MAITLAND, FLA – Last Thursday, with Hurricane Matthew starting its trek up the east coast of Florida, Orlando Solar Bears head coach Anthony Noreen had his team on the ice at the RDV Ice Den for what would be the squad’s last practice before a preseason game two days later. At one point in the session, a player did something wrong during a drill. Noreen immediately stopped the drill, whacked his stick on the boards to get everyone’s attention and explained the error. When the drill resumed, the very same player executed the drill correctly, breathing a sigh of relief when Noreen provided a quick nod of approval.
The fire that Noreen showed in that one drill is just one of the things that the second year coach and his assistant John Snowden hope to transfer along to the players who make the roster when the Solar Bears open their fifth season on October 22nd.
“Systematically there’s a couple of changes that I think have to do more with the type of personnel that we’re going to have this year. We think we’re going to be able to skate better so we’re doing a lot more things to integrate some speed into our play and open things up a little bit,” Noreen said after the practice. “Really for us it’s just building the team, it’s just getting everybody on the same page and letting them know what the expectations are. It’s a process – it’s not going to happen overnight. We talked to the guys today. I think it is very easy to come in day one of training camp and everyone be excited and run around the ice and stopping and starting. What real teams do is that a week from now, they do it three weeks from now, they do that three months from now. We’re trying to cultivate as much leadership as possible so it’s not one guy, it’s not just Eric Baier, not just Carl Nielsen or Johnny McInnis. It’s fifteen, twenty guys, twenty-five guys doing that every day. If that happens, we like where that will lead us.”
Noreen was just back from what has become an annual trip to Toronto to meet and work with the NHL Maple Leafs and AHL Marlies coaching staffs. Last year he spent an entire month immersing himself in the “system” being built by new Leafs head coach Mike Babcock. This time around, the stay was much shorter because of the training camp schedules being paralleled by the World Cup of Hockey.
Asked about how things looked with a year under his belt, Noreen said he could see quite a difference.
“The skill level was drastically improved. I think it helps to have a lot more guys around who know the structure, know the system, know the expectations,” he said. “Things ran a lot more smoothly. I think people are generally excited about the future and where things are going as they should be. There’s a lot to be excited about.”
Noreen had even more to be excited about with a number of Solar Bears contracted players invited to work out with both the Leafs and the Marlies. Goalie Ryan Massa had the opportunity to participate in scrimmages with members of both Toronto squads under the watchful eyes of Leafs head coach Mike Babcock and the Leafs brass. Noreen said he was more than pleased with how his guys fared.
“I thought they did a good job. I thought our guys – the guys we had here for a bit last year that wound up ending with the Marlies – guys like [Brett] Findlay and Eric Faille, I thought they did a really good job even in the NHL camp,” Noreen said. ” Ryan was really good in the NHL camp, he did a really good job in the nets. Again I think it helps knowing the system, knowing the structure, knowing the expectations. You can tell guys are just a lot more comfortable and that includes our guys.”
When Noreen and Snowden took over the reigns last summer, they essentially walked into a roster that was started by now former coach Vince Williams. There was very little Noreen could do but work with the hand dealt to him. This time around, he and Snowden started early and were able to use their connections to find the players that would make the 2016-17 Solar Bears “their own”.
Coach Anthony Noreen (right) going over what he wants his players to do during training camp (Photo courtesy Jesse Liebman/Orlando Solar Bears)
“Obviously, as a coach you know the identity of the team that you want. It’s one thing to have that; it’s another to have the guys that can execute it. We knew what we wanted. We had a plan and that plan started last summer,” he explained. “Thankfully this summer we had plenty of time to get on the phones and to work and go after the right type of guys that we feel are worthy and the type of guys we want wearing the Orlando Solar Bears jersey.”
While Noreen and Snowden were after players with more grit, physicality and scoring ability, they were also looking for players who understand the responsibility they have to play the game the right way and to the community.
“I’m a true believer that any organization, no matter what it is – whether it is a business, whether it’s a family or a hockey team – it starts with the people that you have in the [locker] room,” Noreen said. “We feel like, above all else, we’ve got really good people, people that we’ll be proud to call Orlando Solar Bears, people that we’ll be proud to have out in the community. For me that’s where it has always started when I build teams and we’ll teach them the rest. We can go from there but we know we’ve got the right guys that are going to represent us the right way.”
Another part of the plan was handling the parallel scheduling of the AHL and ECHL training camps. Noreen and Snowden went to great lengths during the summer to put together a plan that would make sure that the players who started camp in Orlando would be learning the same things as the players invited to Toronto and visa versa.
“Communication is key in anything. We’ve got to make sure we’re on the same page. You’ve got to be organized. You’ve got to have detail. We tried to act as if I was here. When I’m here, we (Snowden and Noreen) talk twelve times a day and it was no different when I was there [in Toronto],” Noreen said. “We had our morning meetings, we had our nightly meetings just like we normally would. The only difference was I was on the other end of a phone or sometimes it was video meetings and we would run through the video via Skype or Facetime. We wanted things to run no differently than if Mike Babcock wasn’t in Toronto and Jim [Hiller, Leafs assistant coach] and D.J. [Smith, Leafs assistant coach] having to run camp and do those things. We expect it to be the same way here.”
Having Snowden running things at RDV also served a secondary purpose: allowing the assistant coach to work on his coaching skills. Noreen said that he was very pleased with how the players who stayed in Orlando looked and understood everything Noreen brought back with him from Toronto.
“The best thing about it for me was that it was a great opportunity for John to develop as a coach – a chance for him to kind of run the show. When he first came here, and any guy I’ve had as an assistant coach, I want guys who want to be head coaches,” Noreen said about his assistant. “You learn to be a head coach by doing it and acting the position. He held down the ship here for two days and from the sounds of the guys, he did a really good job.”
The one piece of the puzzle that could have been a problem was putting the Orlando group on the ice with the first wave of players – mostly Solar Bears guys – returning to the City Beautiful. Thanks to the coordination between the coaches, that issue was put to bed very quickly.
“There’s some familiarity between some guys. Hockey’s a small world. There’s very few degrees of separation between guys; no matter what league or where they come from they know so-and-so who they played with in juniors or in college or last year in pro [hockey] or whatever it might have been,” he said. “I feel like we haven’t skipped a beat. The guys that have come in have done a really good job of reaching out and introducing themselves. Again, I think when you bring in like-minded type players, guys that have the same goals and are the same type of character people, it’s usually pretty easy for them to get along.”
Now that the opening night rosters have been submitted to the ECHL, Noreen and Snowden will have a week to tighten up the x’s and o’s before opening the season against the Florida Everblades at the Amway Center. Based on all of the prep work and the intensity shown by the coaches, everyone in the organization is excited to see how things go.
“I’m very impressed with the veteran leadership that we’ve put together this year as well as young talent,” Solar Bears team owner Joe Haleski said. “I think we’re going to have a great mix of young talent, veteran leadership and some good players coming down from Toronto.”
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