SASKATOON, Sask. – Dominique Ducharme is used to answering about his prospects.
The head coach of a team with Nathan MacKinnon, Jonathan Drouin and Zachary Fucale has heard it all throughout the year. But for all the hype those three garner, there’s one National Hockey League prospect he had never been asked about until recently.
“I’m a prospect?” he asked, incredulously. “I’m too old. Have you seen me skate?”
Sure, the days when he was a prolific scorer in midget triple A — in 1989-90 with the Regents de Laval-Laurentides Lanaudiere, he finished second in league scoring with 103 points behind future NHLer Rene Corbet — are long gone.
Ducharme’s playing days may be over, but the NHL may be closer now than it had ever been before. He’s a young and promising prospect in the coaching fraternity, and a win by his Mooseheads in the MasterCard Memorial Cup final on Sunday may open up some doors for the second-year head coach.
Fittingly, Ducharme looks at his coaching career the same way he does a game in which his team isn’t playing: it’s out of his control. He aspires to one day become an NHL head coach, but he’s not losing sleep thinking about it.
“Even if I think about it, what would it change?” he said. “The only thing I can do is be at my best with our team and do my best with them. From there, I’m confident that when you do good things, good things happen to you.”
There has been nothing but good things happening for the Mooseheads since Ducharme’s arrival. Last season, the upstart team surprised many by rallying from a 3-0 series deficit to defeat the favoured Quebec Remparts in the second round.
They took it a step further this year, tying the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League record of 58 wins in a season and winning the franchise’s first President’s Cup.
Yet, through all their success, Ducharme’s approach is unwavering. He’s a calm man whose quotes are often similar, repeating the same lines about focusing on what his team can control and avoiding the rollercoaster ride some teams go through.
“He never blows a loss out of proportion and doesn’t get overly excited when we win a hockey game,” Halifax general manager Cam Russell said. “I think he’s done a good job of teaching that same message to the players.”
“He keeps all the emotions really the same,” forward Stefan Fournier added. “There’s no fluctuating from going super happy to super angry.”
Ducharme brings an open and honest approach to his players. They know his door is always open and the feedback they receive is intended to make them better.
“He’s not going to sugarcoat anything,” Fournier said. “He’ll give you an explanation, even if it’s the one that you don’t want to hear. But I think honesty is what separates a good hockey club from a great one.”
Ask the players and they’ll all pledge their allegiance to their head coach. They’re willing to block that extra shot, push that little bit harder and stretch the reaches of human potential for a man they so fervently respect and admire.
Ducharme isn’t a fiery coach. He speaks softly, but has perfected a form of non-verbal communication that gets his point home.
“The stare gives you the chills sometimes,” forward Luca Ciampini said. “He gets us motivated.”
Ducharme doesn’t appear to have many bad days, and any he does have don’t follow him to the rink – he knows such a thing would be counterproductive.
“I know as a former player, the first thing you do when you get to the rink is you’re looking at your coach and you’re trying to figure out what kind of attitude he has,” said Russell, a 10-year NHLer. “A lot of times if a coach is in a bad mood, it has a negative effect on players.
“He’s an honest person. He’s a fair person and he has the respect of the players. You can’t fool the kids, you can’t fool hockey players. They can see through a coach in a minute if he’s not real, and Dom’s real.”
Throughout the Mooseheads’ most successful season in franchise history, Ducharme stressed there were things they could work on. After his team hammered the London Knights 9-2 on Tuesday, he said their game wasn’t perfect.
“You’re trying to teach the kids never to be satisfied,” Russell explained. “Don’t ever come home and throw your feet up on the couch and think that you played as good as you can play. I think we should always be striving to be better.
“It’s a self-improvement thing.”
“We hear enough from other people how we’re doing and how good we’re doing,” Nathan MacKinnon added. “(He) really pushes us to make sure we don’t get satisfied.”
Russell, who hired Ducharme as his successor behind the bench two years ago, believed it was an easy decision to make him the Mooseheads’ head coach. Just two seasons in his tenure, Russell knows he will someday lose his coach when an NHL team comes calling.
“It’s a developmental league for players and for coaches,” he said. “At the end of the day, the players want to move up — the coaches want to move up. They’re here to make a living at the game and the next level’s what everyone aspires to. I definitely think he can coach at the next level. I think right now his focus is to coach the game of his life on Sunday.”
“When you work hard every day, when you’re committed to what you do, you’re prepared and ready and working and competing and everything else, good things happen,” Ducharme concluded. “It’s just the same way I think about myself and my future.”
His skating may have held him back from the NHL, but his coaching may not much longer.