Bang! Bang! Bang! The pounding in junior coach Mike Field’s head was too loud to be a dream. The barrage jarred him awake in this unfamiliar house on Boston’s South Shore.
Field flung open the shades to discover the source of the incessant banging — a 90-pound kid firing pucks off the wall.
“I looked out the window, and it was Timmy Lovell shooting before school,” said Field, now an Arizona State assistant coach, recalling the first chapter of a 10-year-old courtship with the diminutive Lovell. “Thud after thud after thud. He must have been 4-foot-9, maybe a hundred pounds, and he shot 300 pucks before school. That was my introduction.”
It was a loud first impression between a coach and a player, one that culminated last year with Lovell bolting Boston College to join Field in the Arizona desert.
Division 1 players from Massachusetts have Beanpot dreams hard-wired into their DNA. One Bay Stater transferring out of BC is a rarity. Two in the same year is Halley’s Comet. But such was the case in the 2021 offseason, when classmates Lovell (Hingham, Mass.) and Harrison Roy (Lakeville, Mass.) jumped into the NCAA transfer portal, flying the Eagles’ nest for potentially greener pastures. While Lovell went to Arizona State, Roy went to Lake Superior State in Michigan.
Despite sharing a locker room in both the USHL and college, their motives were as different as their playing styles. Defenseman Lovell split for the oldest reason in hockey — ice time — whereas centerman Roy abandoned his dream team for much more personal reasons.
Lovell was the first to go. “I was told before going (to BC) that I was going to be the offensive defenseman running the power play,” Lovell said. “I was sitting right from the start. It was weird.”
His father, Tim Lovell Sr., founder of Lovell Hockey — the outfit that had honed Timmy’s unique skills — saw his son as a square peg in a round hole at BC.
“I don’t think they knew how to coach him,” said Tim the elder. “For him to be rimming pucks, to be putting pucks off the glass and out? For a skilled offensive defenseman, it’s puck possession and making plays. He had a leash on him.”
“I was doing a job I was not fit for,” said Timmy.
There was no shortage of extenuating circumstances in the fall of 2020. Eighteen-year-old Lovell came into BC small even by high school standards: 5-foot-6, 140 pounds. In the week leading up to his NCAA debut, he broke his wrist in practice, out until January. Yale transfer Jack St. Ivany began running the Eagles’ power play, and Lovell was stapled to the bench.
“I was sitting right from the start," Lovell said. "I talked to my father, and he was like, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s your first couple of games.’ The following week I’m playing even less. We were concerned. There was definitely an issue with the Boston College coaching staff.”
Lovell, a freshman, never found his comfort zone at Conte Forum during college hockey’s first season of COVID. “We were wearing masks under a bubble,” said Lovell. “I never wore a bubble before. It would fog up, and the mask made it worse. It was stressful putting that thing on.”
For his classmate Roy, the masks were the least of his worries. The BC athletic department was mandating vaccinations as part of its COVID protocol, and that proved to be a deal-breaker for Roy.
“I was forced to take something I wasn’t comfortable with,” said Roy from his new perch at Lake Superior State. “I was basically put in a position where you either get it, or leave. It was the hardest decision of my life.”
While Roy and his family wrestled with the dilemma, Lovell and two other classmates jumped into the portal in the spring of 2021, one that closed on July 1. Roy didn’t make his move until weeks after the deadline, and the Lakers luckily found him in the portal. Because of the blown deadline, all the parties needed to cooperate if the NCAA was to allow Roy to play in the Soo without sitting out a year. LSSU coach Damon Whitten and Roy both were grateful to Jerry York (Watertown, Mass.) for his help.
“Coach York was a real gentleman about it, as we’ve come to expect,” said Whitten. “He was doing the right thing by the student-athlete.”
A relieved Roy had only a couple of weeks to prepare for a new life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, something of a culture shock for Eastern city kids. Roy embraced the rugged Lake Superior life with gratitude and an open mind.
“You find sneaky beautiful spots on the beaches,” said Roy, coining a new term. He joined the local golf club and played with his mates until the snow arrived in November. The team welcomed the 6-foot-1 center, never more than when he scored the tying goal in their opener, a road upset over Omaha in overtime. He found a home on the Lakers’ power play and endured a CCHA playoff ordeal against Northern Michigan.
“That was a complete war,” said Roy, “but it helped develop my game.”
Lovell had even more success in his new home, quarterbacking ASU’s nationally ranked power play as a 19-year-old, his 22 points putting him in the top 10 nationally among defensemen.
“It’s hard to find guys who can do what he can do, from an offensive standpoint, especially at the offensive blue line, the hockey intelligence and the good stick,” a college hockey insider said.
After a decade of admiration from afar, Field and ASU finally had snagged their man, a kid who zooms toward all points of the compass without losing speed.
“I call him a ‘joystick player,’ ” said Field, “like Cale Makar.”
From the BC perspective, Lovell was the toughest loss of their 2021 departures.
“Lovell was special,” said a BC Hockey insider, who compared Lovell to BC-turned-NHL stars Johnny Gaudreau, Brian Gionta and Cam Atkinson. “That high-end talent was missing last year.”
Now Arizona State may be the beneficiary of that talent.
“Some guys all of a sudden pop,” the college hockey insider said, “and it’s his turn to pop.”
Although Lovell and Roy never got to live out their Beanpot fantasies, the Massachusetts natives look to create their own legend, thousands of miles from home.
There is an unmistakable deja vu to the case of Timmy Lovell’s transfer to Arizona State. One has to look no farther than across the dining room table.
His father, University of Maine scoring star Tim Lovell Sr. (Norwood, Mass.), transferred to UMass back in 1996. Although they both survived the transition and thrived in their respective new homes, the particular details of the two moves were quite different.
There was no transfer portal for Tim Sr. in the 1990s, and that resulted in dad sitting out an entire year for the right to play for a new team.
“That was taboo back then when you transferred out,” said the elder Lovell. “Twenty-five years ago there was that fear of sitting out, not getting any better.”
Lovell spent a year as a practice player in Amherst, then had a solid season for the Minutemen, piling up 22 points in 26 games his senior year. Those numbers, however, were half of what he had been compiling at powerhouse Maine before he departed Orono for Amherst, taking advantage of a final year of eligibility. He was leaving a national power for UMass, a second-tier school within Hockey East. But coach Shawn Walsh’s Black Bears were facing NCAA sanctions when the elder Lovell bolted.
“The only reason I transferred out was because we weren’t allowed in the playoffs,” said Lovell Sr. “Nowadays people are transferring out to be the person to get to the NHL. They’re making moves to be first-line, second-line guys to further their career.
“It’s tough for the school to keep you now. It’s like the wild, wild West free agency, You look at Lukas Sillinger from Bemidji, the Jackson twins from Northeastern, they’re all high-end kids in their league, leaving school because it’s about the future. That’s what this is all about with Timothy.”
“When my father transferred, it was a big deal, kind of rare,” said the younger Lovell. “For me to have the advantage to transfer from one school and play the next year without having to sit, that’s a huge advantage.”
Roy and Lovell may now attend school on the other side of the country, but come summer, they both return to the Bay State for the off-ice training so critical to their pro ambitions.
Roy works with former Maine star Scott Parmentier (Blackstone, Mass.) at his renowned gym Parmy’s the Difference, while Lovell pounds weight under the supervision of brothers Dan and Thomas Boothby at Boothby Sports Performance in Hingham. They're the same duo who train NHL veteran Adam Gaudette (Braintree, Mass.) and most of the other elite skaters from the Boston Advantage junior program.
Both Roy and Lovell made important gains this summer.
Lovell is now a shade under 160 pounds, which does not sound terribly big until you take into account that he began his college career playing with only 140 pounds protecting his 5-foot-9 frame.
“The biggest thing for him is to continue to add muscle mass,” said Field, who acknowledges that Lovell has NHL dreams but “will probably have to be more than 158 pounds. He’ll have to continue what he did this summer.”
Whitten, who is from suburban Detroit, understands why kids return to cities like Boston for their summer training.
“When you’re from the bigger cities, you have a skating coach, a skill coach, a strength coach, that’s the expectation,” Whitten said. “In today’s game, that such a big part of it. If you’re not doing it, you have no chance to be successful.”
Roy returns to campus brimming with confidence due to the work he put in this summer. “This is the biggest offseason I’ve ever had,” said Roy, who credits Parmentier with his newfound power. “My strength, my speed, my explosiveness.”
Away from the rink, Roy’s passion is golf, and it’s out on the links where he enjoys the benefits from this summer’s sweat equity. “My tee shots have really improved, 300 yards or more when I’m hitting them right.” His swing from the tee box resembles his one-timers on the Lakers’ power play, where he will be a fixture on the left dot, receiving tasty feeds from Louis Boudon, the NCAA’s leading returning scorer.
Both Roy and Lovell expect to break out with explosive seasons at their respective schools, thousands of miles from Beantown, but their newfound power came from the Hub.
Tim Rappleye has just written his third book: A Miracle of Their Own, co-authored by Keith Gave. Tim can be reached on Twitter @TeeRaps
