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What Hockey Means to Me

By Jamie MacDonald, 12/18/24, 2:30PM EST

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On the record with legendary college hockey coach Jamie Rice


Credit: Jon Endow

For 50 years now, you couldn’t fill a bucket of pucks with the number of days Babson College head hockey coach Jamie Rice has skipped thinking about either hockey or coaching. 

That’s more than 18,000 days of passion, commitment and sacrifice, of missed family events in return for giving thousands of other parents the opportunity to see their own kids doing something they love.

To wit: On a Sunday earlier this December, immediately after helping his family rearrange furniture to make room for a Christmas tree, Rice was out the door, headed to New Hampshire to watch a prep hockey tournament while his wife and daughters decorated it. 

What does hockey mean to Jamie Rice?

Well, it’s at the root of what led him to prep school; to college, where he met his wife; to the job that has, in a career where often the only guarantee is a peripatetic instability, come to define Rice as he opened his 21st season.

“They were days in seventh through 12th grade when maybe I was playing football or baseball, but there probably hasn’t been a day I haven’t thought about hockey or athletics since I was five or six years old,” says the now 57-year-old Rice. “Certainly, it’s something that has been at the forefront of my mind and something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. It occupies a lot of my frontal lobe, that’s for sure.” 


Credit: Jon Endow

Selfless

Any coach will tell you – and any family of any coach will tell you – that being a college head coach is not an easy gig, but Rice wouldn’t have it any other way. 

That largely comes down to the people who surround him and the players who have kept him young all these years. So what kind of a kid does Rice, a Babson alum himself, hope arrives in Wellesley every year to keep him coming back to a job that isn’t for everyone?

Babson kids.

“No one backs in to Babson,” Rice says. “It’s not a school you think of as a last choice. It’s a highly selective school, so we’re already fortunate that it puts us in front of highly motivated, driven and successful young men. That’s a great starting point, having those attributes of being a good student and being a good athlete.”

While Rice, who started his coaching career as a 22-year-old assistant at Colby College in 1990, has become almost synonymous with the Babson program over the years, Rice’s approach isn’t focused on the individual.

“Probably the number one trait that is that they are selfless,” says Rice of his ideal players. “They are really team-oriented people. They understand that not everybody is going to be first clarinet at the Boston Pops. The Navy has a great saying that we have adopted over time: It’s ‘ship, shipmates, self,’ and we wanted to be ‘team, teammates self.’ Everybody has to be a little bit selfish, and I get that, but if we can be team, teammates, self in our thinking and how we approach things, then I think we’re getting the right kid.”


Credit: USA Hockey

Golden Rules

Once in the program, Babson’s players aren’t saddled with an unwieldy list of bylaws. Golden rules? Well, kind of …

“If any of the players ever read this, they will know the first one,” Rice says with a chuckle. “There’s no such thing as early. That’s probably our golden rule. There’s no such thing as early. There’s only late. We don’t have a laundry list of rules or a team manifesto. I tell the guys the state of Massachusetts has laws and the college has regulations. That covers pretty much everything. Don’t be a jerk. … And there’s no such thing as early.”

In terms of desirable attributes, there is a bit of a list. 

“Passion. Humility. Conviction. And love Babson,” says Rice. “Those four things are probably the biggest ones when I think about our kids and the successes they’ve had both at Babson and beyond.”

And that is, for Rice, the gift that keeps on giving.

“What makes me happy is if being a part of our program has been a meaningful and continuous part of their lives,” he says. “That their best friends and the people in their weddings were teammates. You remember the wins, but it gives me as much pleasure as anything to either go to a wedding or hear about those things.”

My Hockey Ph.D.

At about his players’ ages, Rice couldn’t have known he’d wind up at his alma mater for more than two decades. And after his first handful of jobs, he’d have no way of guessing any job would last more than a couple years. But coaching was certainly on his mind while playing for Steve Stirling at Babson.

“That was like my hockey Ph.D.,” says Rice. “I played for Joe Finnegan at Rivers, Jeff Kosak at Hotchkiss and Steve Sterling at Babson, and each of them in their own way unlocked a different piece of me about playing hockey. I had the undergraduate level with Joe Finnegan. I had the graduate level with Jeff Kosak. And then I played for Steve Stirling, and that was a Ph.D. level”

Origin stories, where the “origin” lasts years, are always interesting, and it was Stirling who helped Rice take his first steps toward a career behind the bench.

“I was in college and my roommates were all getting jobs – in sales or finance or telecommunications – and I went to the office around Christmastime that year,” Rice says. “I had worked with [Stirling] in the off-season and I said I think I’d like to give this a try. And he said: I think you’d be good at it, and if you want to give it a try, get in wherever you can.”


Credit: USA Hockey

The Journey

Rice took that first coaching job at Colby as an assistant with Charlie Corey.

“It was a hard decision,” says Rice. “Not that I didn’t want to do it, but it was $5,000. It was like, ‘All right,’ and I got into it. And I like to think that I showed some promise.”

That was 1990-91 and it was over almost as soon as it started.

The following season, he was off to Dartmouth College as an assistant. That was 1991-92 and it, too, was over almost as soon as it started.

“All of a sudden you’re in the flow of it,” Rice says.

Four seasons as an assistant for Bob Gaudet at Brown University followed. Job security, not so much. Coaching becomes a labor of love or, maybe, the labor you leave to do something else that pays more bills.

Lifer

Lifer. Those interesting origin stories often follow a passion hanging in the balance over a fulcrum where, on the other side, rests the hard-earned term of lifer.

“It’s like years five through 10 determine if you’re going to be a lifer or not,” says Rice. “You start to see people get higher or fired. My first three years, when I look back at my Social Security statements, it was $25,000 and three years. So I’m not really helping retirement. I just kind of ground through it. It’s not extravagant living, but I think that’s a part of it. If you don’t like to go and tie hockey skates for 6-year-old at a camp, or go on the road and do recruiting, or live a little bit of a humble existence, it’s not for you.”

Stability didn’t come at Brown, either, though, as Gaudet soon left Brown for Dartmouth. Gaudet’s move led to Rice’s return to Dartmouth, but it also set up a couple of the hardest years in his career. 

“I got married in June of 1996, and in April ‘97, Bob Gaudet left Brown and went to Dartmouth,” Rice says. “I had been married less than a year, living in Walpole, just bought a house, and I had a choice to make. Bob offered me a spot and I commuted for two years from Walpole. I spent a lot of nights on the road. And the nights that I wasn’t on the road, I was on the back-and-forth between Hanover, N.H., and Walpole. Or I was sleeping in Bob’s basement or, on the odd night, in the lock room.”

That’s what coaching means to a lifer.

“In those two years commuting to Dartmouth [1997-99], it made me want to say, ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to succeed. I’m going to make this my life. I’m going to make this my career,’” says Rice. “Because if I’m willing to do this, I think it will show people – and show myself – that this means a lot to me. I’m willing to work at it and make a lot of sacrifices. The biggest sacrifices were made by my wife.”

After his two bonus seasons at Dartmouth, Rice made it back to the Boston area when former Bruins forward Bruce Crowder hired him at Northeastern, where Rice stayed from 1999-2004, and gave him true chance to live full time in the home he bought a few years earlier. 

Back at Babson

In 2004, he landed his first head coaching job, at Babson. 

“When I got to Babson 21 years ago, my son was two and the twins weren’t born,” Rice says of the 6-foot-4, 215-pound son who recently played his final football game at Lake Forest College and his now-teenage daughters. “I’ve had days that might have been really hard – whether it’s something you’re missing [with the family], or the team is not performing well, or you don’t get a recruit – but there hasn’t been a day where I’ve woken up and said that I don’t want do this anymore.”

Rice jokes that if the key keeps working every Monday, he’ll keep showing up at the office.

“I’m Jamie Rice, a husband, a father and a hockey coach, and it’s not my only identity,” he says. “But it’s certainly a part of what has become the story of my life. And I think my friends and family support it. They’re understanding of it. Their encouragement has allowed me to continue to do it, ultimately being at Babson College – a place I went to, where I met my wife. A place that I love as much as anything in my life, probably second only to my family and I have been really fortunate.”