From Merrimack to Vancouver

Thursday, February 4, 2010

By TOM KING

Staff Writer

The move a few years ago was a calculated one, and right now Merrimack’s Dave Flint is reaping Olympic benefits.

A few years ago, after serving as the men’s assistant coach at St. Anselm College for seven years, Flint switched to take control of the school’s women’s program. It led to the head coaching spot at Northeastern University and, ultimately, a position as an assistant coach to Mark Johnson on the U.S. Olympic women’s hockey team.

“It’s a great opportunity,” Flint said. “You hope to get to that level in coaching at some point. With me switching over from men’s hockey to women’s hockey, it’s opened up some of these doors that wouldn’t have been open had I stayed in the men’s game.

“It’s an opportunity that some people never get a chance to experience in their lifetime, so I’m pretty lucky.”

Flint grew up in Merrimack but played his high school hockey as a goaltender at Trinity in Manchester, graduating in 1989. He went on to a career at North Adams State, MVP his senior season, and after working at St. A’s as a trainer, he moved into coaching.

And he’s been a pretty successful one, posting a 100-35-5 career mark between St. A’s and NU. He hooked on with USA hockey thanks to his goaltending background and his work at St. A’s, getting to know the women’s executive director, former Bowdoin coach Michele Amidon. They didn’t have a goaltending coach so he sent in his resume and was hired, and he feels that tie helped him get the Northeastern job.

“I started out as their goalie consultant, working camps,” he said. “And then I built some relationships with the coaches who were in the running for the Olympic job.”

He asked Amidon if he could be an assistant for different tournaments, and went to Sweden in 2007 and then the World Championships in China in 2008. Last spring he went to the Worlds in Finland, working with Johnson, a prominent member of the 1980 U.S. men’s Olympic gold medal “Miracle on Ice” team.

“I got a chance to work with some great coaches,” Flint said, “and it worked out. Working that last World Championship with Mark, he had just gotten hired as the Olympic coach, and we hit it off well so he asked me to be his assistant coach for the Olympics.”

Flint’s duties so far have included working with the goaltenders, overall practice planning, and scouting the opposition. It all begins on Feb. 12, and the women’s team faces China on Feb. 14, Russia on Feb. 16 and Finland on Feb. 18. The gold medal game is Feb. 25.

Remember, women’s hockey became the rage in 1998 with the U.S. winning the gold medal.

“That’s when girls programs started popping up all over the place,” Flint said. “This year’s team is kind of a testament to that. It’s a young team, I think the average age is 23 … The sport has really grown in the last five to 10 years. People who have never seen the women’s game go and say ‘Wow, this is great hockey.’”

The international game, Flint says, has much more parity than 10 years ago, when the U.S. and Canada dominated. Sweden and Finland are emerging and others are closing the gap. So he expects an interesting Olympics.

“The last few games we’ve played Canada we’ve played them really tough, but we’ve lost,” he said. “But we’ve made strides. In the last two years, we’ve won four out of the five major tournaments.”

Flint did not have a problem making the move from coaching men to women.

“The transition wasn’t too hard,” Flint said.

“The level of play isn’t obviously as high, but the girls are just as competitive. And more times than not, you deal with less of the egos. They want to learn so much, they’re just like sponges. They just want to constantly learn and get better. That’s what I enjoy about coaching – the teaching – and that’s why I became a coach.”

That’s an interesting story in itself. Flint was actually working to become a trainer at St. A’s, volunteering to get his clinical hours to be certified while at grad school at the University of New Hampshire. After he got his certification, St. A’s was starting up football and needed another athletic trainer, and Flint was the man, and the job was combined as assistant athletic trainer and assistant men’s hockey coach.

“And as I got into it,” he said, “I realized I enjoyed coaching so much more than athletic training.”

When the men’s head job opened up six years into his tenure, he applied, and didn’t get it. “I was a little bit sour, and wondering if coaching was the right area to be in.”

That’s when the school, with its new rink being built, indicated it was starting a women’s program and asked Flint if he would be interested in running it. Bingo.

“It’s a great school, great location, great academics, so I knew I could start a good program there,” Flint said. He spent five years in that position, winning 20 games in his final four years on the job.

His first year at Northeastern was only 12-20-3, but that was the best the program had done in five years.

It was tough for Flint to approach school officials and ask for a sabbatical to take the Olympic job, but it turned out to be no problem; the school embraced the idea and assistants Linda Lundrigan and Lauren McAuliffe are running things in his absence for the duration of the season.

“The tough part for me was I took the job to rebuild the program,” he said. “I worked extremely hard last year to change the culture with recruiting, and we made some good steps. So I was a little tentative (about leaving) but luckily I have two great assistant coaches ... I’m going to watch from afar, support the team and support the coaches.”

Working with Johnson has been fun, Flint said. He’s learned to pry a few of the 1980 stories from him. Johnson followed a similar path, as a men’s assistant at Wisconsin, passed over for the top job, then becoming the women’s coach and turning the Badgers into a national power.

“I’ve learned a lot from him over the last five, six months,” Flint said. “Not only x’s and o’s, but how you deal with players, and managing a team, the little ins and outs and things.”

Flint has asked a lot of people who have been through it what the Olympic experience might be like. “I don’t know if there’s anything they can tell me that’s going to prepare me for what I’ve experienced.

“It’s going to be a whirlwind. I think at the end of it, I’m going to look back and go ‘Wow, I can’t believe what I’ve just experienced.’ I think it’s just going to be a tremendous experience, not only for me as a coach but just to be in that setting with those athletes.”

He says he’s had great support from his parents, who live next door to him, and his wife, Alison, and 6-year-old daughter Paige and 4-year-old son Tate. Ironically, it doesn’t look like Paige will be a hockey player but Tate has already been on skates, pleasing the Merrimack youth hockey and Gate City Wing alum.

At any rate, Flint knows the world will be watching. A game with Team Canada in Ottawa drew some 17,000. He was in Merrimack recently, but then it was off to training in Colorado Springs and the team heads for Vancouver Feb. 7.

“It’s going to be unbelievable,” Flint said.

But, it’s been an experience since he made the transition into women’s hockey that Dave Flint has always believed would someday come his way.