Page 9 of Home Ice Advantage

Aronson, his brown eyes dancing, held the door open for him. “After you, boss.”

And for the first time, Ryan walked into the home locker room of the Boston Beacons as their head coach.

Eric surveyed the room as they went in. The boys looked both interested and apprehensive, which was about to be expected considering the way that Harrison Leclerc had gotten fired.

An entire shitty season last year hadn’t been enough to do it. An entire season of Caleb Cook underperforming hadn’t been enough to do it. The management group had looked at the injuries and the loss of personnel and saidwe’re gonna roll it over into next season. Of course, it was difficult to roll it over into the next season when your head coach was screaming and spitting in the face of one of your franchise players. Even a slow-to-move front office couldn’t ignore that. The incident had been the last straw for Leclerc, and he’d been summarily tossed on his ass.

And honestly, good fucking riddance.

Eric had also done what he’d could to diffuse the tension over the last few seasons, but it hadn’t been good enough. He wondered sometimes whether the guys blamed him for that, whether they blamed him for the dismal record, too. Whether they wished he’d been fired along with Leclerc. It was easy to see the affection that the d-men had for Petey, because he was the kind of guy who was easy to be friendly with.

Eric wasn’t.

He looked around the room at his guys. Caleb Cook and Kai Williams, inseparable as always, watched the trio of coaches with interest and suspicion. Travis Sinclair, one of the veteran forwards, threw him an ironic little salute from his spot on the outside end of the horseshoe. Davit Kancheli, the baby goalie they’d had to call up and throw into the starter’s net after Kristian Rajala retired following his hip surgeries. All of them probably had expectations for the season and most of them were probably in the shitter, as it were. There was only so much he could do about that.

It was an awkward time to come into camp. Before cuts were made. Probably one of Sullivan’s first jobs would be meeting everyone and then getting to know them and then having to tell some of them they were going back to their juniors teams or Europe or the minor leagues. And that would be some of their only interaction until next fall.

He glanced sideways at Sullivan, standing at attention in front of the guys. He thought about Sullivan’s phone call with his father, how frustrated he’d seemed after hanging up. Eric could almost see Sullivan’s entire body vibrating with concealed energy, like he’d wanted to punch a wall or go running down the hallway. He turned all of that now on the room. It wasn’t quite a smile but the hint of one trembled on the edge of his mouth.

“Good morning,” Sullivan said. “As some of you might know, I’ve been hired to take the reins as the interim coach for this season. Before we started camp for the day, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about my vision for the season. What I’d like for this team to become, if we have the opportunity to continue working together beyond this year.”

Eric had played hockey for a long time, and he had coached for a shorter but not insignificant amount of time. All in all, he’d been listening to coaches giving fuckingspeechesof varying sorts for the last thirty-five years at least. Most of them left him cold or weren’t particularly effective. He remembered the Stampede’s coach trying to rally them after they’d gone down 3-2 in the Western Conference Finals against the Desperadoes.

It had been so flat he’d almost felt like laughing.

No one was laughing now.

Gradually, as Sullivan spoke, all of the faces in the room turned toward him. The murmured conversations ceased. The players listened, rapt, as he talked to them about how he wanted to approach this differently, build something sustainable. How he was going to learn right along with them, and how he wanted them to play hockey, and the structure of their personal style within the larger game. To learn how to make the right reads. About learning to think in concepts rather than relying only on mechanical systems, and the freedom to make the calls they saw fit.

Sullivan talked about how he was going to mess up and he hoped they’d talk to him about it, and how he anticipated the players also messing up, but that he would rather see a mistake in the service of trying something new than no mistake and not trying at all.

He didn’t raise his voice. He was steady and calm and confident, and it was hard to look away from him. There was something about his face. The sincerity and genuine excitement so visible. Sullivan was just magnetic.

It was fuckinginfuriating.

It was petty, but the better Sullivan sounded, the more Eric wanted to strangle him and shake him by his obnoxious little neck.

In the center of the room, Sullivan was giving an impassioned speech about how the wins didn’t matter this season as much as learning the right habits did, as much as learning how to play as a team. And that if they all trusted each other and learned to play as a group the way he envisioned they could play, eventually the wins would start coming. He talked about playing defense in the offensive zone and offense in the defensive zone. He talked about being a dynamic 200-foot force.

Sullivan talked about how the most rewarding parts of the latter half of his career hadn’t been winning the Cup, but mentoring younger players, learning the game and helping to teach it to others. That he might not have had the title, but that he’d been doing this for years, and if they trusted him, he’d repay that trust in what he could give them.

Sure, itsoundedgood.

A lot of bullshit sounded good if you wrapped it up in a pretty bow, if you ignored the fact that the roster was the roster and no amount of sweet-talking it could whip aging veterans and baby rookies with barely three seasons between them into shape. Of course Sullivan thought that he could just waltz right in and make things better, of course he hadn’t understood that the last season had been such a grinding misery.

Hehadn’t ever had to try.

Things had just been handed tohim.

Belatedly, Eric realized he was glaring and that it was pretty much at odds with the rest of the room, which was just now breaking out into applause. And then even more so as the guys started to get up to come and introduce themselves to Sullivan and shake his hand.

Sullivan accepted all of the greetings the same way he did everything, with his pleasant, beaming smile, like there was no place he’d rather be than right here. Like there was no one else in existence except the person he was looking at right then. For the first time in ages, the room crackled with energy, and the boys seemed excited to be there.

Petey looked at him with raised eyebrows.

Eric mouthedI’m fineback at him.

“Come on,” Petey said, “you better get it together, bud. We’re about to go out on the ice and get the full Ryan Sullivan experience.”

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