About a month after the resignation of Laura Schuler, the women’s hockey team announced it found a new head coach on June 23.
Dave Flint, the new hire, is taking over a Husky team that went just 7-24-3 last year after having spent five years at the helm at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., where he amassed a record of 88-15-2 with the Division III Hawks.
His teams managed two Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC) East regular season championships and three ECAC Open Tournament championships in four years as a varsity program. His success earned him ECAC East Coach of the Year for three straight seasons from 2006-08. He was also a finalist for National Coach of the Year three times during the same time period.
Flint said the Northeastern job appealed to him in part because of the rich history and tradition associated with the program, as well as the location of Boston and the features like co-op and an urban campus that help make the school a selling point to potential recruits.
“I think the big attraction for me is the program’s history,” he said. “It was one of the pioneering programs in women’s hockey and, at one point, the national power, and they’ve had a lot of national kids go through that program as well.”
Flint was a goaltender for four seasons at North Adams State from 1990-93. This year he was named the goaltending coach and advisor for the National Women’s Program after spending time on staff with Team USA since 2005.
His goaltending pedigree should come in handy with the development of second year goalie Leah Sulyma, who started 31 games last season and finished as the runner-up for Hockey East Rookie of the Year. During the season, she won Rookie of the Week five times and Rookie of the Month for December.
“That’s maybe one of the strengths of the team. When you build a team you always start from the goal line out and it’s nice to come in and have a goalie that did so well as a freshman,” Flint said. “At this point in a goalie’s career you don’t try to change their style, you just try to give them some basic fundamentals to work on. At her age she’s developed her own identity as a goalie, but the nice thing is that I can train her, and give her some extra attention to maybe hopefully develop her and get her game to that next level.”
The play of the goaltenders at St. Anselm in 2007-08 resulted in .92 goals allowed per game and an ECAC East Goalie of the Year award. Goalies for the gold-medal-winning 2008 Team USA team at the World Championships in China allowed 1.58 goals a game.
Flint also brings experience in building a program after having built the St. Anselm program almost entirely from the ground up, as women’s hockey at the school became a varsity sport in his second season as head coach.
Despite last season’s struggles and a double-digit win drought that extends back to the 2003-04 season, Flint said he didn’t consider the Huskies to be in a rebuilding phase.
“They have a great foundation of talent and when I started in women’s hockey I built a program from basically nothing, a brand new startup program and for four years had lots of success. I look forward to that challenge [again],” he said. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily rebuilding, [it’s more of a] fine-tuning. I don’t think there needs to be that much rebuilding done, there’s some good talent and some good kids there.”
