The Iceman Cometh
New women’s hockey coach is a Goliath on defense.
By Paul Perillo
Most people see ice hockey as a pretty simple game: Score more goals than your opponent, and you win. Dave Flint, the new women’s hockey coach, doesn’t look at the game that way. For him, success lies in the opposite direction.
Flint’s teams score by stopping the other team from scoring. At his previous job—coaching women’s hockey at Division II Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, New Hampshire—he managed to win nearly 85 percent of his games by preaching three things: defense, defense, and defense.
Razzle-dazzle shootouts? Who needs them. Flint wants notches in the win column, not fancy style points.
“It all starts with good fundamentals,” he said about a month after taking over from Laura Shuler, BPH’94, who left Northeastern during the summer to become an assistant coach at the University of Minnesota–Duluth.
“You have to have a strong goalie,” Flint says. “I’ve seen a lot of average teams play well above average because of great goaltending. We’ve had some of the best defensive teams in the country because we’ve made a commitment to that end of the ice. We’ll try to do the same thing at Northeastern.”
Flint had his work cut out for him, at least initially. The Huskies allowed 120 goals last season, resulting in a 7-24-3 record. In fact, it’s been six years since Northeastern posted a winning record, going 27-7-1 in 2001–2002.
But by mid-November this season, the Huskies were ranked tenth in the nation after getting off to a 6-1-2 start. At the end of 2008, they were at 7-6-2.
“I wanted to go to a program I felt I could be successful at,” Flint says. “I was pretty happy at Saint Anselm. To leave it, I had to be making the jump to a Division I school, and to a school that is committed to its program.
“This school is a diamond in the rough,” he continues. “At one point, Northeastern was the best [women’s hockey] program in the country. The support the school shows for both the men’s and women’s teams is apparent.”
In his five years at Saint Anselm, Flint built a remarkable 88-15-2 record as he shepherded women’s hockey from club to varsity status. He won two Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) East regular- season championships and three ECAC Open Tournament titles.
Excellent defense paved the way to this success. The Hawks led the nation in scoring defense in three of their four seasons as a varsity team. Last season, en route to a 23-2-1 finish, Saint Anselm actually led the nation in both scoring offense and defense, averaging 4.46 goals and 0.92 goals against.
Flint is bringing the same mindset to the Huskies. A two-players-up three-back system pushes to keep the puck out of the Northeastern net.
And the coach is relying on what he considers one of the best one-two punches in college goaltending: sophomore Leah Sulyma and Florence Schelling, a freshman from Switzerland.
Schelling, Flint says, is one of the top three goaltenders in the world. She anchored Team Switzerland at both the 2006 Winter Olympics, in Torino, Italy, and the 2008 World Championships, where she led her team to a fourth-place finish, the best in her country’s history.
Having a chance to study in Boston helped sell Schelling on playing at Northeastern, Flint reports. No doubt his experience as the goaltending coach for USA Hockey attracted the blue-chip recruit as well.
“My employment with USA Hockey will continue even though [the timing] conflicts a little,” Flint says. “The positives outweigh the negatives—we want national team–caliber kids. They used to get them here all the time. I want them back.”
Julia Marty is another Swiss import for the Huskies. Last year, she spent her freshman season at the University of New Hampshire. The highly touted defender is yet another pillar in Flint’s “defense first” philosophy.
“There’s a good base of talent here, we just have to be committed to getting the most out of it,” Flint says. “We will definitely improve defensively.
“The biggest thing for me is seeing change,” he says. “Change in the locker room, in the classroom, in the weight room. I want kids who will play in the defensive zone, go down and block shots. Not necessarily the most talented players, but kids who make that sacrifice day in and day out.
“If we can do this, there’s no reason why getting into double-digit wins isn’t a realistic goal.”
Athletes Working to Improve Their Serve
Surrounded by messages from a succeed-at-all-costs society, student athletes can easily lose sight of what’s important. Fortunately, an innovative effort at Northeastern is helping its sports community remember the difference between winning on the field and winning in life.
Each of the university’s seventeen varsity programs participates in some kind of community service, often in conjunction with the Athletes in Service program, a division of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which helps athletes lend their expertise to countless organizations and individuals in and around Boston.
Sport in Society began running Athletes in Service in 2005, engaging athletes in more than five thousand hours of service in that year alone.
Today, program participants are involved in a range of activities: holding sports clinics, hosting meet-and-greets at games, giving nutrition advice, providing reading tutorials for elementary-age school children, offering career guidance, and contributing to young women’s self-esteem and leadership initiatives.
Varsity athletes are “our positive role models and leaders,” says Taryn Provencher, project coordinator for Kevin W. Fitzgerald Urban Youth Sports, the Sport in Society division that encompasses all of the group’s physical-activity and healthy-development initiatives, including Athletes in Service.
“The youth in the community truly think of them as heroes and heroines,” Provencher continues. “Seeing the smiles on the kids’ faces after just one interaction really gets me glowing, because I know the athletes will be back again and again to work with the students.”
It’s no exaggeration to say the student athletes log plenty of repeat visits. Many of the teams’ efforts span months, not hours. For example, the field hockey squad went to the Charlestown Lacrosse and Learning Center once a week for three months to conduct reading groups with girls in grades three through six and hold cooking and nutrition classes. Men’s crew did similar work with the boys at the center.
Women’s crew worked with the We’ve Got Next young women’s self-esteem and leadership program each Wednesday for two and a half months. They even arranged for the young women enrolled in the program to tour the Northeastern boathouse, where they got to try out the rowing machines.
The women’s soccer team went through GoGirlGo! training before coaching girls at the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown. In collaboration with the school’s City Kicks group, the athletes ran soccer sessions and GoGirlGo! readings each week for two and a half months.
There are dozens more examples of Northeastern student athletes volunteering in the local schools and neighborhoods—and that’s in addition to the clinics each team puts together to introduce its sport to Boston youth.
“The athletes work to inspire the young people, and I believe the young people enlighten the athletes as well,” Provencher says. “It’s a win-win situation all around. And it’s all in the name of service and creating opportunities. Using the power of sport to create social change is what we do here at Sport in Society.
“And through the Athletes in Service initiative, Northeastern athletes do that almost effortlessly, just by giving their time.”