Deane Lanphear was the head coach of the 1970-71 Mount Hermon hockey team.   Coach Lanphear had graduated from Mount Hermon in 1953, and then went on to UMass. He later gained a divinity degree at Andover Newton.

His divinity degree put him in good company at Mount Hermon, where it seemed half the administration and faculty had divinity degrees.

Deane taught Religious Studies and was housemaster of Wallace, a shining new dorm at that point, funded with the Readers Digest money of alum DeWitt Wallace. 

According to The Gateway, Deane joined the Mount Hermon faculty in 1969, so in 1970-71 he was still new to teaching and coaching at the school. 

Deane had dash.  Check out his sideburns in his faculty candid in the 1971 Gateway.  

And he smoked, which added to the cool factor.  Smoked cigarettes, just to be clear.

In 1970 Deane was about 35 years old.  He was the perfect age for a coach—too young to be your father but a bit too old to be your brother.   He had a good sense of humor and was more likely to use the needle than the hammer when he felt you needed help understanding his message.

Deane didn’t try to impose a singular style of play on the Mount Hermon hockey team and that’s because he couldn’t.  Back then, more so than most of our rivals,  Mount Hermon hockey teams were dominated by PG’s (high school "post grads":  guys who were using a year at prep school to improve grades and game; some had been directed to the school by colleges that wanted them to get an extra year before arriving, a sort of red-shirting).

Each year then, Deane pretty much had to start with a new team, a team that he’d have only one year. He had to match his game plan to his new players, not vice versa.

Mount Hermon teams had a habit of starting slowly, the first few games often being played after only a week or two of practice.  But Deane did an amazing job of melding talent quickly, and by mid-January his teams were usually clicking.

The assistant coach was Al Burnett, who had graduated from Mount Hermon 8 years before.  Al was a  strawberry blond, handsome guy who looked like he had been stamped from the mold that has formed prep school athletes since the days of Hobey Baker.  Al was a strong skater and all-around strong, athletic guy.  He also had this trick shot--a slap shot in which he held the stick with one hand and then drove his shin into the shaft of the stick.  I'm not describing it very well, but the shot was surprisingly hard and accurate. I don't know if he ever tried it in games.

Deane and Al had both been good hockey players but had probably been coached, themselves, by guys who hadn’t played a lot and hadn’t had any real technical training in hockey skill development or game strategy.  Of course, outside of the Soviet Union, there wasn’t a lot of technical focus in hockey coaching or training anywhere back then, just deeper and shallower talent pools depending on how long the game had been established in a given area. 

It was an era in which the game was not as intensely coached as today.  Especially the defensive dimension of the game.

Nor was there much focus on conditioning, beyond end-of-practice wind sprints. 

There was no organized weight training. I don’t know if Mount Hermon even had a barbell.  I never saw it or used it. There was a Universal machine and those old pulley machines mounted to the wall. We didn’t feel shortchanged because the prevailing wisdom was that we shouldn’t get “muscle bound.” 

It’s hard not to be nostalgic for the way the game was played then, with players having more freedom and more of their developmental time likely to have been on ponds, playing shinny. 

Pure talent had more room to play back then.  And those of us not abundant in talent hadn't yet been crowded out by the growth of the talent or recruiting pool.