Nothing to lose
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Paul Flanagan, his wife and three kids left the coziness of Canton, N.Y., the small college town 20 miles south of the Canadian border, and the 52-year-old Flanagan’s home for 50 years.
They drove away from the five Frozen Fours, the program at St. Lawrence that raised Flanagan as a player, assistant coach and, finally, the sixth-winningest head coach in Division I women’s ice hockey history.
What he was looking for, Flanagan wasn’t sure. What he knew, is that a little drive couldn’t hurt.
‘There’s nothing to lose and maybe a lot to gain,’ he said. ‘There was no pressure attached at all.’
They trekked to Hamden, Conn., on a Friday last March, and looked at Quinnipiac, one of the schools that called Flanagan about a job after he finished a 28-10-1 season at St. Lawrence that ended without a Frozen Four berth.
On Saturday, they backtracked to Syracuse. They had called, too. Wanted to start a new team in seven months. Leave the comfort of home for this uncertainty? The offer, Flanagan said, got him in the car. So he’d listen to what they have to say.
They toured the SU campus, watched a men’s lacrosse game from a luxury box in the Carrier Dome and talked details with athletic department officials. They spent three hours on campus.
When they got back into the family’s 2007 Chevy Uplander, Flanagan’s wife, Sharon, whom he met on a blind date in 1983, looked at him.
‘I can’t believe how good I feel about this,’ she said.
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It’s why he got into the car in the first place. Is there something more out there? The only other time Flanagan ever considered leaving St. Lawrence was three years ago, when Vermont offered him a job.
This time, Flanagan felt wanted. He hadn’t felt that way in a long time. And everything else just made too much sense.
He was thinking more and more about saving for retirement. Syracuse’s offer would solve that. He wanted his kids – ages 10, 14 and 16 – to experience something different than life in Canton. And he wanted to escape the mounting pressure, the very same pressure he once craved, of fielding a perennial winner at St. Lawrence. At Syracuse, there would be few expectations in the beginning.
‘Once I got down here,’ Flanagan said from his office at Manley Field House, ‘I started thinking that I’ve been there for 20 years. I’m 52. Here’s a chance if I’m ever going to do it to spread my wings.’
So he would come to Syracuse, where there were no skate sharpeners, not even pucks for when the players tried to scrimmage without the coaches around. This is no St. Lawrence, where hockey is the only Division I sport, and Flanagan turned the tiny liberal arts college with an enrollment of 2,000 into a national power.
But it’s a fresh start for Flanagan, the first head coach of the Syracuse women’s ice hockey team, which plays its first-ever game at Colgate on Wednesday.
‘I probably shocked some people because I grew up in Canton, went to school there, pretty much had lived there,’ Flanagan said. ‘But at the same time, I was never averse to venturing out.’
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In the 26 years since he came back to Canton after spending two years as a mudlogger in Montana following graduation from St. Lawrence, the longest Flanagan ever spent away from Canton was three weeks.
Flanagan drove his family back to Canton after the Syracuse visit. He spent the next day celebrating Easter Sunday at his home. But Syracuse needed an answer quickly. That night, he met with St. Lawrence athletic director Margie Strait. The school, she told him, didn’t have a competitive counter offer for Flanagan.
‘They weren’t necessarily lavishing me,’ Flanagan said. ‘Maybe they thought I was never going to leave.’
‘He’s just one of the best in the country in all of NCAA hockey,’ Syracuse Director of Athletics Daryl Gross told The Daily Orange when he hired Flanagan on March 31. ‘He’s just got such a great record of credentials that it was really a no-brainer for us.’
Sharon, his wife, said her initial response was one of pride. The idea that a school like Syracuse was interested in her husband was ‘a neat feeling.’
Maybe that’s why Paul Flanagan left home.
Flanagan drove to Ottawa the Monday morning after Easter and flew to Colorado Springs, Colo., to attend training camp for the U.S. women’s national team in preparation for the World Championships in China. Flanagan was an assistant coach on the gold medal squad.
Jackie Barto, head coach at Ohio State and also the head coach of the U.S. national team, was Flanagan’s face-to-face confidant while struggling with the decision in Colorado. They talked about starting a program – being the first coach, making the first lineup, ordering the first jerseys.
‘I could see the excitement and the energy as he talked about the opportunity,’ Barto said. ‘I definitely think it was the right time for him.’
Scott Wiley, the head coach at Colgate and a good family friend to the Flanagans, said he was not surprised at Paul’s desire to leave everything he always knew.
‘I got the sense that at times, he felt like he wasn’t supported as he’d like to be,’ Wylie said. ‘Syracuse had done a great job with that. The sense of them really wanting him made it quite a nice fit.’
Wylie came to visit him a few times after Flanagan arrived in Syracuse. He sees a new Flanagan, someone with renewed energy. Recently, they fished together at Green Lakes State Park in Fayetteville.
‘He just seems like he’s really enjoying it,’ Wylie said. ‘He’s refreshed. The opportunity has really given him new energy.’
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But why was he drained in the first place? Admittedly, Flanagan said, he had everything he needed in Canton. His family was happy. He loved the community. He coached a winning team.
Canton has been good to him. It was, after all, why he started coaching. The town is so small that when Flanagan came back from Montana in 1982, he ran into the athletic director at Canton High School. They needed a hockey coach.
‘Hey, you played hockey,’ Flanagan remembers him saying. ‘You gotta be able to coach.’
So he did, while serving as a substitute teacher at the school. Then, in 1988, he went back to St. Lawrence as assistant coach on the men’s team. Eleven years later, he took over the women’s team.
Canton loves its hockey, Paul says. And everyone in Canton knows the Flanagans, Sharon says.
Maybe that’s why Paul Flanagan left home.
Flanagan compiled a 230-83-24 record and made five Frozen Fours in nine years as the women’s head coach. ‘He’s one of the best coaches in the country,’ Wylie said. ‘I’d put him in top three or four in the country.’
But, somewhere along the way, he grew restless.
‘There was always that pressure,’ Flanagan said, relaxed in his new chair. ”We need to get back (to the Frozen Four).’ One of those years, I thought, ‘There are a lot of teams out there that haven’t even come close to going to one.’ This is just different. I’ve lived with that pressure and it motivates you, but if I’m sitting in that chair two hours up the road, it’s like, ‘We gotta get back there again.’ There’s pressure. Each and every single night. Tons of pressure.
‘If we lost a game against someone we shouldn’t that pressure to succeed, boy, it keeps you awake at night. It grinds on the players. You can see it in them. And here, right now, I hope there are no expectations other than to be competitive and to get better. It’s refreshing.’
He stops to consider what he’s saying.
‘I never really thought about it that much, but now that I’m listening to myself speak here, there’s a certain part of me that’s like, ‘Hey, fresh start.’ Because I do like that pressure to a degree. I thrived on that. If I didn’t, I would have left what I was doing a long time ago.’
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So why did Paul Flanagan leave home for Syracuse?
He’s sitting in the temporary coaches’ locker room at Tennity Ice Skating Pavilion on South Campus. In front of him is a brown and red St. Lawrence equipment bag. The Syracuse gear isn’t here yet. Stuck somewhere on the Canadian border, says full-time equipment man Trevor Simpson. Sticks, gloves, pants, helmets, it’s all on the way. Hopefully.
‘Who cares?’ Flanagan said. ‘It would be nice if we had all this stuff.’
He’s just grateful to have a full-time equipment man. The inadequate players’ locker room is cramped? Who cares? They’ll appreciate the bigger one when it’s built. They had to erect makeshift walls to form his office at Manley? Who cares? He’s just glad he can pick when his team practices (mid-day, so he can be home for dinner every night).
Flanagan’s not sure he would do what he just did – find a team in three months – again. But that’s over, for the most part. (‘He’s basically working our ass off the whole time,’ freshman forward Megan Skelly said.) Already, three days after he conducted the first-ever Syracuse women’s ice hockey practice, two recruits for next year are watching this Tuesday practice.
Back to the grind. But it doesn’t seem like a grind compared to St. Lawrence. No pressure. Low expectations. And he is the one creating it all.
So why did Paul Flanagan leave home for Syracuse?
He finds out, beginning Wednesday.
Published on September 24, 2008 at 12:00 pm
