With every passing development bearing the imprint of Jack Parker, it makes more sense to organize an impromptu 30-year reunion of the 1986-87 Boston University hockey team.
Wait, what?
Those Terriers went a so-so 19-15-3, and failed to defend their first-ever Hockey East postseason title. They were the seventh of nine installments who failed to reach the NCAA tournament in an 11-year stretch, the leanest period in Parker’s distinguished 40-year reign.
None of that is the point here. Ditto the 897 game victories, 11 conference crowns and three national titles Parker corralled in his career. All of that and other data that has become easy to memorize will continue to receive due recognition in the wake of Parker’s pending enshrinement in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.
The legacy of 1986-87, nine seasons after Parker’s first NCAA championship and eight seasons before his second, is best defined by delayed gratification. A variation on that principle is all but a catchphrase of one of the 1987 Terriers’ graduating seniors, Bob Deraney.
This author covered Deraney and his pupils in the Providence College women’s program from 2008 to 2011. The chronicles of that era had no shortage of variety, and the sentence “You don’t get instant gratification” was commonplace when the scoreboard wasn’t sparkling. But the team’s self-liberation from a slump tended to manifest not long after Deraney spoke those words to the press.
Peruse the roster of players and coaches on that 19-15-3, 1986-87 Terrier team, and the same concept applies to its legacy. The U.S. Hall’s induction class of 2017 alone is three-fifths comprised of names from that roll call.
Besides Parker, former winger Scott Young will join on account of his subsequent 1988 Olympic participation and 1,181-game, 756-point NHL career. Ben Smith, one of Parker’s former assistant coaches, served in the same capacity for the ’88 U.S. men’s team, then guided the women to gold in their inaugural Olympic tournament 10 years later. His Americans added a silver and bronze in their 2002 and 2006 follow-up, respectively.
Fresher hardware with the influence of another former Parker understudy is still leaving its afterglow. Parker, Young and Smith’s honor was announced eight days after Mike Sullivan became the first American coach to win back-to-back Stanley Cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Mike Sullivan, who began his college career at BU in 1986, did not win his first championship as a player or coach until 2016. But now he is the first NHL coach since Scotty Bowman to led a team to back-to-back titles. (Photo by Frederick Breedon/Getty Images)
Sullivan happened to be a freshman at BU in 1986-87, the only year where he and Young overlapped. His head-coaching endeavors started in the AHL right on the heels of his ending a 12-season professional playing career. Within another year, he was coaching in The Show, but the notion that he was still too green for the field bubbled when the Boston Bruins fired him in 2006.
It took Sullivan three NHL assistant jobs, a brief return to the AHL and nearly a full decade to return to the exclusive 30-member coaching fraternity. But each of his first two seasons with Pittsburgh have culminated in a Cup.
Sullivan’s last stop on the road back was with the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins. His former spot there has since been filled by a former Terrier teammate in Clark Donatelli, who subsequently joined Young and Smith on the U.S. Olympic team throughout 1987-88. The rest of Donatelli’s playing run was less fulfilling, but he is now coming off his sixth season of professional head coaching, including the last two with the Baby Pens.
Donatelli’s fellow Rhode Island native, Dave Quinn, manned the BU blue line in the mid-’80s. Though his first-round draft status with the Minnesota North Stars got lost in long-term translation, he has since found fulfillment behind the bench himself. Five stops in various capacities in the NCAA, AHL and NHL led to his succeeding Parker as the Agganis Arena bench boss.
And in a slight reversal of residence from Quinn, Deraney is the only remaining Women’s Hockey East head coach whose tenure predates the league’s 2002 inception. The Roxbury, Mass., native has called the shots at Schneider Arena since 1999, leading Providence to a 2002 ECAC postseason pennant, followed by the first three WHEA titles.
Much like the Terriers of the ’80s, the Friars have lately brooked the thinner portion of Deraney’s protracted tenure so far. But after his latest contract expired on the heels of a seven-win improvement on 2015-16, he earned a renewal.
That move keeps him in the company of eight other graduates of Parker’s capstone class currently holding a coaching job in the Division I or III men’s or women’s ranks. Three of them — Deraney, Quinn and Quinn’s assistant Young — all overlapped with Parker and Smith on Commonwealth Avenue 30 seasons ago.
No instant gratification back then, but plenty of fruitful, widespread seeds from the Parker tutelage tree now.
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