Rand Pecknold is on top of the mountain in college hockey and he’s loving the view.
“It’s been chaos since we won, but it’s been great,” he said.
Reaching the summit beats the heck out of life on the bottom, which is where Pecknold (Bedford, N.H.) was 29 years ago.
A 12-3 home loss to Bentley in November 1994 got his coaching career at Quinnipiac got off to a rocky start.
“We did absolutely nothing that I’d been preaching and teaching in practice. I dressed three goalies and I had to play all three. It was not a spectacular debut,” he remembered.
Not long afterward he recorded the first of his 615 wins, a 9-5 victory over Stonehill. “Bobby Lucarelli (East Haven, Conn.) had four goals,” said Pecknold, who was making $6,700 to coach and was teaching high school history to help pay the bills.
And so it began. From humble beginnings, the Bobcats and their coach embarked on a climb that peaked — after decades of blood, sweat and tears — in the 2023 NCAA championship.
That possibility seemed ridiculous in 1994. Said Pecknold: “I was 1-12-1 after 14 games. I always remember that.”
While Quinnipiac didn’t have much going for it in the early days, it did have Pecknold.
Chris Cerrella, who graduated in 2001 and is now a successful junior coach in the Eastern Hockey League, said the feeling among he and his teammates was, “Let’s get behind this guy because he’s going to be a winner.”
Joe Dumais (Auburn, Maine) arrived in 2002 as a freshman forward, graduated in 2006, and has been Quinnipiac’s associate head coach since 2016. He is still amazed at the workload shouldered by Pecknold in the early years.
“Rand was a great CEO. He could really run everything that was going on. We didn’t have a rink, we didn’t have equipment managers, we didn’t have anything. Rand was doing everything,” said Dumais.
“When I first got here as a player, he was a very detailed coach that knew what he wanted, knew how he wanted his team to be operated and demanded a lot out of his players, both on and off the ice.”
Ben Syer arrived at the same time.
“I was leaving grad school and was looking to get into college coaching. I just cold-called Rand and he called back. I think the job guaranteed $2,500. He was looking for a young and hungry guy and I fit the bill,” said Syer, the associate head coach at Cornell since 2012.
The mandate from his boss was “bring me ballplayers, let’s get some ballplayers in here,” said Syer.
“In a lot of ways, it was kind of fun. It was a challenge. At that time, I wasn’t married, didn’t have kids. I’d sit in the office and work my way west. I was with (assistant coach) Kyle Wallack (West Hartford, Conn.). We shared an office that both of us really couldn’t fit in and you’d literally call through the time zones.
“You’d get, ‘Quinnipiac, who?’ You’d call everybody. We’d send old-school mailings. I don’t know, 300 or 400 mailings a week. It was about as big a net as you could cast and hope somebody would take the bait.”
Fortunately, Quinnipiac had an athletic director in Jack McDonald who was all in on building the program.
“People didn’t even think we were a real Division 1 school at that point, but we’d get free tickets to go to the Beanpot because of Jack’s connection. We’d go. We’d learn. We’d interact with people. We’d go to the Frozen Four. Rand’s ability to network and really look at it in terms of the bigger picture was amazing, even at that point. Everything Rand did was to be the best,” said Syer.
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Reid Cashman was the kind of ballplayer Pecknold had in mind. An All-American defenseman and Hobey Baker top 10 finalist in 2005, he put up 148 points in 151 games for the Bobcats. After his playing career, he was an assistant coach at Quinnipiac from 2011-16 and is now the head coach at Dartmouth.
“Rand and Quinnipiac have gone through phases,” said Cashman, a Washington Capitals assistant coach for two seasons. “The (Class of 2006), which was a year ahead of me — Joe Dumais was in that group — was the start of the character that was going to be a part of the culture. The '06s and the '08s set the tone for the character of the kind of kid that Quinnipiac was going to try to bring in.”
Slowly but surely, the foundation for a national championship-contending program took shape. The Bobcats joined the ECAC in 2006 and opened their state-of-the-art on-campus rink in 2007. Pecknold and his staff continued to cultivate a culture that is now second to none in college hockey.
Hiring strength and conditioning coach Brijesh Patel in 2008 was a big step.
“He’s a massive culture driver,” said Cashman.
“Everybody’s expected to work,” said Dumais. “On the ice, off the ice, in the classroom, in the weight room, in practice, in games. If you don’t, you almost get ostracized. You’re the odd man out. Everybody’s looking at you and saying, ‘Why are you not working hard in the weight room, why don’t you have good grades?’ And those kids don’t last.”
In time, Quinnipiac started attracting players such as Devon Toews, Connor Clifton, Sam Anas and Matthew Peca, who would go on to the NHL.
They went 30-8-5 in 2012-13 and advanced to the national championship game for the first time, losing to bitter Whitney Avenue rival Yale.
That run to the Frozen Four made an impression on Chase Priskie, who was a 15-year-old defenseman at South Kent School in Connecticut when he met Pecknold. “Being from Florida, I had never heard of Quinnipiac. I didn’t even know they were Division 1 when I first started being recruited by them,” he said.
“I remember watching the regional, the semifinals and then the national championship game,” said Priskie. “That was the first time I realized that, wow, Quinnipiac can play at the national level. It’s like, going to Quinnipiac, you can still compete for a national title.”
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Priskie was a freshman on the 2015-16 team that returned to the national championship game and lost to powerhouse North Dakota. He was drafted by Washington in 2016 and played for Rochester and San Diego in the AHL in 2022-23.
“He gets his top-end guys to commit to playing his style and the guys keep each other accountable,” said Priskie, a two-time Bobcats captain.
“If you don’t buy in to the system, one, you don’t play, because there are other guys who are willing to do that. And two, the players keep each other accountable, which I think is something that Quinnipiac does better than anyone else. A lot of it is how Rand instilled the culture. I know he talks about it being like blind faith. The pack-is-bigger-than-the-dog type of thing. Buying in to the system, you’re going to have more team success and greater individual success as well.”
Another critical part of Quinnipiac’s success has been Pecknold’s willingness to change with the times.
“He’s a big-time players’ coach now,” said Cerrella, “but he wasn’t that way when I first got there. He would walk by us on campus and sometimes we’d hardly get a smile from him.”
Dumais has seen the changes. “When I played for him in ’02, practices were much different. They were longer. He was just harder on guys,” he said.
“He’s evolved to where he rarely ever yells at the guys or snaps on them. We used to bag skate when I was here. He doesn’t do that anymore. The best thing he’s done is he’s evolved as a coach. He wants to get better. He wants to evolve with the players and with the coaching staff and that why he’s been so successful.”
Bill Riga (Westboro, Mass.) spent 13 years on Pecknold’s staff before taking over as head coach at Holy Cross in 2021.
“I think his temperament has evolved as he’s aged and had kids and a family and has had more experience and more success. The way he talks to the players in video sessions, addresses them between periods, has evolved over time. Everything in general is a little bit more, ‘This is why we’re doing things,’ instead of ‘We’re just doing this and that’s the way it is,’ ” Riga said.
Pecknold sees learning and openness to change as an advantage.
“It’s probably one of my strengths. I’m a constant learner. I continually want to learn and get better. I’m, I guess, almost thirsty for knowledge. I’m not locked into, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ Where can we go to turn over a rock nobody’s turned over? I’m always willing to change and to adapt. If we’re going to be successful, I’m going to have to continually adapt,” he said.
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It all came together for the Bobcats in 2022-23 as they finished with a program-best record of 34-4-3, but there were a couple of bumps along the way.
“We went to Cornell/Colgate (in January) and got swept,” said Dumais. “We did not play well either night. We didn’t have anything. That was a low point. Coaches were pretty upset, the players were upset. We rebounded really well, played a really good Connecticut Ice tournament after that.
“Even worse than that was when we lost to Colgate in overtime (in the ECAC tournament at Lake Placid). It was tough because we hadn’t won the Whitelaw Cup (the ECAC playoff championship) in a while. We thought we had the team to do it and we lost. That was devastating. Our players had a tough time with it. Our coaches were pretty upset and down.”
With the NCAA tournament days away, the players turned to Quinnipiac’s most prominent NHL alum, a Stanley Cup champion with the Colorado Avalanche.
“That next week our guys had a Zoom call with Devon Toews. They set it up on their own. Devon talked to them about the pressure of being a top two, top three team and having to play through the playoffs. It set those guys at ease,” Dumais said.
The Bobcats responded by rolling past Merrimack, Ohio State and Michigan to reach the national championship game for the third time in a decade. Their opponent would be a Minnesota juggernaut that featured 14 NHL draft picks, compared to Quinnipiac’s two.
Quinnipiac fell behind, 2-0, then cut the deficit to 2-1 by the end of the second period. With the goalie out and an extra attacker on the ice, Collin Graf (Lincoln, Mass.) tied the score with 2:47 left in the third period, setting the stage for overtime.
The vibe in the room during the intermission was electric.
“I came in smiling, almost laughing. I think I said something like, ‘That was awesome.’ I remember making eye contact with Christophe Fillion as I came in. He just had this grin, ear to ear. I’ll never forget it,” said Pecknold.
“The way it was set up, I had to walk through the room and then turn to face the guys. I could just feel the energy in that room and the positivity. The confidence was off the charts. I just said something like, ‘You want to get this done? All right, let’s go!’ I walked out and they went nuts.”
It was over just 10 stunning seconds into overtime as Jacob Quillan buried the game-winner. Quinnipiac was the national champion.
There was a great moment after the game on the ESPN broadcast when an emotional Pecknold asked for and received a hug from interviewer Colby Cohen.
“That moment with Colby isn’t dissimilar to how he is with alums after they graduate. When he’s not your coach anymore, you see a different side of Rand,” said Cashman.
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The storyline and the dramatic ending were tailor-made for Hollywood — perfect for, say, a feel-good Netflix production.
So the question was posed to Pecknold: Who would play you?
“Jeez, I don’t know. Kurt Russell (who played Herb Brooks in “Miracle”) is a little old now. Can Tom Cruise skate? Let’s get Brad Pitt,” he said.
Then he burst out laughing.
Life is good at the top of the mountain.
