Dallas Eakins’ nose was glued to the car window as his family eased toward his grandparents’ house in Canada. Eakins, 7 years old at the time, his mother, 2-year-old half-sister and stepfather had pulled up stakes, moving from Florida to Peterborough, Ontario.

Boys Eakins’ age ran about the street, hockey sticks in hands, slapping a ball. Come winter, the ball would be replaced by a puck, skates laced up instead of tennis shoes.

“Looking at those kids,” recalls Eakins, coach of the new San Diego Gulls, “I remember thinking, ‘That’s how I’m going to make friends.’ ”

Make friends? Eakins, 48, made hockey his identity, becoming the second native Floridian to skate in the NHL, the first to score a point. Log onto hockeyreference.com and you’ll travel his nomadic journey, a 16-year, 18-team professional odyssey, far more time spent in minor league hinterlands with teams like the Beast of New Haven, Manitoba Moose and Worcester IceCats than the NHL.


Try 979 games in the minors, 125 in the NHL -- 89 percent of his pro skating life spent trying to reach hockey’s pinnacle. Four of his 10 NHL seasons consisted of one, two, three and seven games. His NHL stat line as a sinewy, 6-foot-2 defenseman: 0 goals, 9 assists, 208 penalty minutes.

“My career was always one-year contracts, no security,” he says.

Then he adds a line that could serve as his mantra: “But you keep forging ahead.”

Eakins’ life has been a fascinating one: eight NHL stops; marrying a stunning Canadian actress; NHL head coach at 46; fired less than halfway through his second season with Edmonton; now head coach of the Anaheim Ducks’ American Hockey League affiliate – the San Diego Gulls, who begin a new chapter in hockey here with their AHL opener on Oct. 10 at home against Grand Rapids -- one wrung below the NHL.


His backstory includes heartache: never knowing his biological father; his mother dying young; his step-father, a man he loved, walking out of his life, eventually committing suicide.

“Those lessons ingrained in him that life is not to be taken for granted,” says Rob Cowie, a Nashville Predators scout who played minor league and NHL hockey with Eakins. “That everything is not given to you. And that sometimes, life sucks.

“Maybe that’s one of his biggest lessons. The second one is that you are not what happens to you. How you react to what happens to you, that’s what makes you who you are.”

Dade City, Fla., sits 38 miles northeast of Tampa. “Hillbilly country,” Eakins calls it. His great grandmother lived in a shack on the corner. His grandparents lived next to her. Completing the three-generation sub-division, Eakins’ mother lived next door in a trailer.


“It wasn’t middle-class,” he says. “We didn’t have much.”

There was a nearby butcher where cows were killed then slaughtered.

“I never saw one shot,” says Eakins, “but I heard them drop. I’d see a tongue in the display window, equating, ‘Oh, that was in the cow’s mouth yesterday.’ ”

Eakins was born Dallas Yoder. He never knew his biological father, whom he says was Native American and family members describe as a drifter. His mother, Carol, born in Macon, Ga., was a straight shooter, figuratively and literally.


“It was never gray with my mother,” he says. “It was black and white. Her action was swift, usually with her mouth. If there was ever a confrontation, she would never ever punch second, that’s for sure.”

When Eakins spotted venomous snakes near the property he was instructed to notify his mother.

Says Eakins, “She got her shotgun, shot the snake and walked back into the trailer like it was nothing.”

Dallas’ mother married Jim Eakins, a long-distance truck driver who grew up in Canada. Jim Eakins tired of the travel and being away from his family, landing a job in Peterborough, 86 miles northeast of Toronto.


Dallas, meanwhile, fell hard for Canada’s sport of choice.

“As a kid, work is play. All you want to do is play and play and play,” he says. “Hockey was play.”

He learned to skate by pushing a chair. Within a year he was playing in a youth league. His step-father built an improvised rink in the back yard.

“That’s what Canadian fathers do,” says Eakins. “You’re on those outside rinks until your feet are frostbitten. Your mother’s calling you to come in in 10 more minutes. Your feet were frozen, but you weren’t coming in.”


The kid showed a knack for the game. By 13, he was attending a hockey camp run by Roger Neilson. Then in his mid-40s, Neilson was already an NHL head coach, on his way to a Hall of Fame career. By 16, Eakins was a camp counselor for Neilson, breaking down NHL game film.

As Eakins yo-yoed between the minors and NHL, his relationship with Neilson morphed from a boy being mentored by a man to professional kinship to adult friendship. They talked by phone during the season and later shared annual golf vacations in Maui.

“Basically,” says Eakins, who skated briefly for Neilson with the Florida Panthers, “he was my second father.”

Eakins lasted 16 years professionally because he loved the game, studied the game and did not cut corners. In junior hockey, he lapped teammates in two-mile fitness runs. In the NHL, he made like Lance Armstrong in cycling fitness tests.


“Dallas’ ability to run and ride the bike are legendary to this day,” says Kris King, a juniors and NHL teammate of Eakins’. “He was by far the best conditioned athlete. He wasn’t the most talented, but he was definitely the hardest worker. He was one of those guys who probably had to do that to make the teams he played on.”

King thinks Eakins’ leadership skills, in some ways, kept him in the minors.

“He was more valuable playing in the American (Hockey) League, teaching the next prospects on the ice than being a sixth or seventh defenseman on an NHL club,” says King.

King’s assessment is relayed to Eakins. He pauses for a moment, then admits, “That could be right.”


The first time Carol Eakins saw her son play an NHL game in person, security escorted her out of the arena.

Eakins was a 26-year-old rookie with the Winnipeg Jets in 1993. The ninth game of his NHL career landed 90 minutes from his Peterborough home, against the team he cheered for as a kid, Toronto. His line that night: 0 goals, 0 assists, 10 penalty minutes for fighting.

“Where’s mom?” Eakins asked his step-father outside the locker room after the game.

“Oh,” said Jim Eakins, “she got kicked out after your fight.”


Eakins tussled with Toronto tough guy Wendel Clark and during the sparring Carol exchanged pleasantries with Maple Leafs fans.

“The fans, they’re on me, I’m the enemy and she wasn’t going to take it,” says Eakins. “I guess it looked like it was going to escalate.”

Security removed Carol but later allowed her back in to visit her son.

Less than three years later, on Nov. 15, 1998, Eakins buried his mother. Carol Eakins was 51. She died of kidney cancer.


“Mom was one of those ladies who would never go to the doctor,” says Eakins. “She checked herself into ER one day and she was infested with cancer. Months later, she’s gone.”

Eakins says his step-father spiritually died the same day.

“It was like he unzipped his body and somebody else stepped out,” Eakins told the Toronto Star.

His step-father became distant, then incommunicative.


“He turned his back on me and my sister,” says Eakins. “I know I did everything possible to bring him back into the fold, to look the other way on a lot of issues. Then I got to a place where I knew he wasn’t coming back.”

Neilson counseled Eakins.

“There’s got to be a way,” Neilson said.

The estrangement stretched nearly a decade.


“I gave him his space,” says Eakins, “but still reached out once in a while.”

When Jim Eakins’ mother died, Dallas attended the funeral. Not wanting to create a scene, he kept his distance. He saw his step-father in the parking lot.

“He stared at me,” Eakins says. “It was like he wanted me to know he saw me. And then he just turned away.”

In September 2008, Jim Eakins committed suicide, using the same rifle Dallas’ mother once used to kill snakes.


“It always killed me that I couldn’t get through to him,” Eakins says. “It makes the pain that much worse. It still haunts me to this day.”

He chooses to remember his step-father as the man who loved him, who laid ice in his grandparents’ back yard so Dallas could skate and shoot pucks before school and into the night. The man who did not push and hammer and prod his son, but instead always encouraged him.

“I remember the good,” he says. “I don’t remember the lunacy that happened.”

On the subject of recovering from his parents’ tragic deaths, he says, “You can do this one way or the other. You can keep looking back, feel sorry for yourself, have it affect you. Or, do your parents a proud moment. Always remember them with a smile on your face, but get going, get going. It’s never what I did yesterday. What am I doing right now and what’s coming tomorrow.”


Touching on the subject again later, Eakins turns blunt and says, “What’s your alternative?”

April 6 2002: 24-year-old Jarome Iginla scores his 49th goal of the season in Calgary’s 3-1 loss to Nashville. Iginla will win the NHL scoring title. His 35-year-old teammate, Dallas Eakins, skates 9 minutes, 39 seconds, does not score and serves two minutes for roughing.

Eakins doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s his curtain call, his final NHL game.

He plays two more full seasons in the American Hockey League, then accepts the inevitable. The fast-twitch muscles aren’t twitching as fast. He’s fading. Undefeated Father Time’s alarm clock is ringing.


“I knew I was never, ever going to be considered to play in the NHL again,” he says. “It wasn’t a bitter thing. I could have played in the minors a few more years, but it was never my goal to be a minor league player, even though that’s what I ended up being most of my career. I was done.”

He separated himself from the game for a year, moved to Los Angeles, managed some income properties, then moved to Toronto to be close to his wife’s family.

Restless, he was reading the newspaper one day, saw that the Maple Leafs not only were moving their AHL affiliate from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Toronto, but had fired the entire staff.

Until then, Eakins insists he never thought about coaching.


“I know something about hockey,” he told himself. “I have no coaching experience, but I played 16 years. I think I know the game. I had good relations with players.”

He phoned Maple Leafs General Manager John Ferguson and within days was hired as a Toronto Marlies assistant coach. If Eakins’ playing career proved circuitous and arduous, his coaching ascension measures comparatively meteoric.

He spent eight seasons in the Maples Leafs’ organization: one as a Marlies assistant, two as a Leafs assistant, one in the Leafs’ front office, then the next four years as the Marlies’ head coach. After compiling a 157-114-4 record with the AHL team, on June 10, 2013, Eakins was appointed the Edmonton Oilers’ head coach at the age of 46.

The bromide is that coaches are hired to get fired, and Eakins’ dismissal with the Oilers arrived swiftly. Following Edmonton’s 7-19-5 start last season, general manager Craig McTavish fired Eakins after less than 1½ seasons. His Edmonton record: 36-63-14


Asked if he was given a fair shot with a young team and struggling franchise, Eakins waits before answering, then says, “I don’t know what a fair shot means.”

Offers his friend, Cowie, the NHL scout, “I know it hurt him.”

Then again it was Edmonton. The franchise Wayne Gretzky made famous is now the NHL’s poster child for ineptitude. The Oilers’ streak of missing the playoffs stretches to nine seasons, the second longest slump in the NHL, one shy of the Florida Panthers.

Current Edmonton head coach Todd McLellan is the team’s sixth head coach in seven seasons.


Standing above the fray (and not wanting to impact any future chances of coaching another NHL team), Eakins is not critical of Edmonton, and, in fact, raves about McTavish.

“Time ran out on the coach,” he says. “That’s the deal you sign up for as coach.”

Mark Fraser played for Eakins with the Marlies and Oilers. He describes Eakins as a “stern coach, yet a player’s coach at the same time.”

He remembers Eakins pushing players, one time standing in the locker room, pointing at individuals and saying, “I see more from you! More from you! And more from you!”


After never knowing his biological father but being blessed with father figures, Eakins longs to influence players on and off the ice.

“He wants to raise good young men, good husbands, good fathers,” says Fraser. “He wants to hear stories of older women crossing the street with groceries and one of his players stopping to help the little lady across the street.

“He was trying to teach us something beyond the game. Every coach feels or shares the same thing, but he was the first one to articulate it to me.”

Eakins tested the Marlies one preseason, offering to treat players to a steak dinner if they abstained from alcohol for one month. A red wine connoisseur, Eakins is hardly a teetotaler, but thought the challenge would measure the players’ discipline and help them physically.


“I will do 100 days,” he told his testosterone-oozing players.

Recalls Eakins, “I love red wine. It’s all I drink. After about Day 45, one of the jackasses puts a fine bottle of Pinot Noir on my desk. They wanted to test the coach.”

Eakins savored the Pinot, after abstaining 100 days.

Eakins joins his wife, actress Ingrid Kavelaars, and their two daughters, Emerson, 7, and Cameron, 4, for a Gulls public appearance. The September gig is billed as a downtown block party and Eakins, scheduled to speak to the audience, is nervous.


“It’d be a little embarrassing if only 15 people showed up,” he says.

Instead, an estimated 1,300 celebrated the Gulls’ return. More than 3,000 season tickets have been sold. The Gulls’ history dates back to the 1960s, and Eakins senses that a city with sand between its toes is hot for hockey.

“There’s something going on here that could turn out to be a whole lot of fun,” he says.

Scotty Bowman coached 2,494 games for five franchises, winning a record nine Stanley Cup titles. He was also fired four times. Bill Belichick failed miserably with the Browns before turning genius, leading the Patriots to four Super Bowl crowns.


Fired once, Eakins no doubt longs for the NHL but says with a straight face and conviction in his voice, “Being 100 percent honest, that’s the last thing on my mind.”

He talks about preparing his staff, developing players and, “How can I really help hockey be reignited with an even higher profile in San Diego?”

Sulking and self-pity is not his style. He accepts life’s cross checks, repairs the wounds, wearing the scars proudly. He prefers aggression on the ice, pushing the puck, challenging it defensively. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Do not look back.

Before polishing off his Eggs Benedict and driving to a speaking engagement at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Eakins says, “If I do a good job, somewhere down the road someone’s going to come knocking.”


It reminds him of a lesson the most influential woman in his life passed along.

Says Eakins, “My mom always said, ‘If you take care of your pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves.’ ”