Fish In New Waters

After six years of success in the Orono boys’ and girls’ hockey programs, Sean Fish wanted to take on a new challenge in a familiar place.

Fish took on the head coaching job for the St. Michael-Albertville boys’ hockey team this year, and he has the Knights off to a 4-1 start after a victory Dec. 14. That’s almost to the win total for each of the past two seasons for the Knights, which play in the stacked Lake Conference.

“I don’t think there’s a better conference in the entire country, right, like Edina and Wayzata and Eden Prairie and all these really good teams that you have to play every night,” Fish said. “So I said, ‘hey, I’m gonna give this one a shot.’ They’re obviously struggling, and I want to get that program back up to where it should be, because it’s a great community, like that community over there is growing.

“It’s a lot of younger families. The youth program is strong, and everything is looking good. But for whatever reason, we’re losing kids at the high school level, whether it be to Rogers or (St. Cloud) Cathedral or Benilde (St. Margaret’s) or wherever else. And so for me, it was wanting to get that program back to where it should be, which is to be in a state, state-contending team, right? Like, we (St. Michael-Albertville) beat Moorhead that year in 2018, and it was unbelievable, like it was one of the coolest things ever to watch that group and how hard they worked.”

Fish returns after leading Orono programs to state
STMA went to state in 2018, but after that section-final win over Moorhead, the Knights haven’t enjoyed the same level of success. An assistant with the Knights from 2014 to 2018, Fish left for Orono where he turned the girls’ program into a state power, though it took time, and then led the boys’ program to state the past two seasons.

“And for me, coaching girls’ hockey was maybe, probably, the best thing in my coaching career, even with all the stuff that I’ve already done early in my coaching career, but teaching the why behind the game is huge, and the girls just wanted to know why I was telling him to do that,” Fish said.

“So I obviously knew my stuff wasn’t one of those things where they didn’t trust that, but they didn’t trust why I was teaching it. So … after we figured that part out, it was just like, ‘OK, let’s go.’ So, then we just turned that thing into an absolute powerhouse, like, they’re still really good.”

Now, he’s taking those lessons back to STMA, where the Knights opened the season in style — a wild 6-5 overtime win over Spring Lake Park/Coon Rapids on Nov. 26 where the Knights blew a 5-1 lead at one point, allowing four third-period goals.

“The first game was full of ups and downs and many firsts for a lot of our team, not only the players but also a couple of our coaches’ first games also,” said Knights senior defenseman Jack Johnson said. “We showed how skilled we can be and how hard we can play in the first two periods. But in the third we also showed we have a young team that is learning everyday. In the end we pulled out the win with a couple of those younger players’ help but the biggest swing in our play came with the speech Fish gave us before the overtime period.”

New coach, raised expectations
Johnson and junior forward Tanner Esterberg see the Knights program turning already with a team that has only four seniors. Esterberg noted that the expectations are different now, too, as a team and individuals.

“The rest of the season expect many more wins to come, but not every game is gonna be our best and obviously we play hard teams, but we aren’t focused on winning every game, we are focused on the section games that matter as long as we play the best we can the other games that’s all that matters,” Esterberg said. “Fish has made me much better as a player because right away he got to know me and realized that yelling at me isn’t going to help, and he just lets me be me while still teaching me things, and it’s given me a lot of confidence to go out and put the puck in the net the way I like to play.”

Besides Fish teaching the game, he backs up his experience from his playing days, which included time at Anoka between 2001-03 where he won a state title in 2003. He followed that up with a two-season stint in the NAHL with the Minnesota Blizzard where he put up 64 points between 2003 and 2005. Fish then played Division III hockey at Wisconsin-Stevens Point where he tallied 90 points in four seasons from 2005 to 2009.