Hockey was how I first heard of Providence College.
I
could not have been any older than three or four years of age at the time. One
weekend morning, I was at the breakfast table with my parents and brother at
our Portsmouth, R.I., home, and eager to scour the sports section of the papers,
expressly hoping to find hockey content.
My
father took charge of the navigation, and after a few seconds of vain
page-turning, he finally found my fix. Pointing to one stub and accompanying
black-and-white photograph deep in what must have been the Providence Journal-Bulletin, he said, “Well, there’s Providence
College hockey.”
As
a journalist, I cannot and will not stretch the truth and say that a lasting
love affair ensued a la Dan Shaughnessy’s with Fenway Park. But looking back,
that moment was a fitting coincidence considering the path my life and career
took en route to my second stint in my beloved Ocean State.
Because
I was a PC student who, in 2007, enrolled with sportswriting aspirations and a
penchant for pucks at the forefront of my mind, Schneider Arena inevitably
became a vital venue in my life. They say young athletes learn life lessons
from their firsthand involvement in sports, but I can tell you that just being
around the game and diligently chronicling it will do the same trick if you let
it.
As
it is for any other student who takes the proper approach outside of mere
spectatorship, the campus rink became as much of a learning environment for me as
Moore Hall, Albertus Magnus, Harkins Hall and the Feinstein Academic Center.
All
properly enriched PC students have their academic and nonacademic takeaways
from each of those other buildings. Through my primal extracurricular activity
on the women’s hockey beat for the Cowl
and as the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond The Dashers, I likewise
collected my share of wisdom ice chips at Schneider.
My
portfolio between the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2011 would have had
practically nothing without the Skating Friars and their adversaries. They
would have had nothing without the facility. Thus explains Schneider Arena’s
topmost meaning to me.
It
was there that I variously took in nearly every men’s and women’s hockey home
game for work and/or pleasure, and sometimes drew parallels between either team’s
state of affairs and my own outlook in the academic arena. (I often did the
same thing in the process of following the Bruins.)
It
was there that I watched the PC women’s impressive, seven-game winning streak
asphyxiate itself in a 2-1 loss to a lowly Vermont team on the last Friday of
January in 2010. That was the first half of a show-and-tell session, the tell half
being when head coach Bob Deraney answered one of my questions as follows:
“It’s
a very long season, and I think they’re looking to catch their breath. You
can’t catch your breath. We’ve mentioned it and they know it. There are no easy
games. You have to come to play every night, or else a result can happen that
is undesirable.
“It’s
an endurance test. There is no time to take it easy. You have to come ready to
play every night. I think that’s what happens. We’re not very young, but we’re
a young team, and I think young people want it easy, but hockey is not a sport
where you can have it easy. Hockey is a mental grind because it’s a six-month
sport.
“You
can’t enjoy the season until it’s over and you can’t take it easy until it’s
over. We want it easy sometimes, but it’s not going to happen for us.”
Young people
want it easy, but hockey is not a sport where you can have it easy.
That
stuck with me because that was a moment where hockey sounded uncannily like
life, college or otherwise. Once in a while over my last two-plus semesters at
PC, that speech and the event that produced it came back to me when I was
feeling the grind and tempted to cut a corner in my studies.
The
same thing happened after one of the multiple moments when the Friars snapped
out of a slump, or at least turned in an effort worthy of a moral victory,
signaling the approach of a cathartic victory before long. That was when
Deraney would concede that, even when you know you need to do more and start
acting accordingly, “You don’t get instant gratification.”
Again,
anybody who witnessed the games that precipitated such a statement would see
the point. Patience and persistence are prerequisites to loosening the
stranglehold of an opposing competitor or an opposing force.
And
boy, it is satisfying when it pays off, no matter what the fashion. One day,
when one player ended a goal-scoring slump after all but splintering her
knuckles through knocking and won an overtime game as a result, Deraney said of
the deciding play, “That’s probably the least skilled play she made today, is
the one she scored on. But if you keep going to the hard areas, you’re going to
get rewarded, one way or another.”
If you keep
going to the hard areas, you’re going to get rewarded, one way or another.
Theoretically,
you could absorb the same basic lesson through an academic class, whether it is
delivered directly from a work of literature on the syllabus or instilled
abstractly through the journey to term finals. But it sticks with better
adhesive if it comes in tandem with the same message as it is cultivated from
an extracurricular event.
Furthermore,
with all due respect to other sports, particularly baseball, I established
early on in my college era and with as little bias as possible that hockey is
the real metaphor of life. My experiences at Schneider Arena repeatedly
reinforced that notion and it helped me hustle through my courseload en route
to a degree.
I
have not been inside Schneider since roughly three-and-a-half weeks before my
graduation in May 2011. With its post-renovation reopening set for this week,
and its two tenants already indulging in the internal makeover, I will likely
be Rip Van Winkle whenever I reenter it myself.
That
is not merely all right with me. It is quite desirable. I have my rigid impression
of the rink as it was constituted during my own time at PC. Now that impression will permanently
stand alone in my memory bank as a part of that exact era in my life.
As
this weekend’s reopening ceremonies will surely stress, plenty is changing for
the better, we all hope. My hope is that when I revisit the building that is
Schneider Arena, I will soak in its various enhancements and unhesitatingly
draw parallels between it and the building that is my life and career.
After
all, much of the traction I have gained and tried to build upon up to this
point came from within those walls. It was the people and the establishments
who work within those walls that helped me along to my launching pad that was a
Providence College education.
Heck,
the people who called Schneider the base of their business inadvertently let me
know such a school existed in the first place.
It’s
funny how the puck bounces with no explanation sometimes, but you might as well
corral it when it is available.
Each
of you do yourselves a favor and see if you can seize a lesson like that whilst
enjoying the new, yet same Schneider Arena.
Al Daniel covered
hockey as a student-journalist for the Cowl from 2008 to 2011 and Women’s Hockey
East for Beyond The Dashers from 2009 to 2011.
