Dr. Carl Flynn said he isn’t going to miss the yellow school bus trips but he is going to miss being educated by his players, including on those trips.
Flynn recently announced his retirement as the head hockey coach at Presque Isle High School after a 20-year run that included six Class B North championship game appearances and a regional title in 2009.
His Wildcat teams went 201-150-12 during the regular season and he had 14 winning seasons among his 20, including 12 with at least 11 victories. Presque Isle has gone 12-6 in each of the past three seasons.
“As the most traveled high school sports team in the state, I figured I spent 120,000 miles on a yellow school bus,” said Flynn. “I googled it and that is five times around the planet Earth.”
But it was on one of those many trips he learned a valuable lesson from his players.
“It was my second year of coaching, 2005-06, and I had a flip phone like everyone had,” said Flynn. “I noticed this envelope up in the corner of my phone and I asked my assistant coach what it was. He didn’t know.”
That’s when his players taught him about texting.
“So I turned and asked one of my freshmen and he said it is a typed message and instructed me to click on it,” said Flynn. “I did and it was from one of the seniors in the back of the bus and he wanted to know if we could pull over at the next gas station for a bathroom break.”
The freshman showed him how to type in his response and send it.
“Then all the kids realized I knew how to text, so they started sending me text messages before practice, after practice, all the time,” Flynn said.
“A month later I got a bill from my cellphone company for $700 because I didn’t have a texting plan, “said Flynn. “I learned my lesson.”
That wasn’t all bad news for the coach.
“But my high school hockey team showed me how to text long before any of my friends knew what texting was,” said the 57-year-old Flynn.
He pointed out that his players would teach him new words and phrases that helped him keep up with times and the fashions of the day.
It kept him young, he said.
“Now I’m going to have to start acting more my age,” he quipped.
Flynn said besides the travel, he wants to spend more time with his 77-year-old mother, June, after his father, Joe, died last year. She lives in St. John, New Brunswick, three hours from his home in Long Lake.
And his work load as a physician has increased. He is working at the Cary Medical Center as well as for Pines Health Services in Caribou, and for the Aroostook House of Comfort, a hospice in Presque Isle.
He has to be to work at 5 a.m. and he mentioned that the team had one week in January when they didn’t return from three road games, two to Orono and one to Rockport, until after 2 a.m.
And he lives 45 minutes from Presque Isle which is an even longer drive when there are weather issues.
“I’m not going to miss the late nights,” he said.
Flynn said he had planned to retire a year ago, but stayed another year to help ease the transition as Presque Isle became a co-op program this year with a player apiece from Fort Kent High School (senior defenseman Connor Voisine), Caribou High (freshman defenseman Matthew Bouchard) and Central Aroostook High School in Mars Hill (sophomore winger Avery Birmingham).
“I wanted to make sure it got off the ground. It did. It went off without a hitch, which was very good,” said Flynn. “As the biggest high school in Aroostook County, we have an obligation to these kids at small high schools who have played hockey their whole lives to have a chance to play high school hockey.”
Flynn has talked to other retired coaches in various sports and they told him they had loved the practices but dreaded the games.
“For me, it’s just the opposite,” he said. “I’m going to miss that adrenaline rush in the locker room before the game. I’m going to miss giving pre-game speeches, being on the bench and watching the teams warm up, meeting with the referees before the game, hearing the national anthem and watching that first puck drop.”
Flynn has several fond memories that included a semifinal win in his second season over top seed Orono, which had beaten Presque Isle handily during the regular season; a semifinal win over top seed John Bapst of Bangor, a regional championship game win over Winslow in 2009 to head to the state final, and beating Brewer for the first time after “losing to them 18 or 19 times in a row.”
It was a high-scoring quarterfinal game that the Wildcats won in overtime over the Witches, he recalled.
Flynn had the pleasure of coaching his son, Adam, and daughter, Jillian, and said he hopes his longtime assistant, Darren Carlisle, gets the opportunity to replace him.
Flynn will still follow the program. He plans to attend the home games and will help out in any capacity whether it be as the announcer or a goal judge or whatever PI athletic director Mark White needs.
“I’m more than willing to help out. I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” said Flynn.
The New Brunswick native takes a lot of pride in the program.
“I took it over because it was struggling and needed to be cleaned up. It didn’t have a great reputation. And then we got some really talented players and had some really good success for a lot of years,” said Flynn.
“To play in six [regional] championship games in 20 years is something not many schools can claim,” said Flynn.
