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Coach Has Long Association With Boston College and Success

Coach Jerry York during Boston College’s N.C.A.A. tournament win over Harvard on March 25. The Eagles will meet top-seeded Quinnipiac in a semifinal.Credit...Elise Amendola/Associated Press

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. — The winningest coach in college hockey history works four miles from where he grew up with nine siblings, and at an institution where he went from walk-on as a freshman to captain and all-American center his senior year.

Boston College’s Jerry York enters the Frozen Four in Tampa, Fla., on Thursday with 1,012 wins and five national titles. But he is recognized around campus and college hockey for more than the victories and the trophies — what he calls hardware — that his teams have added to the collection at Conte Forum.

“He’s just a regular, down-to-earth guy,” Army Coach Brian Riley said. “He never takes himself too seriously.”

The Eagles (28-7-5) will meet top-seeded Quinnipiac (31-3-7) in the first semifinal game, followed by a pair of seven-time champions, North Dakota (32-6-4) and Denver (25-9-6). Tampa has been good to the Eagles, who won the title the last time the final was held there, in 2012.

York, who graduated from Boston College in 1967 and has a master’s degree in education from the college, is in his 22nd year as its coach. At 70, he is old enough to have coached fellow grandfathers, yet can still connect with players raised with smartphones and social media.

“He’s still easy to relate to,” said the freshman forward Chris Brown, whose brother Patrick was the Eagles’ captain in 2014. “He’s a father figure, a mentor, a coach and a friend.”

York requires his players to keep their hair short, remain clean-shaven and maintain a tidy locker room. The same goes for their dorm rooms: beds made, and nothing inappropriate on display. Still, even first-year players call him “Yorkie.”

York met his future wife, Bobbie, at a local beach the summer before her freshman year — his junior year — at Boston College. The campus was equidistant from her home in West Roxbury and where he grew up in Watertown.

Bobbie said her husband always wanted to be the coach at his alma mater. But York might never have returned there had Mike Milbury not backed out of the Boston College job two months after succeeding Steve Cedorchuk in April 1994. Cedorchuk had replaced Len Ceglarski, who retired in 1992 after 20 years at the helm.

Ceglarski had hired York in 1970 as his first assistant coach at Clarkson, but York was mostly relegated to the freshman team.

“I didn’t know back then how much he knew about hockey,” said Ceglarski, 90, still an avid follower of the program. “I had old-fashioned ideas. I regret I didn’t give Jerry more things to do. He had the brains for it.”

York, at 26, became the youngest coach in college hockey when he succeeded Ceglarski in 1972 after Ceglarski left for Boston College. After seven years in Potsdam, N.Y., he won 342 games in 15 years at Bowling Green, including the program’s only national championship, in 1984.

Once back home at Boston College, York endured losing seasons his first three years. Since then, he has won four national championships — the first in 2001 — and been to 12 Frozen Fours in the last 19 years. The keystones of his success are a relentlessly positive attitude and his faith in his players, said Wayne Wilson, who was part of York’s second recruiting class at Bowling Green and played on the 1984 title team.

“He had a structure, but he let us to play the game,” said Wilson, the coach at Rochester Institute of Technology the last 17 years. “Some players get paralyzed by a coach’s system, but he allowed us to be creative within the concept of the team.”

The former Eagle Greg Brown joined York’s staff in 2004, after a 12-year professional career.

“He accepts you immediately,” Brown said. “At my first practice, he said to me, ‘You take the power play.’ He gave me responsibility right away. He’s like that with everyone.”

As coach of an elite program, York attracts top recruits. There are 20 Eagles in the N.H.L., including the Flames’ Johnny Gaudreau and the Rangers’ Chris Kreider. York’s current roster has 12 N.H.L. draft picks, two of them first-rounders.

But the Eagles are not a star-driven team. This year’s captain is Teddy Doherty, a jack-of-all-trades from nearby Hopkinton who entered his senior season with nine career goals. He scored two in the Northeast Regional final win over Minnesota-Duluth.

“A lot of players are put on pedestals all their lives, but when they get to our school, it’s not all about them,” York said. “The driving force in our success is taking hockey players and getting them to put the team, team, team first.”

Wilson added: “At B.C., it’s about winning trophies. It’s not about you or your points or moving on to the N.H.L.”

Brown, a two-time all-American defenseman at Boston College, said that York “is all about the program — winning the right way.”

Brown added, “He won’t compromise or cut corners, and he won’t let kids cut corners, even if it will give us a better chance to win.” That is particularly true, Brown said, of the Eagles’ off-ice behavior.

“He’ll get madder at a player if he should show some disrespect to someone off the ice than any mistake on the ice.”

It’s part of what York calls “being an Eagle.”

Like York, Jack Dunn, the college’s director of public affairs since 1998, is a “Double Eagle,” having graduated from Boston College High School in 1979 and B.C. in 1983.

“I’ve known about Jerry York my whole life,” said Dunn, adding that York “was held up to us” at the high school as a role model, because he “encapsulated everything as a person the Jesuits wanted you to be.”

Dunn described York as “fiercely loyal” to the important people in his life, his college and his team.

“He’s old school, but he has managed to make his values current with his players,” Dunn said. “I’ve had a lot of them as students. They never miss class. They never miss homework assignments.”

Even while coaching in the highly competitive Hockey East conference, which sent six teams to this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, York encourages his players to think beyond college and hockey.

“He always talks about being a better person and creating relationships that are going to last, about not being single-minded about hockey,” said Chris Brown, Greg Brown’s nephew.

Hockey East Commissioner Joe Bertagna has known York since Bertagna was a goalie at Harvard. Bertagna’s last college game, a 7-4 loss to Clarkson in 1973, was York’s 17th career victory at Clarkson. Since 1998, Bertagna has seen York’s teams win seven regular-season conference titles and nine tournament championships.

“He’s a great example of someone being successful and competitive, yet still being able to see the big picture,” Bertagna said.

At this time of year, though, success has a simple definition.

“We measure our teams by how many trophies we win,” York said.

Another is within their grasp this weekend in Tampa.

A correction was made on 
April 14, 2016

Because of an editing error, an article in some editions last Thursday about Boston College men’s hockey coach Jerry York misstated, in some copies, the given name of his wife in one instance. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, she is Bobbie York, not Bonnie.

How we handle corrections

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