Summer under the seats

On the outside there are no traces of hockey. The locker room is a shell. Empty stalls bearing the nameplates of last season’s roster linger. No Zamboni. No Cool Ray, the team’s mascot. Even the ice at the North Charleston Coliseum has evaporated.

South Carolina Stingrays head coach Jared Bednar is relaxed — in shorts, flip flops, and a golf shirt — and kicking back in his office, located under Section 129 of the Coliseum seats. He already has a visible summer tan.

Only a few weeks ago, the Coliseum was buzzing with excitement. The Stingrays were hosting the Cincinnati Cyclones in the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL) Conference Finals. Trailing the series 2-0, Bednar’s team was prepared to regain their momentum and take control of the best-of-seven series.

But, in the immortal words of Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” The weekend and the season came to an abrupt and frustrating end with a pair of heartbreaking overtime losses.

On the inside, Bednar knows the season is over, but he’s not forgotten it.

“What frustrates me and our guys is, we had Game 2 (against Cincinnati), we had the lead 3-0, and we let that slip away,” Bednar says about the past season. “You’re playing a good team at home, they got a little momentum, and we got in penalty trouble.

“Our goal at the start of the year was to compete for a [Kelly] Cup, and I would have liked to get to the Finals. Once you’re in the Finals series, anything can happen. You have to have a lot of things go right. You have to be really lucky. Winning that Cup is a completely different animal.”

No one expected the Stingrays’ success this year, especially after the team’s slow start. Less than one month into the season, in mid-November, the Stingrays started skidding, losing six straight, including four in a row at home. It appeared the team was headed for a second straight season of mediocrity.

“When it was two or three games, I never thought it would hit six,” Bednar says. “At that point, things were looking pretty grim, but the guys stuck with it. We looked like we were on the way to an average season, then the guys all came together and we won 12 in a row.”

The winning streak (Nov. 28-Dec. 31) followed on the heels of the Rays’ skid and couldn’t have come at a better time. “You gotta believe if you’re going to succeed and all our guys felt we had that quality of a team,” Bednar says. The Stingrays outscored their opponents 40-19 during the winning streak.

The Stingrays began playing with a new confidence and Bednar, the rookie coach, was making a noticeable impression on the fans, the league, and the organization.

No team in the league was better. The Stingrays were 20-4 during the stretch from Nov. 28 to Jan. 26, peaking at season’s end with a seven-game winning streak to capture the No. 2 seed in the post-season.

What Bednar wasn’t prepared for was the way in which the work consumed him. “It grabbed a hold of me a lot harder than I thought it would,” he said. “I’d been in the office as an assistant for five years, and I was able to leave the game at the rink. I found myself, as the head guy, that I was — not worrying about it at home — but hockey was all I thought about for eight months.

“Work just found its way home with me more often than I thought it would. I just didn’t want to leave things half finished, so I’d stay longer. It took up more time than I thought it would. There was a learning curve there for my wife and kids and myself.”

It’s all part of the education process for the head coach, a lesson Bednar will carry into next season. Yes, next season. Bednar is already looking ahead to his trip to Augusta on Fri. Oct. 17, opening night of the new season.

But it’s June, and there’s a lot of work to be done before then. Recruiting, signing, training, and practice. Then, with hard work and a lucky break here and there, Bednar and company will survive another eight-month-long season (90-plus games and over 6,000 minutes of ice time) and earn another shot at the Kelly Cup.

Although the Bednar family summer vacation is days away, for the moment, the coach is back in the office making a few last-minute recruiting phone calls. “The further you go, the more you start thinking about that Cup,” said Bednar. “It’s difficult to let that go.”