ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — The Southern Professional and Federal hockey leagues begin their 2019-20 seasons on Friday, the last professional circuits to get underway.
Around here, the start-up of the SPHL — which has featured a couple of players from this province (Shayne Morrissey and Scott Trask) the last couple of years — has annually signaled the start of preparations for our Newfoundlanders Away weekly statistical offering.
Expect the first edition of the feature in early November, and unless something changes between now and then, there will be no listing of a National Hockey League player from Newfoundland and Labrador.
But that doesn’t mean N.L. isn’t represented at the NHL level. There are a half dozen people from this province working in the front offices or within the hockey operations of big-league teams.
The most recent addition to the list is St. John’s native Rob Mullowney, who was appointed the director of corporate sales of the Ottawa Senators in May.
Mullowney has been part of the Senators organization since 2016, originally hired as chief operating office of Ottawa’s American Hockey League in Belleville, Ont.
He will remain Belleville’s COO even though he has relocated to Ottawa.
Mullowney is one of three Newfoundlanders with top-level NHL jobs who started their hockey careers with AHL teams in St. John’s; he was vice-president of hockey operations of the AHL’s St. John’s IceCaps when Ottawa hired him to run its top farm club.
The other two are Mark Hillier, who resides in St. John’s, but is the director of amateur scouting for the Winnipeg Jets, and St. John’s native Peter Hanlon, the longtime vice president of communications for the Calgary Flames.
Both worked for the AHL’s St. John’s Maple Leafs.
Hanlon, a Memorial University graduate, actually got his start as a volunteer with the AHL Leafs and moved up to head up the team’s communications and media relations. He then moved on to similar duties with the American Hockey League head office in Springfield, Mass., and after that, to the Flames.
Hillier was the director of hockey administration with St. John’s from 1992 to 1994, after which he moved into the scouting department of the parent Toronto Maple Leafs, eventually becoming Toronto’s director of amateur scouting.
Hillier’s next stop was Atlanta with the Thrashers and he moved to Winnipeg when the Thrashers’ franchise became the Jets. He started as Winnipeg’s head amateur scout and took charge of the team’s entire amateur scouting department in 2015.
The other Newfoundlanders in the NHL are St. John’s native Derek Clancey, recently promoted to director of player personnel with the Pittsburgh Penguins; Lewisporte native and Paradise resident Darryl Seward, the assistant coach (video) for the Vancouver Canucks; and Dave Roper of Mount Pearl an assistant equipment manager for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Clancey has worked just about every job in hockey operations since retiring as a minor-league player more than 20 years ago.
He was a player-coach and head coach in the ECHL, then an assistant coach in the AHL before transferring into pro scouting with the Penguins in 2007. Clancey moved up to director of pro scouting in 2010 and then to his new job this off-season. During his time with the Penguins, Pittsburgh has won the league championship three times (2009, 2016, 2017), leading to Clancey having his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup on each occasion.
Seward got into coaching in Moncton, N.B., and started to become a video specialist during four years with the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s Moncton Wildcats.
Seward jumped to the pros in 2012 with the Syracuse Crunch and worked with the Springfield Falcons and Lake Erie (later Cleveland) Monsters, winning a Calder Cup with Lake Erie in 2016. Five years ago, Roper was a volunteer equipment manager with local senior and major midget teams. Today, he’s working in a dressing room whose inhabitants include Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and John Tavares.
This is actually Roper’s third season with Toronto after two in the minors. The Leafs hired him in 2017 after he spent a year with Norfolk Admirals of the ECHL. His first pro job was with the Louisiana IceGators of the league where this story started, the SPHL.
Twitter: @telysports
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