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Q: What kind of police officer would you have been, if you’d gone that route?

A: I don’t know. (Laughs). I’d like to think I’d be an undercover guy, but I don’t know … I might have been at the desk, or in the school division.

Q: Are there ever regrets? Even now, as an NHL coach, do you ever say, ‘Geez, I don’t know if this is what I want to be doing’? Do those moments come?

A: No. Not at all. This is the only thing I can think of doing. But if I’m passing a regret on, I finished an education degree at the U of S, and what I would have done a little differently … instead of being such a, for lack of a better term, a jock, I probably would have gone into the school of engineering. My dad wanted me to go into engineering. I ended up with a math degree in education, but maybe I should have challenged myself a little bit, gone into engineering, and seen where that would have taken me.

Q: Is it safe to say you’ve transferred a lot of what you’ve taken from your education studies and put that into hockey?

A: Very safe. My dad was a school teacher for 30-odd years, and the one thing that’s really helped me in my coaching is my education background. It was a blessing in disguise.

Q: There’s parallels between coaching and teaching. Is there anything you’ve been able to move across, to take with you into the hockey world?

A: Like my father, I’m not a big believer in three strikes, you’re out. You’ve got to keep being persistent, try to get every kid through. Obviously, the lesson-planning and the yearly planning and all that stuff … it prepares you to keep things organized, and having a direction. And then realizing all students are different, right? There’s all different types of learning styles, so we try not to attack things one way. Some guys are more visual, some guys love the video, some guys not so much. You learn from teaching that not all kids are the same, and you have to reach them different ways, which is no different than coaching.