BIBLE HILL, N.S. — To become the winningest coach in the history of AAA midget/major midget/major U-18 hockey in Nova Scotia, you must have a bit of a competitive side.
That would be Valley resident Steve Crowell who continues to pile up ‘W’s as the head coach and general manager of the Dartmouth-based Steele Subaru Major U-18s, including another this past weekend versus the Sydney Rush.
Crowell has been with different incarnations of Dartmouth teams going back to 1987, as well as a brief but very successful time with the Cole Harbour entry. His only seasons outside the league were spent as Truro Jr. A head coach/general manager for four season and a year with Dartmouth’s major bantam/U-15 team. Coaching stints prior to his U-18 journey also include U-15 and junior A, both in Dartmouth.
So where does the competitiveness come from?
Like many high-end athletes and coaches, you would only have to look at Crowell’s parents, both part of Acadia University’s Sports Hall of Fame. His mom was a swimmer as well as manager of a championship basketball team, while his dad played rugby on very successful clubs, and on two Maritime champion hockey teams at Acadia, one serving as captain. He is in the Hall as an individual and as a team member.
Crowell’s dad Bryson passed away Jan. 11 at 92.
“He taught us well,” Crowell said of his dad, the us referring to his brother and sister. “Know the rules of whatever sport you’re playing. And there were never any participation medals, you earned what you got.”
Crowell was reminded of Sunday afternoon board games at the family home where Bryson would carefully go over the rules of the game and the strategy, and then still come out on top because he talked one of his kids into (using a Monopoly example) swapping Connecticut Avenue and Baltic Avenue.
“Then at the end, he would say, that was when the game was won or lost,” Crowell said with a chuckle, the competitive lessons still ringing true.
While it was hockey and rugby as a youth and at university, it was golf and bridge that became Bryson’s competitive endeavours later in life and remained so, right up to his passing.
Crowell remembers him calling one day at the age of 86. It was Labour Day Weekend.
“All excited saying ‘I still can’t putt,’ that was his opening line,” Crowell said. “He missed a six-foot putt, straight uphill. If it had gone in, he would have shot a 66, at Amherst. Four-under; playing from the forward tees, but still. He regularly, the last five or six years, would have played every second day. And over a two-week span, if he played seven rounds, one or two of those would have been in the 70s,” Crowell said, adding those were walking rounds too, he would cart golf only if his partner needed the wheels.
Crowell himself was a very good golfer and remembered one piece of advice his dad gave him that often came into play.
“He taught me one thing for sure; when you’re putting from distance, imagine the hole is six-feet wide and get it inside that six-foot circle,” he said. “Your next putt is going to be a whole lot easier; it was an amazing visual. Playing in tournaments and remembering that when the pressure is on … just get it in that six-foot window.”
The ‘steady eddy’ golf, but not so steady on the greens, was a constant in Bryson’s life; as was a love for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Meanwhile, Crowell is well known as a die-hard Montreal Canadiens’ fan.
Crowell says his Habs’ dedication goes back to when he was two and being taken to a game by an uncle who had a Montreal business and Canadiens’ season tickets, about seven or eight rows up from the bench.
“So all the big wigs were there in front of us. I wouldn’t know that at two of course, but, anyway, he took me to a game and sitting in that area as well were two guys not playing – one was Henri ‘Pocket Rocket’ Richard, who was injured, and Charlie Hodge a goalie. I spent most of the night being bounced around on Charlie Hodge’s knee and I became a Canadians’ fan based on that,” he said with a chuckle, noting that made him somewhat the hockey-fan outcast in his home of Toronto fans.
He recalled the last Leafs-Canadiens final in 1967 which was won by Toronto – their last Stanley Cup victory to this day. He also remembers the teasing he endured from his dad and siblings over the loss to a point where mom, a staunch Toronto supporter herself, asked them to ease up.
“I’m going up the stairs and you can see right into the guard rail, into the den, and you can see they’re still in there laughing and cheering and I’m balling my eyes out,” Crowell says, the memory as clear as yesterday. “I leaned over the guardrail and screamed, ‘if there is a God in this world, the Leafs will never win the Cup again.’ You can imagine how many years I’ve told that story at Christmas time, at dinner tables; the Leafs have gone 50 some years now, it’s like the curse of the Babe.”
And while the Leafs might be cursed, Crowell’s coaching career has been anything but. Along with holding the wins record, he also has a league record with 10 championships, and has advanced his teams to the national tournament on seven occasions, which a national major U-18 record. The list of accomplished players who played for him could fill up a full page and the list of coaching assistants is an impressive one as well. Still, few of those assistants could break down a game with the acuteness of his dad.
“It was like talking to Bill Belichick,” Crowell said, referencing the famed New England Patriots’ head coach.
“The last game he saw this year, we played the (Halifax) McDonald’s at the Sportsplex, and I had to drive him back out to Cole Harbour where he was staying. In just in that 15-minute ride out, he basically analysed our team and nailed it. Nailed individuals on our team and weaknesses on the McDonald’s, who he had never seen play (until that game). He would look over his glasses at you with the ‘look,’ we used to call it. He would make a statement and then be looking for your response, and I would be going, ‘yeah, yeah, you’re right again.’”
