I’ll yell you, 2010 must’ve been a great time to be in Green Bay — the United States Hockey League’s won it all and, it turns out, a local pro football team won a title too. But the next season, the Gamblers lost in the championship round to Dubuque. So in came coach Derek Lalonde, an assistant coach from the University of Denver, and Green Bay started off hot. But in regard to the Gamblers, you’ve got to know how to mold them, know when to scold them.
So the team captain spoke to the coach.
” ‘I love the way practices are, Coach, and I love your approach, but we’re not working hard enough,’ ” Lalonde recalled Grant Arnold saying, early in the 2011-12 season. “In the previous year, Grant said, he felt they didn’t work hard enough, and it caught up to them at the end of the year.”
Don’t look at the story as if Arnold is the nerd in class, asking the teacher for homework. No, he just yearns to lead, burns to succeed. Sure enough, the Gamblers won it all. And sure enough, the next season, Arnold went to the University of Denver.
Which takes us to Providence, R.I. — well, takes The Denver Post’s Mike Chambers there, where he will cover Saturday’s Sweet 16 game, and from where he e-mailed me about Arnold: “Monty loves this guy. Any coach would.”
Monty is Jim Montgomery, DU’s coach and, sure enough, the coach of the Dubuque team that defeated Green Bay — the defeat that sparked the Gamblers captain to ask Lalonde to make tough practices tougher. Today, the junior Arnold is the captain of a DU team with seven seniors. In a weird way, it’s fitting that he hasn’t scored a goal this season — it’s as if all of his other contributions make up for it.
“I wouldn’t say I begged,” Lalonde recalled by phone Friday, “but it was pretty close to begging (then-DU coach) George Gwozdecky that they had to have Grant Arnold on their team — because he was the best captain I’d ever been around.”
Passionate player
Look, guys, DU could go to the Frozen Four. Maybe even win the whole thing. And if the Pioneers do so, you’ll hear more about Trevor Moore and Danton Heinen and Hobey Baker finalist Joey LaLeggia, who is from Joe Sakic’s hometown of Burnaby, British Columbia, and not Brooklyn, where they’d surely call him “Joey Legs.” But championship teams have guys like Grant Arnold. These guys who scream passion, who scream tenacity, who scream scream. Such as in the regular-season matchup against Boston College, sure enough, also Saturday’s opponent. The game went to overtime, and suddenly Arnold was screaming to the team.
“In times when you need someone to step up and say something, I really like to be that guy,” Arnold said by phone Friday. “I brought the guys together and said, ‘Let’s go take it.’ … I feel I can relate what the coaches want from our team to the guys. And they’ve responded well all year.
“It’s very special to wear the C for Denver. Watching them win the back-to-back (national) championships (in 2004 and 2005) was really special, and when that call came for me, there was no question — I was going to Denver.”
He’s from Centennial and first took the ice at age 5, at the South Suburban Ice Arena, “and just had so much fun,” his father, Steve, recalled by phone.
That day, Steve noticed a flier at the rink, advertising hockey lessons.
“He just loved the sport so much,” Steve said. “He would try out for all these travel teams, and the top-tier travel team at Littleton. He wanted to be on there so badly — he could never quite make the top-tier travel team. He was 13. But he had to learn persistence.”
, he found himself in 36 fights, according to Dad.
“Grant’s got a side to him, he’s got an edge to him — yeah, he definitely has an edge to him,” Steve said. “And If you want to be a champion, you have to do the things that other people won’t do. That’s the grind-it-out mentality.”
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or
