In retirement, Mike Cappello's work carries on at Dartmouth High and beyond

Dartmouth High hockey will miss Mike Cappello, but his influence lives on behind benches and around rinks, gyms and athletic fields in the lives of his students and those whom they mentor.

And that's a generational tradeoff any successful sports community will make.

"Coaching is all about developing, communicating and working with people, and no one did it better than Mike," wrote Dartmouth Director of Athletics Andy Crisafulli, making official Cappello's departure from high school hockey after 31 years, 24 as head coach.

Cappello will continue serving as Dartmouth Public Schools' Adapted Physical Education teacher who creates activities to merge students with special needs into the mainstream.

He also remains passionately involved in the Special Olympics and Unified Sports, but with family to look after and his 58th birthday ahead of the 2022-23 high school hockey season, Cappello decided during the summer that it is time to pare down.

"I'm really happy about the decision that I made, but I certainly will miss the day-to-day for hockey and miss the camaraderie of the players and the coaches," he said.

Assistant coaches Brian Rose and Derek Martin have also stepped away, throwing their support behind the recent hire of former New Bedford High hockey star Mark Rossi.

Cappello did his due diligence and completed the team's scheduling.

"It's definitely been a different feeling for me this year because I'm usually running around trying to find out who's where and what, who's in the weight room," he said of his players. "I still talk to them on a regular basis, making sure where their grades are."

The care that goes into the person well beyond the student-athlete is something Cappello says he learned early on from Dartmouth's bevy of talented coaches, beginning with late, great Carlin Lynch.

HOCKEY: SouthCoast sports community reacts to retirement of Dartmouth's Mike Cappello

"Early on in my career, like most young coaches, it was about win, win, win, win, win, and you realize there's much more than that," said Cappello, who amassed 239 victories as head coach, hung many league title banners and enjoyed some deep tournament runs.

"I was lucky enough to be tutored by Carlin Lynch, who was the athletic director there who was my hero, my mentor, everything," said Cappello, preceded in the role only by Bob Hayes. "Bill Kavanaugh, even if they weren't hockey, just coaches — Steve Gaspar — I just learned so much from those guys, and them talking about coaching their kids and what they did. Today, I talk to all of our coaches on a regular basis."

He begins rattling off names such as Rick White, Mike Frates, Jeff Caron and Mike Grandfield.

"We're all pretty close. You're just picking up whatever you can, not only about their philosophy but how we handle high school kids. I've been around good people," said Cappello.

More than the triumphs or the big games, Cappello says he will miss practice.

"That was, by far, my favorite thing," he said. "I love putting practice together, I like making it competitive, and that's one thing I love that our coaches did. We always made them compete a lot in practice, and I think that's how we became successful. The more we competed, the better we got."

Garrett Allen (2011) is not the first Dartmouth alumnus to admit that he didn't realize at the time what Cappello was teaching him.

Now a rising junior hockey coach and instructor drawing on what he has learned from his NHL coach-uncle Scott Allen but also going back to high school, Allen recalls learning responsibility first as a Dartmouth freshman, then thriving only to find himself on the team's second line after Dartmouth had lost three in a row.

"It's never about an individual, I don't care that you had a goal in all three games, I want to make the team better. Now you're on the second line," Allen recalls Cappello saying.

"He gave it to me more as a challenge than as a punishment. Can you make the players on the second line better?"

Allen stopped sulking and put up a goal and three assists to help Mike McLean break a scoring slump and get Dylan Santos on the board in a 6-4 victory over Old Colony.

"I have a kid on my team, he's my best player," said Allen. "I told him, 'I need you to make these two kids better players by playing with them.' Challenge them, let them know we need you to make our team better."

"I watch him now and I'm just amazed watching him teach in his own hockey school," said Cappello. "I've heard unbelievable things. He's very smart, very put-together, and he's a kid that gets it."

The kids learned about hockey and experienced some of those rewards in the immediate, and they learned life lessons that some are still realizing well into their adult lives.

Ryan Gouveia, whose father Kenny is a longtime hockey coach, still needed to find his way in high school. His conversations with Cappello about the team and many other topics were important leading up to his decision to leave Dartmouth after his junior year to pursue college hockey via a transfer to Northfield Mt. Hermon prep school.

"(Cappello) was a competitive guy. He doesn't (show it) as much as other coaches, he wanted to win ... but he kept the bigger picture in mind," said Gouveia.

Cappello also quietly branched out, relentlessly raising his own hockey acumen by driving to Rhode Island, where he sat in on Brown University and Providence College practices. Then, together with Rose and Martin, they devised plans for the team, for units and individuals.

"As a coach and as a player, I played on a lot of teams, and it's the relationships that you build, that's what sports is all about," said Rose, who pitched for the Boston Red Sox and now coaches baseball at Bishop Stang. "Coach Mike is a guy who offered respect to his players (and) his assistant coaches ... It wasn't my way or the highway, it was a collaboration of input from his staff and his players. We were a well-oiled machine after a few years.

"In the 2009-10 season, we started catching steam with concepts and the way the program was supposed to be run on and off the ice. You knew what you were expecting as a player walking through the front door."

"Since sixth grade, my son (goaltender Tyler) wanted to be around the team," said Martin, referencing a 2016 Standard-Times article on his son's off-ice work. "It was because of Mike. ... when you have a coach and a mentor who was always checking on you ... what he did for just my kid was amazing."

Tyler is now teaching Special Education at Durfee High School. As his professional career unfolds, he says he is learning how years earlier Cappello put him in places to succeed and gave him the right exposures and experiences to take to college.

"I can't thank him enough for it," said Tyler, who would like to coach when his master's degree is complete and he can put in the necessary time. "Mike sought me out (in) sixth or seventh grade so I could work with the kids in the middle school. Whatever he thought he saw in me was there because I'm still doing it today. I tried to be everywhere I could. ... I couldn't get enough."

Derek Martin insists that, while Cappello is a quiet person, he is not a pushover. "I used to say all the time, he was the calm between the storms on the bench."

Managing 15-20 high school student-athletes amidst the adrenalin, chaos and emotion of a tournament game against crosstown rival Bishop Stang in an arena packed with roaring classmates and parents perhaps is hockey's perfect storm.

Over the years, there were momentous triumphs and devastating defeats, and the occasion when the Rose-coached junior varsity team won a big game that unified the program and kickstarted a better performance from a previously flat varsity.

"The situation I had with those guys coaching probably made me last as long as I did," said Cappello. "Sometimes, if you have different opinions it can go different places, but it always stayed in house with us. We were always able to figure our way through it and come to a consensus on what worked, and if it didn't we just built each other up, so it was a nice mix."

In reminiscing about coaching a player as talented as Scotty Shorrock, Cappello will also miss the role players whose lives were equally impacted by their high school experience.

"I think about Josh Sullivan. He didn't light up the stat board, but if you needed something done on the ice, he was out there making a big play or making a big hit or blocking a shot or doing something," said Cappello. "He's a kid who sacrificed, but there's a lot of kids like Josh who made us what we were."

Which, even during the lean years, was a tough out.

"One thing I've been really happy about," said Cappello, "I've always had players come back and talk about the years they played and what went on and how much they miss it. And I want them to have that when they leave high school hockey because, I think, we don't have guys going to play in the NHL or anywhere else. They have these moments."

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Retired Dartmouth hockey coach Mike Cappello reflects on career