The Quinnipiac Way: How a college hockey power was born
HAMDEN, CT — Rand Pecknold took the job as men's hockey coach at the school that’s hard to pronounce (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) because it meant $6,700 and a position in the sport.
"I easily could’ve quit," he says. "Nobody would’ve blamed me. We had nothing. I couldn’t feed the guys when we went on the road. We didn’t have a budget to play a full schedule. This was about as Mickey Mouse as it gets."
So he slogged through midnight practices at the town rink in Northford, CT. He got home at 2:30 a.m., slept until 6 a.m., woke up, taught at a local high school and came home for a three-hour nap. At 6 p.m. he'd drive 71 miles to the Quinnipiac University campus to recruit players and try to figure out how to bolster his team. Then he started it all over again with practice at midnight.
“It was one of the hardest years of my life,” Pecknold told SI.com while sitting in his office at the TD Bank Sports Center, under a whiteboard with not-quite-erased diagrams. “And there we were with one win, and I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’”
Now, 22 years later, Pecknold has taken his team from the bowels of a public rink that had a curtain separating the home and visiting locker rooms to the top of the NCAA rankings, the number one seed heading into this weekend’s national tournament. It’s been the turnaround of a lifetime, from 1-12-1 in his first 14 games as coach to 29-3-7 this season and the cusp of the national championship. But this is not just about the boys. It turns out the program that started in the town rink now has something else: a pretty damn good women’s team.
(SI.com)
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