MAITLAND , FLA – When Anthony Noreen walked into the Orlando Solar Bears team offices late on a recent Thursday afternoon, he looked the part of a coach in the off-season. Dressed in a team polo shirt and jeans, he appeared to be decompressing nicely from the recently completed season. Over his shoulder was a backpack that looked weighted down but not heavy enough to burden a young man still in the early stages of a coaching career.
In a way, it was a look symbolic of Noreen’s past year where the teacher was just as much a student as were his charges.
First year coach Noreen and Solar Bears team president Jason Siegel were in the office for a sit-down interview with reporters from Orlando Sports Daily, SB Nation’s Pension Plan Puppets (a Toronto Maple Leafs themed outlet) and ProHockeyNews.com. The discussion centered around impressions and reflections on the season and plans for the off-season including planning for the 2016-2017 campaign.
By all accounts, Noreen – who was brought in last summer after four seasons as head coach of the USHL’s Youngstown Phantoms – faced a year unlike any other he had experienced in junior hockey. It was a roller coaster ride that finished with the Solar Bears missing the ECHL’s Kelly Cup playoffs after two straight appearances in the post-season tournament.
It would be easy to think that Noreen came into the position with little knowledge of what he was getting into. Right from the start, he said that Siegel made him aware of what to expect.
“Certainly in talking with Jason coming into it, he told me this is a league where you’re going to experience [things]. You’re never going to have a whole roster. There are going to be nights where you’re going to play with six forwards. There are going to be nights where you’re going to have two defensemen and sure enough there was a night where we had seven forwards and there was a night where we had three defensemen so all of those things happened,” Noreen said. “I think you learn from it, you grow and get better. You challenge yourself.
“My expectations were to try and get the most out of the guys and do the best with what we had and try to add a little along the way,” he continued. “My expectation was to get it to a point where it’s a team that’s hard to play against every night, a team that’s full of guys who play the game the right way, play the game hard and are physical and tough to play against.”
Transitioning from junior hockey to the pro game can be difficult for even the best players. Imagine what it is like for a coach who is supposed to be the one doing the teaching. For Noreen, bringing along some of his base philosophies was made easier by the fact that they fit in with the new system being used by Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock.
“In speaking with the guys in Toronto early on, all of our philosophies about how we want to play the game and the systems we want to play and things like that, they’re all pretty in line. There’s nothing ground-breaking different,” he said. “A couple of things maybe on some face-off structures and stuff like that but nothing really much different. Hockey is hockey and at the end of the day it is going to come down to who does it the best and who wins the individual battles.”
Communications are a key to success – or failure – in an affiliation system. Noreen spent quite a bit of time in Toronto with the Leafs and AHL Toronto Marlies staffs before training camp as well as several times a week via phone. Noreen said that the amount of support he got from Toronto was vital to the Solar Bears progress.
Orlando head coach Anthony Noreen (File photo courtesy of F. Medina & G. Bassing/Orlando Solar Bears)
“I can’t imagine anyone has the same communication level. We talk every day. We’re never in the dark. It’s never oh god this guy is getting called up and now we’re stuck in this situation,” Noreen explained. “If there’s a chance they can do us a favor, they do us favors. There’s many times where they dressed a defenseman at forward. I don’t know if there are many affiliates who would have done that for their ECHL team. They care. They’re invested, they’re invested in their players. It’s not something where I have to go to them (and ask) because it’s something they do already.”
Beyond the communications, there were plenty of things that Noreen had to adjust to. There was the longer schedule, the mixing of affiliated/assigned players and a “core” group as well as the more than 150 individual player transactions that came across the desk in his office. It all could have been frustrating but Noreen said it was just part of the learning process.
“if you ask the people who work around me, I’m not really a person who gets frustrated very often. Do I get passionate in the moment? Yes. There were days where we had six guys called up and three guys with injuries and what am I going to do, sit and feel sorry for myself and complain and get frustrated or get to work and find a solution of how we’re going to move forward,” he said. “That’s something that I really feel challenged me and I hope made me better as a coach this year. I’vecakways said I’m not one to waste energy on things. It was certainly put to the test this year. I hope I learned from and get better from it.”
There was also the adjustment to the professional style and speed that took getting used to. Noreen indicated that he gained a new level of respect for what it takes to play pro hockey.
“I had seen a couple of games here and there but never really spent a significant amount of time watching ECHL hockey,” he said. “I think when you see things that happen in practice, on the ice in games, plays that are made, saves that are made, you have a whole new respect for just how good guys who make it to the top (NHL) must be. You see some of the guys we had this year that aren’t playing in the AHL or aren’t playing in the NHL and like I said it just shows how good the guys at the top are and how special they are and people they are.”
So how did Noreen assess his first season with the Solar Bears? He said that it all comes down to how much everyone got out of it and how it can be applied to the future.
“The way I always judge a season is did you learn from it and did you get better. I felt like our guys got better. I felt like we all learned a lesson. I felt like I learned a lot of lessons moving forward,” Noreen said. “I think the best thing about it is we take what we learned and I think we’re all excited for an off-season – to actually have a full off-season – and build a team the right way. I look forward to working with Kyle (Dubas, Leafs Assistant General Manager/Marlies GM) and all of us and just getting the right type of guys in here that we know are going to get things to where it should be.”
Contact the author at Don.money@prohockeynews.com
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