Thank You Coach

There might not be many people outside of the college hockey world who know who Jack Parker is. Hell there might not be many people outside of the Boston University community who know who Jack Parker is. I say this because college hockey does not have a faithful following outside of New England unless you live in an area where the winters are brutally cold, such Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. It certainly doesn’t have the national recognition of its NCAA counterparts football and basketball. If you do a search on ESPN’s Website, you will find pages for poker, lacrosse, and the X Games, but none for NCAA hockey.

But this isn’t an examination of college hockey. This is about Jack Parker, the coach of the Boston University Terriers hockey team. This past Monday, Coach Parker announced his retirement after forty years on the bench, the same day as his sixty-eighth birthday.

boston.com

When I first heard the news, I wasn’t necessarily surprised, but couldn’t help think part of this was due to the front page news stories that blemished the team this past year. I’m referring to two of Parker’s players being arrested on separate occasions for sexual assault, causing the university to implement a task force to investigate the culture of the hockey team. The results were a little disturbing, finding that the team developed a “culture of sexual entitlement.” As a result, Parker agreed to step down as executive director of athletics to change the reporting lines in the hockey program. In his press conference on Monday, Parker admitted he considered retiring last year, but felt it was necessary to “see the team through the task force.”

In spite of the flawed image these findings placed on the team and the program, they should do nothing to tarnish Parker’s legacy. His accomplishments speak for themselves: as of Monday he has 894 wins (currently third all time), a .643 winning percentage, twenty-four NCAA tournament appearances with three national championships, and twenty-one Beanpot titles. He is not only one of the greatest coaches in the history of college hockey, but should be mentioned in the same breath with other college coaching icons such as Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith and Bear Bryant. It was not only a job for Parker, but he considered BU a family. “I have two daughters and about 226 sons,” he said at Monday’s press conference.

Why do I care? I earned my bachelor’s degree from BU and worked on the campus for eight years after college. I’ve been to many hockey games over the years, beginning when I was a student. I was at the 2007 Beanpot finals to watch BU beat Boston College in overtime to win their twenty-eighth Beanpot championship. I was in a bar filled with cheering alumni when BU came back from a 3-1 deficit with less than a minute left in the game to force overtime and eventually win the 2009 national title. You can say that the university and its hockey program has been a big part of my life.

I actually had a brief opportunity to meet Coach Parker in a non-hockey related issue when I worked on campus, assisting him once as a customer in my office. Not only was he genuine and down-to-earth, he made an effort to shake my hand on his way out the door, like it was an honor to meet me instead of the other way around. It was something that stuck with me as a testament to the type of person and coach that he is.

Why did Parker choose now to retire? He didn’t announce it at the beginning of the season to avoid placing the spotlight on himself and a farewell tour at every opposing arena. For his players’ sake, he didn’t want to surprise them after the season that he wouldn’t be coaching them anymore. As he said on Monday, “I did want the team to know that we are going to go through this together. This will be our last experience as me being a hockey coach here.”

Although he made the announcement earlier this week, Parker’s job is still not over. The Terriers finished third in Hockey East this season and are currently ranked eighteenth in the nation. They will be hosting Merrimack this weekend in a best-of-three series in the first round of the Hockey East tournament. With an 18-15-2 record, it might be difficult for BU to be selected to the Frozen Four tournament unless they make a deep run at the Hockey East title. One thing is certain; whenever Jack Parker coaches his last game, his legacy will not be forgotten.