When our conversation turned to roads less traveled, David Carle clearly did not give a fork.
“Flattering?”
Is it flattering, I’d asked, when folks whisper that the DU hockey coach, with two Frozen Fours and an NCAA national championship on his resume by the age of 33, is NHL material?
To this, a ginger eyebrow raised quizzically. Those sea-blue eyes narrowed into a salty squint.
“Flattering?” Carle replied, chewing on the premise like a piece of rotten fruit. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.”
From the heart, ideally. Surely it crossed your mind, back in the day?
“Yeah, I mean, maybe when I got into coaching (initially),” Carle told me in November just outside the home locker room at Magness Arena, from which his 30-9 Pioneers departed Tuesday for the NCAA men’s regionals in Manchester, N.H.
“But I felt like getting the Green Bay assistant job (in 2012) was my dream job at the time. And then getting back here as an assistant coach happened way quicker than I ever thought it would. And doing this (as a head coach) happened way faster than I ever thought it would.
“I always feel a strong sense of obligation to (DU) for taking care of me when they did. I felt the same sense of obligation when they hired me back to be an assistant coach, when they hired me to be the head coach, and when they signed me to the extension.”
You know that extension the Pios announced last August? The one that pushed Carle’s contract into 2027?
It’s looking smarter all the time.
Wisconsin’s just entered only its third men’s hockey coaching search in 41 years, and the cheeseheads who follow the Badgers have already roped Carle onto their short lists.
Madison is a big-time Big Ten job, a blue-blood gig with blue-blood salary — former coach Tony Granato was reportedly making $600,000 when he was let go after seven seasons at the helm.
Then again, who needs blue blood when you’re already sitting on a pot of gold?
Carle’s wrangled the No. 9 recruiting class in the country for 2022-23, according to CollegeHockeyNews.com. He’s knocking on the door of his third Frozen Four berth in five seasons.
The only thing harder than reaching the top of the mountain is doing it again the next year — especially when you’re trying to scale that puppy with a giant target pinned to your backside. Carle warned his guys all the way back in their first team meeting, that a.) no dance partner was going to just roll over and let the Pios rub their bellies simply because they were the national champs; and b.) you’d best be ready to take everybody’s best shot.
“We knew we were going to get everyone’s best game this (season),” Carle reflected Tuesday. “That’s happened. We’ve taken some on the chin. We haven’t played our best in moments. But we’ve always addressed that openly and honestly, looked in the mirror and found ways to respond.”
Despite nicks, dings, bruises and everyone’s ‘A” game, DU topped the NCHC during the regular season with a 19-5-0 league mark anyway. The Pios never lost more than two tilts in a row, with a pair of tough roadies at UMass (0-2, Oct. 14-15) and at St. Cloud State (0-2, Jan. 20-21) accounting for four of those nine defeats.
“I mean, unless like you get a big offer from an NHL team. There really is no point in leaving,” Noah Lederer, a DU sophomore and co-chair of the Pios’ infamous Whiteboard Club, told me earlier this season. “I mean, he’s gonna stick around. We need him.”
From the DU record book to grocery store commercials, the man’s become part of the fabric here, part of the furniture. Carle joked that other than the year-and-a-half he spent as an assistant with the Green Bay Gamblers of the USHL from 2012-14, he’s lived within two miles of Magness since 2008.
“A lot of what we talk about and what I try and live, along with obviously what we preach to the players is, ‘Being two feet in where you are,’” Carle told me all those months ago. “And I can tell you that that is where I’ve always been. And that’s where I am today.
“I just (take) an immense amount of pride in the program, and what it’s done for our family, myself individually, what it’s done for me. And I would say that there’s just a lot of pride and a sense of responsibility to try and do right by the program, each and every day that I come to work …
“I always feel a sense and a debt of gratitude and responsibility, I would say, to prove (DU) right.”
So far, so good. Don’t ya think?
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