out our new “
video report cards” soon too that we’re
also pretty excited about so each camper will have an on-ice video breakdown of
things they did well and things they need to work on.
If an adult camp, a free agent camp and a youth camp wasn’t enough we are
finishing off the month of July with the pilot voyage of our
“Ironman 3 on 3”
tournament. This is a really, really cool idea from our own
Cole Burkhalter who
is a homegrown product of KAHA and helping to make a big impact on hockey in
this area as our Director of Hockey Development. So here’s how it works; there
are two divisions, elite and intermediate. Starting on Friday, July 22
nd
we’re going to drop the puck and play hockey 3-on-3 format - teams of 6 skaters
and 1 goalie - around the clock until we have crowned a winning team in each
division. We’ll only break to resurface the ice between games and the rest of
the time the action will be rolling, all day every hour of every day until
Sunday night. Teams will camp out at the Coliseum, area hotels, backseats of
their cars and anywhere else they can crash between games. We’ll have the bar
open, concessions, fun off-ice games going on all around the arena while you’re
not playing and a bunch of other pretty unique events running alongside the
tournament itself. Teams from Boston, Michigan and locally have already signed
up so I’m pretty confident this event will be a fantastic weekend to finish off
a very busy month of July for the Ice Bears.
EDIT: My son's name is
Bradley. Not
Chunk. But in true hockey culture, he had to have a nickname.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for reading if you’ve stuck
it out this long through what has come to be my bi-annual, long winded blog fest. To
wrap it up I wanted to start some dialogue about the Southern Professional
Hockey League and the direction we’re all moving in together as member teams
and staff under their umbrella.
First things first, and this will not come as anything new for my readers; I’m
hopeful there will be some serious dialogue at our league meetings about the
playoff format. Pensacola and Peoria set a new standard this season with a best
of 5 final series and the on-ice product was hands down, unarguably fantastic.
There will always be financial, attendance and promotional challenges for our league in
April, but this best of 5 was a great example of what could-be. Both teams got
to put their best foot forward each game, travel was not an issue and the
results couldn’t be attributed to any factor other than what the teams
themselves dictated. That’s how it should be for every series in my opinion and
I was very encouraged to see the league and those two franchises take a step in
the right direction this season. (Congratulations
to the Pensacola Ice Flyers by the way, keep our cup safe for us we’ll be
coming for it soon.)
The other topic I’m hopeful will receive some discussion at
the league meetings is the current veteran rule in the SPHL regulations.
Currently, each team is allowed 3 players of “Veteran” status on their active
roster. A veteran is a player who has played over 224 professional games and
the website
www.hockeydb.com is the
measuring stick used by the SPHL to count those games. If you played
professionally and it’s recorded on HockeyDB, it counts. That regulation is
also piggybacked by a secondary reg’ indicating those 3 veteran players cannot
combine for more than 1100 games as a threesome.
My hope is that league officials and our board of governors
will consider some alterations to those regulations that will allow for teams
to retain more of these veteran players for longer spans of their career. I believe
the SPHL has done two very obvious things in the past 5 seasons or so; one
positive progression has been the increase in their level of play and quality of
staff, players and organizations. The other progression is not so positive from
where I sit and I’m not trying to criticize anyone at all here, but I believe
the league has lost the old-fashioned “rivalries” that made our product so
entertaining not so long ago.
Let me elaborate – players don’t hate each other enough anymore. That might
sound a little old school and a touch barbaric and the anti-hockey folks who
advocate that our sport is too violent and unnecessarily dangerous will just roll their eyes, but it’s
plain and clear to me. When the Ice Bears used to welcome the Huntsville Havoc
into the Coliseum, our fans knew Mike Degurse and Luke Phillips and James
Patterson and Matt Carmichael would be there to face off against Ice Bear
players who had built up a competitive hatred for each other and the product on
the ice would magnify that. Fans knew different players on each team and looked
forward to the different rivalries that each match up brought to town. Ice
Bears vs Havoc on Friday night? You could bet on a big crowd and you could bet
on some of the opponents you love to hate coming in here and entertaining you.
The same could be said for the Von Braun Center and their fans booing well
known Ice Bear players during warm-up and introductions. It was fun for eveyrone invovled, it was a rivalry…..
and it has been lost over the past 4-5 seasons.
Why? Because players move on. You can’t build up a rivalry
if every team has 11 new players every season and organizations can’t retain
players for long enough to build up those rivalries if there is a cap on games
played looming above every experienced career during the off-season. It won’t
be applicable for every team, every season, but there will be plenty of
circumstances where the current veteran rule forces popular, well known
players, well known organizational assets that fans have come to identify to
leave the team that raised them so-to-speak.
In 2006 the Ice Bears were forced
to choose three from the following list: KJ Voorhees, Curtis Menzul, Jamie Ronayne,
Doug Searle, Kevin Swider and Jason Bermingham. Not a tough decision for head
coach Jim Bermingham at the time as much as it was just downright unfortunate
for our fans who had to understandably say goodbye to Ronayne and Voorhees who
were very central, prominent faces for the organization (and J Berm who eventually retired after 06 anyway). I’m not as familiar
with the situations other organizations have gone through that are similar, but
I know Columbus, Huntsville, Fayetteville and others have all faced pretty
comparable decisions.
We did the same thing again in 08’ here in Knoxville when the off-season brought
another list of notable players whose career hung in the balance due to the
rule. Swider, Timmy Vitek, Kevin Harris, Mike Carter, myself and JJ Wrobel were
all veterans and our team could only keep three. Some pretty popular names left
town and along with them left some of the primary rivalry pieces for visiting
teams. Again, I’m sure each team can state their own instances of similar
circumstances from past seasons.
I completely recognize the need to regulate the development of
the league and we need a steady stream of rookies and fresh legs in here to
continue pushing the pace and level of play for the SPHL. Crap, some might even
argue that without the veteran rule forcing players like myself, KJ Voorhees,
Kevin Harris, Jamie Ronayne, etc out of Knoxville that it paved the way for
younger, better players to come in and elevate the skill level and on-ice product…… I’d be willing to
have that argument with an informed, knowledgeable source sometime J But at the end of the
day the SPHL is built on entertainment and loyal, passionate fan bases in each
of their member cities. Those fan bases don't want to find new favorites every other season, they want to establish a familiarity for their hometown team and create a bond with the culture and faces on both home and visiting teams. We’re not affiliated with ECHL/AHL/NHL networks, we’re
not bound by any agreements that require us to provide players at a certain
point in their career to clubs at the next level and we’ve carved ourselves a
very respectable niche for the specific product we can still provide. I’m in
favor of capitalizing on that and reestablishing some rivalries, using
returning players as the main component to those rivalries.
Worst case scenario? Individual teams decide they don’t want to continually
employ more veteran guys and they opt to go with younger, rookie-laden lineups
instead. It’s their choice though, and they get to make it knowingly and with
alternative options. If your organization, fans and city is able to retain
veteran players and keep them happy, motivated and productive then so be it. If
you can’t, well…. You don't.
The answer? We could go many different directions with this
if the league and B.O.G's agree and choose to facilitate change. I’m speaking as an individual here, as an employee of the Ice Bears.
I don’t speak on behalf of my organization nor do I represent the majority of thinking
across the league, so keep that in mind while reading this. I respect the entire
SPHL hierarchy and I’m certain the Board of Governors will discuss and vote on
issues with the SPHL and its future in mind.
My ideas for positive change include removing the total combined number of 1100
games to start with. I think that’d be a great start to see where it goes. Each
team can have three veterans, unlimited number of games. A “smoke em’ if you got em’” mentality if you will. That will let us
track which teams utilize the rule change and if there is any change whatsoever
in product, entertainment, etc.
Next, I would propose somewhat of a “franchise” player tag that allows each
organization a bit of a gimme for homegrown veterans. If you’ve got a grizzled, popular veteran player
who has played 50% or more of his vet-labeled career with your organization, he
does not count toward the SPHL veteran regulations. For example; PLAYER A has
played 432 professional games, 275 of them have been with the Columbus Cottonmouths.
PLAYER A does not count toward any SPHL vet regulation at the time as he is
considered a “franchise” player for the Cottonmouths.
These are all just ideas from a guy who has been on both
sides of the puck now for awhile and has grown up right alongside with this league from its
struggling infancy to its now expanding and recognizable present. If the league
wants to remain young and continue trying to be a developmental league, that’s
fine too. We’re going to be a positive contributing part of it here in Knoxville and we’re
going to put the best possible product on the ice for our fans regardless of the template. I’m
just rambling a little bit this morning cause the locker room is empty, it smells too nice around here, there is no ice right outside my office door and I
miss my guys.
Enjoy the summer everyone, #letsgoicebears
