Those Sioux City kids sulking on that bus didn’t know Hakstol, but Gasparini did – the stock he came from, the stage of life he’d reached. Hakstol had grown up on a beef farm five miles northwest of Warburg, Alberta. The farm has since swelled to 10,000 acres, but Warburg’s population still hovers around 700 people, and on a farm in western Canada, you work and you don’t complain and you certainly don’t preen, and you take care not to do anything that would embarrass yourself or your family, because in a town that small, nothing travels faster than shame. Before he could think about playing hockey or baseball with his buddies, Hakstol had to complete his daily chores – feeding 700 cattle, seeding grain fields, baling hay – to help his father, Ed, who ran the farm and managed an oil field. Then he had to mind his studies to the satisfaction of his mother, Theresa, a schoolteacher. The family television got four channels, one of which was in French.

At 17, he bought a 1967 Camaro: red, with a dual silver stripe that bisected the hood. He sold it a few weeks later, realizing how impractical a purchase it had been. What, was he going to race it on the five miles of gravel road that surrounded the farm? Hadn’t his father, who worked every day from dawn to dusk and could have afforded to buy himself a brand-new pickup anytime, driven nothing but used trucks his whole life? A boy raised in that sort of environment becomes a certain sort of man.

“David was always very intense, very honest, very straight,” Gasparini said. “He was a captain for me for two years, and he was certainly one of the great captains I’ve had. He was an adult, a very mature young man.”

Hakstol had been playing professionally, in the International Hockey League, for five years, hanging on to the hope that he might earn a call-up to the NHL. But he had torn his right ACL in his last game with the Minneapolis Moose, and another IHL team, the Las Vegas Thunder, had considered signing him but decided against it. Now he was a 28-year-old, stay-at-home defenseman with a bum knee and a finance degree, unsure of whether he should go to graduate school or how he might earn a living until Gasparini told him he was the ideal coach for a team that had won just 17 of its 46 games the previous season, that seemed bound for nowhere again.

The job paid $28,000 a year. He took it, hopped a plane to Iowa, boarded that bus to Rochester – and lost, 16-4. “I knew what I was getting into,” he said, but the rout was just the beginning. More than 40 players, including seven goaltenders, suited up for Sioux City during the 1996-97 season; the roster had more turnover than a fast-food restaurant staff. The team’s home arena was the Municipal Auditorium. Built in 1950, it held 3,500 spectators and housed its rink – which was 170 feet by 75 feet, much smaller than a regulation 200 X 85 NHL surface – on its second floor. The locker rooms were two floors up and accessible only by stairs, and the ground level was the Auditorium’s convention center.

“That’s where they kept the animals for the circus, too,” said Leigh Mendelson, who joined Hakstol’s coaching staff that season. “So it would smell like lion piss down there.”

“My first half-year in Sioux City really solidified that I had a lot to learn but loved what I was doing...even though it could be frickin’ miserable.” – Dave Hakstol

As a player, Hakstol had always believed that he understood hockey, that he could keep his pulse steady and his play efficient and smart even at a game’s tensest moments. But now he had to run practices and orchestrate line changes and manage the emotions and anxieties of young players who had been made promises and expected them to be fulfilled, and he recognized how narrow his perspective had been. “You’re dealing with everything,” he said. “It was hard. There were a lot of hard days there.” Except he had a chance to walk away just after Christmas, when Las Vegas reconsidered and offered him the opportunity to play again, and he found himself saying … no. “My first half-year in Sioux City really solidified that I had a lot to learn but loved what I was doing,” he said, “even though it could be frickin’ miserable.”

His record that season was an unsightly 8-43-2, and he didn’t love coaching enough to put himself through another six months of muggings without doing all he could to defend himself. So he commenced with a clean sweep: new players, new culture, new everything. Mendelson, who had been coaching in a lower-level league, drove his ’88 Volkswagen Fox from St. Louis to Iowa just to meet Hakstol and ask him for a job. “His reputation precedes him as far as the person he is,” Mendelson said. Hakstol hired him, then dispatched him to the corners of North America and everywhere in between – Saskatchewan, Arizona, Maryland, with the occasional overnight nap in the Fox – to mine junior and midget leagues for players whom other USHL franchises had overlooked. Once the offseason began, Hakstol and his other assistant, Todd Jones, joined Mendelson on the recruiting trail. Because the Musketeers played on the Auditorium’s smaller rink, Hakstol calculated that he could sacrifice some talent and creativity on his roster – not much, but some – for the sake of finding guys who charged pell-mell into the most treacherous areas of the ice and didn’t give ground once they got there.

“I have a huge value in toughness, in team guys,” he said. “Call it what you want. It involves guys who are willing to do the dirty work. Snot-and-balls guys – that’s got to be part of the foundation of who you are.”

CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer When Dave Hakstol took over in 2015, he was one of only a handful of people to jump from the college ranks to an NHL head-coaching job.

That mandate led to the acquisitions of players who were disparate in everything except their desire to win. There was Ruslan Fedotenko, who scored 43 goals in 55 games for Sioux City before scoring 173 goals over 12 NHL seasons, his first two with the Flyers. There was David Hale, a defenseman who was Hakstol’s stylistic clone, who after two seasons with the Musketeers was drafted in the first round by the New Jersey Devils, spending three years at UND and seven years in the NHL, reaching a level in his playing career that his coach never did. And there was forward Chris Olsgard, 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds, now a financial planner in Columbus, Ohio, who was the team’s captain for two seasons and its penalty-minutes leader for one. That last detail wouldn’t be noteworthy but for one relevant factor: Olsgard’s shoulders were so unstable that he tended to dislocate one of them whenever he was in a fight. Yet he so respected his teammates and Hakstol, and so wanted them to respect him, that he often had someone – the Musketeers’ trainer, an assistant coach, another player – lift his pasta scotta arm and pop the shoulder back in its socket so he wouldn’t miss his next shift. “Tells you a lot about how Hak could motivate someone,” Olsgard said.

It led to 6 a.m. team runs along the banks of the Big Sioux River or up and down the Auditorium’s staircases, and it led to an understanding between Hakstol and his team that the boys could have their fun on a Saturday night as long as they showed up fresh for practice the next morning. When they didn’t, it led to on-ice drills conjured out of an athlete’s nightmares. One day, Mendelson and Jones went rummaging through the Auditorium’s attic and uncovered half a dozen “hockey sticks” – steel plates welded to steel bars. Each was four feet high and weighed 25 pounds. Mendelson assumed that they had been props from a stage play, but they seemed the tools of a dungeon master. So whenever a certain sluggishness fell over practice, Hakstol would call out, “Blades of steel,” take a seat in a lawn chair at the center faceoff dot, and snicker as his hungover night-riders tried to pass and shoot while wielding those monstrous instruments.

It led to a remarkable turnaround in Sioux City: a 35-18 record and a playoff berth in 1997-98, then two more winning seasons and two more playoff berths before Hakstol returned to North Dakota as an assistant coach under Dean Blais. “Here’s what I learned: Make sure you come up with a plan of how you want to do it, who you are, and then do it,” Hakstol said. “If it’s good enough, you’re going to succeed. If it’s not, you’ll fail, but you can look yourself in the eye and say, ‘I did it my way.’”

Pleasure on the prairie

Everyone knew who Dave Hakstol was. Of course everyone did. UND hockey is less a sport in Grand Forks than it is a civic religion. It is the great connector, the cultural lingua franca for townies and undergrads, for politicians and professors, for the chairman of the booster board and the president of the local 4-H Club. Proportionally, the Fighting Hawks’ popularity in the region is staggering. The city has 57,000 residents, and with 11,640 seats, as the home to a program that has won eight national championships and reached the Frozen Four 22 times, Ralph Engelstad Arena is a prairie town’s grandest pleasure palace. Imagine the Flyers’ arena accommodating more than 20 percent of the population of Philadelphia and its suburbs. The Wells Fargo Center would have to hold 1.2 million people.

TIM TAI / Staff Photographer UND's Ralph Engelstad Arena seats more than 11,000 people – around 20 percent of Grand Forks' population.

Erinn O’Keefe knew who Dave Hakstol was, in fact, before he ever became UND’s head coach. Her father, Tim, was the CEO of North Dakota’s alumni association and foundation, a former defenseman for UND himself, a mover in the same circles as her future husband. In August 2001, while Hakstol was still an assistant, he met Erinn through mutual friends during a day trip to Pelican Lake, and he fell for her when she sandbagged him on a bet: For a beer, who could stay on their water skis longer? He wobbled for a few seconds on a single slalom ski and tumbled into the water, and his friends, who knew Erinn had spent her whole life on the lake, got a good laugh out of the look on Hakstol’s face as he watched that freckled, brown-haired girl glide across the sheet of blue.

The two of them dated for two years, much of it long-distance because he was away so often on recruiting trips. She could tell, she said, that he loved what he did but that remaining an assistant coach might not fulfill him, and she trusted that if he did get a job with more power and pressure, he would not let those shackles drag him down, or her.

“I might say to him, ‘Oh, man, that game was really something,’ and we might talk about it for a couple of minutes, but he really doesn’t bring it home,” Erinn said. “And it hasn’t always been that way. That’s something he’s developed over time. It amazes me because it’s not a put-on.

“He compartmentalizes things.”

They married in 2003, and it took a year for circumstances to test her trust. Blais resigned to accept a coaching position with the Columbus Blue Jackets, and at a UND golf tournament/fund-raiser near Minneapolis, athletic director Roger Thomas drove Hakstol back to Grand Forks, the 300-mile trip turning into Hakstol’s de facto job interview as the two discussed a dozen topics that had nothing to do with hockey, another five-hour ride changing Hakstol’s life forever. “I knew him, but I didn’t know him,” Thomas said. “I was pleasantly surprised to see more facets of him personally.”

TIM TAI / Staff Photographer Dave Hakstol and his wife, Erinn, relax behind her parents' home on Pelican Lake in Minnesota. The two have been married for 15 years.

The most fervid fan base in college hockey didn’t share Thomas’ confidence. Message boards popped and sizzled over the hire: All it took was one long interview? Why didn’t Thomas scan the continent for the best candidate? We have a history to uphold here! It’s an unsettling thing, isn’t it, to have someone you don’t really know in charge of something you care about so deeply?

Even if Hakstol had been inclined to embark on a shake-hands, kiss-babies, PR campaign, there was a graver matter on his mind: Not long after his promotion, he learned his father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Ed and Theresa moved to Grand Forks and lived with Dave and Erinn for two months, and while Hakstol prepared for the season, his mother and father drove an hour to Sanford Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo once a week for Ed’s treatments. On Feb. 7, 2005, nine months after his son became North Dakota’s head coach, having returned to Warburg to be as comfortable as possible in his final days, Ed Hakstol died at 66.

“I knew what the odds were,” Hakstol said as he sipped a 6 p.m. cup of black coffee and sat at their kitchen island. “They weren’t great. … I was able to make a couple of trips home. Not enough, obviously.”

“They were so proud you were in the position you were in,” Erinn said.

He remained there for 11 years, leading North Dakota to the NCAA championship game in his first season and back to the Frozen Four six more times thereafter – though the Fighting Hawks never won a national title under him – steering his own course instead of presuming he could keep the program on autopilot. The recruiting plan, he told his assistant coaches Dane Jackson and Brad Berry, was simple: Cut out the crap. No one comes to Grand Forks for the beautiful winters or the cosmopolitan culture or the downtown nightlife. “Guys who came here wanted to be friggin’ hockey players,” Hakstol said, and he predicated his coaching philosophy on that basic belief. He wanted snot, and he wanted balls.