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From the FreeP: Parker’s career ends with inconsistent 2012-13 season

By Annie Maroon/DFP Staff

Jack Parker’s last season as the Boston University men’s hockey coach will be remembered for that reason alone. It will also be recalled as a hard season to figure: The Terriers, despite their youth, played a strong first half, a nearly perfect month of March wand a six-week stretch between those two that doomed their year.

“If you told me at the beginning of the year we would have gone to the Hockey East championship game, with as young a team as we had, I would have said that’s a pretty good year,” Parker said. “But not the way it unfolded. The bookends were pretty good. The six-week span in January was the ‘blah.’”

BU (21-16-2, 15-10-2 Hockey East) began the season dressing nine freshmen regularly. The team later lost center Wesley Myron to the ECHL, but nearly every other rookie made significant contributions in the end. With the amount of playing time they got, they had no other choice.

Freshman Danny O’Regan proved himself a top-six center and led the team with 38 points. Freshman defenseman Matt Grzelcyk finished with 23 points, third among all Hockey East defensemen. In net, both freshmen Sean Maguire and Matt O’Connor played well enough to start alternating games all year, until O’Connor suffered a collapsed lung near the end of the season.

“I remember thinking that we had to have either [sophomore center Cason] Hohmann or [Yasin] Cissé make a big jump from the year before, and we had to have either Myron or Danny O’Regan play on the first two line centers,” Parker said. “As it turns out, Hohmann made a big jump and O’Regan played great.”

Between the freshmen jumping in and older players, including Hohmann and senior captain Wade Megan, starting off hot, BU went 10-5 in the first semester against the nation’s toughest schedule. It faced Boston College and the University of New Hampshire three times and the University of North Dakota twice, beating each once.

For more, including a look at why BU may have struggled so much in the middle of the season, go to dailyfreepress.com.

3 Comments

  1. Why does Parker use the “young team” excuse every year? Doesn’t the team grow up at some point? And from an age perspective, didn’t BC have the youngest team this year? They did OK.

    • BC did OK? Only trophy they got was the Beanpot, and that’s not important to BC fans. Losing their last two games by an 11-4 final goal total doesn’t seem OK to me.

  2. The problem was that Jack lost control of the team some time ago. The loss of so many players was because there were off ice problems for over ten years. Also plyers like Hohman are not first rate quality players for Div I hockey.The recruiting has been very poor vis a vis BC program in the last ten years. He was a great coach for most of his carer.