Scott Sandelin milestone reopens Shannon Miller wound in Duluth

Scott Sandelin, his pupils and his rooters have every right to savor his entry into the 300-win club last Saturday as much as they see fit. They are excused from the inevitable discussion of the downer the Minnesota-Duluth men’s coach’s accomplishment evokes.

That being said, we are barely two years removed from the same institution’s questionable ouster of another puck professor who once crossed the 300-win plateau in the Bulldog name.

Shannon Miller is in the second season of her post-UMD tenure, and maybe of her post-coaching life altogether. Her ornate 16-year run in Duluth met an unceremonious finish when, at the halfway mark of 2014-15, higher-ups informed her she would be jettisoned by season’s end.

Aside from a subsequent lawsuit in September of 2015, the saga has since garnered little media attention. That only means the controversy is as good as unresolved, therefore every new jewel on Sandelin’s crown is liable to underscore the dent on that of his former AMSOIL Arena neighbor.

One-and-a-half seasons after her exit, Miller’s 383 victories with the Bulldogs still have her at No. 4 on the Division I women’s all-time leaderboard. Only Harvard’s Katey Stone, Mercyhurst’s Mike Sisti and Wisconsin’s Mark Johnson have eclipsed her.

Conversely, there are 15 active Division I men’s coaches who have notched more career wins than Sandelin. In addition, while the men’s national pool of competition has long been deeper and denser, the fact remains Miller hung up four more championship banners.

For the better part of this calendar decade, the on-ice fortunes of both UMD hockey teams have fluctuated hand-in-hand. But only one of the programs has experienced off-ice tumult when it hit a valley.

This past Saturday’s 4-3 overtime thriller over St. Cloud State improved Sandelin’s squad to 13-5-4 this season. The Bulldogs are in a comfortable position to put in their third consecutive NCAA tournament appearance. But prior to that streak, they had posted a .500 or sub-.500 record in 2012-13 and 2013-14.

Despite the momentary slump — which came in the wake of a 2011 national championship — no one in power threatened Sandelin’s job security. Yet for Miller — she of five NCAA titles in the 10 years between 2001 and 2010 — it only took two substandard records in those same two down years as the men’s program to drain her vocational viability.

Moreover, when the news of her imminent dismissal broke two Decembers ago, her Bulldogs were resurging from the prior season’s 15-15-6 finish. They were 12-5-3 at the 2014-15 holiday respite, and would close the campaign at a respectable 20-12-5.

Granted, after a dip to 15-21-1 last season (hardly an uncommon occurrence for a first-year replacement), Maura Crowell has re-sharpened the women’s blades. They enter the coming weekend with a 15-4-3 transcript. They are coming off a sweep of the dynastic Minnesota Gophers, and they match the men’s PairWise positioning at No. 3.

While there is no cause to withhold any credit from Crowell, who is to say Miller could not have overseen the same turnaround?

Leading up to her passive release by the university, her team was cultivating comparable results to her male counterparts with anything but comparable support. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Rachel Blount noted at the time of the lawsuit, Miller “was paid $93,241 less than men’s hockey coach Scott Sandelin. The suit also notes the women’s hockey program received substantially fewer resources than the men’s team.”

Despite those “substantially fewer resources,” Duluth remains a destination for top-shelf talent. For that reason, it is harder to digest the additional nugget in Blount’s write-up where athletic director Josh Berlo reportedly “said the reason was that UMD could not afford her $207,000 base salary, which made her the nation’s highest-paid women’s coach.”

Revenue discrepancies aside, Miller’s track record and turnaround in the autumn of 2014 helped to justify her salary standing. That notion is self-evident in the relative brevity of the Bulldogs’ competitive recession, which happens to every powerhouse now and then.

UMD’s record so far this winter speaks to the cycle turning back northward. And its roster is still predominated by Miller recruits and Miller-era holdovers.

Crowell, a longtime understudy on Stone’s staff at Harvard, warrants credit for capitalizing on a hard-earned, long-awaited head-coaching opportunity. UMD’s success under her tutelage is no accident, and nothing taints the role she and Sandelin are playing in the collective prosperity at AMSOIL Arena.

Nonetheless, under more even-handed circumstances, Sandelin would not be the only Bulldog bench boss celebrating a milestone victory this season. If given the chance, Miller would have been coming off her 400th career win no later than October.

The absence of that milestone in the Duluth hockey annals will not tone down its conspicuousness in the foreseeable future. Not as long as both programs are brushing their respective ceilings, but only one veteran coach is still around to raise their own bar.