As far as Boston University men’s hockey coach Jack Parker is concerned, the 2009-10 Terriers weren’t hungover the season after winning the national championship. They were still drunk.
“The parade never ended,” Parker said. “The party and the parade from last April never ended as far as the mindset.”
Junior defenseman and captain Kevin Shattenkirk, who will forgo his senior season after signing with the National Hockey League’s Colorado Avalanche on Saturday, didn’t go so far as to say the party never ended, but he did admit that the team at least had a hangover all year.
“We really struggled all year to get over the hangover, I guess you could call it, after winning the national championship,” he said. “We struggled to stay focused or find any sort of consistency.”
As a result, the Terriers, who were picked first in the Hockey East preseason coaches poll and second in both national preseason polls, tipsily stumbled their way through an 18-17-3 campaign that ended with no hardware and no NCAA Tournament bid.
“There’s no question in my mind that we pissed away a college hockey season that could’ve been much better than it was,” Parker said.
The biggest reason for that pissing away, Parker said, was attitude.
“As we say with every team, “Attitude is everything,’ and this team had a lousy attitude,” said the 37-year bench boss.
After an abysmal 4-9-3 first half, the Terriers appeared to be turning things around after the winter break, as they started the second semester on a 9-3-0 run. But the hot stretch proved to be nothing more than a mirage.
BU went just 5-5-0 the rest of the way, finishing with a 5-2 loss to the University of Maine in the Hockey East semifinals. The Terriers came out flat and found themselves trailing 3-0 halfway through that game. They were outshot 18-5 in the first period.
“The fact that we weren’t ready to play against Maine is an abomination,” Parker said. “But that’s what we were all year.”
A year after winning the Spencer Penrose Trophy as the national coach of the year, Parker had no answers this season. Time and again, he addressed the media after a loss and said that he could tell his team wasn’t ready to play in the hours or even days leading up to the contest. But Parker could never figure out how to cure his team of that illness.
“It’s hard to coach a team when the players don’t want what the coaches want,” Parker said. “They weren’t hungry enough. The coaches wanted to do it again, have a good season, but at no time was that a priority with our team as far as I could tell.”
Parker tried just about every motivational tactic in the book — he yelled at players, he expressed disappointment in them, he called them out by name, he changed their pregame routine, he even picked out the positives — and none of them worked.
But there’s one thing Parker said he wishes he had done more of.
“When I look back on it now, I would’ve benched more guys,” he said. “I would’ve taken them out of the lineup because they weren’t performing.”
Parker said he also would’ve kept more tabs on his players away from the rink.
“We needed to be more attuned to what was going on school-wise, to what was going on socially,” he said. “We should’ve been more involved with that because we didn’t have the in-house monitoring that we should’ve had out of the captains and the seniors.”
Shattenkirk didn’t try to deflect Parker’s criticism or make any excuses for the team’s shortcomings.
“I think he’s right,” Shattenkirk said. “I don’t think we as upperclassmen did a good enough job leading, whether it was vocally or by example. Looking back on it, there are definitely things I would’ve done differently. I don’t think I was as good of a captain as I could’ve been.”
When asked to elaborate on what he would’ve changed, Shattenkirk, like Parker, said he would’ve taken a more hands-on approach.
“I think I would’ve been a little more vocal, a little more assertive,” he said. “Just kind of holding guys accountable for their jobs, things like that. I think it was kind of tough being a junior and being a captain. I know the guys on the team respect me a lot, and I respect every single one of them, but we should’ve done a better job of holding each other accountable.”
Holding each other accountable is a crucial part of any team in any sport. Upperclassmen have to hold underclassmen accountable.
Underclassmen have to step up and hold upperclassmen accountable. Coaches have to hold players accountable. Players have to hold coaches accountable.
When Parker wasn’t holding players accountable during the 2008-09 championship campaign, then-captain Matt Gilroy made him by dogging it one day in practice, forcing Parker to chew out, of all people, his captain.
When people weren’t being held accountable in 2009-10, whether it was players or coaches, whether it was on the ice or off, no one pushed back. No one forced the issue.
“There was such a drastic drop-off, from seniors to freshmen, in doing the right thing,” Parker said. “It’s not as if they were robbing banks or stealing TVs, it’s just that it wasn’t that important to them.”
The Terriers may not have robbed banks, but they did rob themselves of what could’ve and probably should’ve been a successful season.
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