From afar, John Gardner could seem standoffish. He had the classic old-school coach look. Occasionally, he'd throw his baseball cap on the bench when a call didn't go his way.
Gardner was a living legend. He was the coach at Avon Old Farms from 1975-2024, winning 867 games and nine New England titles.
But that standoffish vibe from afar wasn't reflective of who he really was. He cared deeply for his players. He developed relationships with them over the years. When he died in December 2025, there was an outpouring of support.
Above all else, I had always heard he was really funny.
I reached out to former players and coaches for humorous stories. Partially because I was genuinely interested and wanted to laugh, but also to honor Gardner.
It's odd to start a prep season without him, given how much of a fixture he became. It was fitting that Avon went on an improbable run for the Elite 8 title just months after he died.
"What made him so special was that he was a normal guy," former Avon standout Hudson Miller said. "He learned how to develop young boys into young men."
He did that in many ways. But the biggest may have been through humor.
Hudson Miller, player (2020-24): “When Mark [Naclerio] reached out to me and Chuck [Blanchard] for this, Chuck and I were on the phone earlier, and this probably speaks volumes, but we were probably talking for over 30 minutes about this, just going story for story.”
Mike Pereira, player (2009-10), assistant coach (2017-22): “When I was a player there, my senior year, we were going through it. Rough stretch. Our goalie was a Duke lacrosse commit, Josh Dion. He wasn’t sleeping at night. He was Gardner’s advisee. He went to Gardner and was like, ‘Hey, I’m having trouble sleeping.’ He wasn’t playing well, and we needed him. Gardner was like, ‘We need to sort this out. I’ll give you a sleeping pill, and I’ll come by at night. You just can’t tell anyone anything. But I’ll come by after study hall and drop you one of my sleeping pills and then you gotta make sure you’re at morning meeting every day.’ He drops by, drops the kid a multivitamin. But he can’t tell what the pill is. So the kid comes to morning meeting the next day and Gardner’s like, ‘How’d you sleep?’ and Josh is like, ‘Coach, I’ve never slept better in my life. Never better.’ So Gardner tells the kid he’ll drop by again that night and that he can’t say a word to anyone. Kept doing it night by night just dropping the kid a multivitamin. We ended up winning the whole thing, and the kid played lights out down the stretch. I didn’t find that out until I was coaching there about two or three years in, with the whole Josh Dion placebo effect, as we called it.”
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Miller: “My freshman year, 14- or 15-year-old me going into meet coach [Mike] Pereira, he was walking my family around but then I go into the rink to meet coach Gardner and obviously going to Avon, you know who he is and you’re nervous. I sit down in his office and you think he’s going to ask you about your play style or some sort of hockey question. His first question: Do you like to read? It puts you on the spot. I think most of us would say yes to get his approval but then he asked me what my favorite book was. Right away, it’s a moment of trying to open you up a little bit. Eventually, you get a little more comfortable and get a laugh out of it. That’s something he did with a lot of us. That was the first question he asked them. And we’d laugh cause when new kids would come in to interview, we’d all laugh, being like, ‘Well, we know what Gards is asking him for the first question.’ I think he got a little kick out of it as well.”
Mark Naclerio, player (2008-11), assistant coach (2022-24): “He would also openly share his recent reads, emphasizing the importance of a well-rounded young man, not just a hockey player.”
Chuck Blanchard, player (2020-23): “My senior year, he was grilling us for our music choices on the bus pre-game. He didn’t like our rap and SoundCloud mixes, and told us to play 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd. No one really knew it, but next thing you know, he’s playing the air guitar during the solo, and we’re all dying laughing in the back of the bus. After that we played it every bus ride.”
Tucker Harris, player (2023-26): “When the 2000 team came back to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, they told stories about how they would race the buses back to school on the highway."
Miller: "We would always fight to be on Gardner’s bus to games."
Joe Connor, player (2020-23): “I was in geometry at the time, and it was impossible for me. Back when Gardner first started, he was the geometry teacher. So someone told him that I legit couldn’t do it, so he has me come in his office so he could show me how to do geometry. So I pull out my binder, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I got this stuff.’ We’re going over it, we’re doing it all. I’m feeling confident now, so I go into class, and my teacher was one of his good buddies. He’s like, “J.C., how’d you do this?” and I told him Gardner taught me how to do it. And he’s like, ‘I’m not sure this is looking too hot. I don’t know what you guys were doing there, but definitely not what you were supposed to be doing.’ His geometry skills were a little outdated. But he was so confident with it.”
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Anthony Palmer, player (2023-26): “In the Avon refectory, it’s kind of like Hogwarts. Inside, we have little salt and pepper shakers on the table. He used to unscrew them and watch people pour it and have everything fall onto the plate. Like he would do it to the headmaster, too. He’d do it with ketchup bottles. It was funny.”
Blanchard: “My exit meeting after my junior year, I’m a little nervous about what he’s gonna say about my upcoming season and what I need to work on. We proceeded to talk about golf and courses and just chatted for 15 or so minutes about everything but hockey. We got to the hockey for a couple of minutes after that, but again he just loved to chat, and so many of my memories and conversations with him were unrelated to hockey.”
Miller: “If you had last period free, you’d go hang out in the training room and he’d be in there cracking jokes and seeing how we’re doing."
Connor: “There was a group of us like Hudson [Miller] and Chuck [Blanchard] and we’d do a summer camp for him, and we’d stay in the dorms. After we’d put all the kids to bed, we’d be chilling, and one night, I DoorDashed food, and it didn’t come for legit forever. We all ended up going to bed, and I didn't really think about it. I guess the food ends up coming, and these two guys are DoorDashers, and they walk all the way into campus, and they’re like banging on all the doors trying to get in. One kid came back after waking up and was like, ‘What's going on?’ He thought people were trying to break in. I think the kid even called Gardner, and Gardner was like, ‘What the (expletive) is going on?’ We had the whole school security flying around trying to see what was going on. I didn’t think anything of it. We all woke up the next morning and Gardner’s like, ‘Boys, what’s going on? Was someone trying to break in?’ We told him we had no idea. He ended up finding the bag of DoorDash, and it had my name on it. We were all chilling, and he walks in and goes ‘Joe, you caused all this (expletive) over DoorDash?’ He was ranting too about how the Avon police had to come in. I felt so bad, but it was so funny.”
Miller: “My junior year, we started the year well, winning the Christmas tournament and going 9-0. We lost our first two games back from break to Taft and Hotchkiss. He was definitely not happy and he was known for his hat throws when he wasn’t happy with refs. He’d always throw his hat on the bench. After our two-game losing streak that year, he went to the school store and bought a new hat and he thought the old hat was giving us bad luck. When he started wearing the new hat, I don’t think we lost the rest of the way again. He was a pretty superstitious guy.”
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Naclerio: “I quickly learned the importance of respecting his many superstitions when I got the opportunity to coach with him. Some of these were the placement of us coaches on the bench shifting throughout the game and the way he threw out the bucket of pucks with the same hand motions at the end of warm-ups.”
Miller: “Every year at Avon we’d have morning meetings, which is basically an all-school assembly, and in the winter when the snow would start, he’d go up on stage at the meeting and demonstrate how to walk on ice properly because kids would break their ankles falling on ice throughout the years or faculty would get hurt. So he turned it into a whole skit. It was a tradition at that point.”
Connor: “Lefty Markonidis, for some reason, every time he skated around, he would twirl his stick in his hand, and it would drive Gardner nuts. I remember coming into the rink one day, and we’re all getting ready for practice, and he made Lefty skate around with one of those gel-weighted sticks for the first 20 minutes of practice. He was going off about how he hated it and that it made him look like an idiot. And then during practice, Lefty starts twirling the weighted stick, and Gards is like, “Come on! Stop!” He’d always have his old skates from probably when he was in college and his big, old wooden stick, which he loved banging on the ice. He was a riot.”
Naclerio: “We had a player a few years back who would bat a puck out of the air every chance he could when the puck was airborne. To break this habit (that was driving all of us coaches crazy), he gave the kid a weighted stick to practice with that he could hardly lift. This lasted a full week of practice.”
Blanchard: “Pre-game speeches in big games, he’d always come in very calm and would ask how we were doing. Whether it be Westy Monday or an Elite 8 playoff game, he’d come in very relaxed and sometimes even tell us a story about an old team or a game from years ago. You expect a big rah-rah speech, but he comes in making jokes and super loose, and I always appreciated how he knew if the boys were tense pre-game and if he needed to cool us down a bit.”
Miller: "You’re at your stall and you're nervous for the game, and he would just, off the top of his head, tell a story about a random game 20 years before where somehow it related to us. It would be Westy Monday, and you’d hear the crowd outside the locker room, and he’d be telling us a story from the 1980s. That was his way of calming us down.”
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Harris: "He was just such a good leader in all aspects. It wasn’t just about hockey with him. He wanted to make us into good men."
Miller: "I think that’s what allowed us to really have success: We connected with him on such a deep level. We wanted to win so bad for him.”
