In the first 32 years of hockey at Culver Military Academy, head varsity A coach and hockey director Al Clark has built a program that has amassed 20 state championships, in addition to producing 148 college players – including 70 at the Division I level – and 22 National Hockey League draft picks. Clark’s teams enter the 2008-09 season with an all-time record of 827 wins, 330 losses and 87 ties for a winning percentage of .700.
By 1992 – when the team just completed a dominant two-season stretch with a 66-7-7 record against the best Midget AAA, Junior A and prep school competition in the country – the program had been profiled by no fewer than three of the nation’s largest media outlets. That five-month wave of publicity began with a November 22, 1991, article in “USA Today,” continued with a full-page Sunday feature in the March 8, 1992, edition of the “Chicago Tribune” and culminated with a March 23, 1992, two-page piece in “Sports Illustrated.”
Based in no small part on the talent level that drew such publications to campus, the boys team continues to be a major draw for college recruiters. The program has sent players to college teams ranging from traditional powerhouses such as the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, Colorado College, Providence College, the University of New Hampshire, Bowling Green State University, Boston College, the University of Maine and Miami (Ohio) University to academic elites like Princeton University, Yale University, Middlebury College, Williams College, Colby College and both the U.S. Military (Army) and the U.S. Air Force Academies.
Although Culver’s primary focus is to place players in the proper collegiate environment commensurate to their academic and athletic abilities, seven of the first 20 draft picks have played or are currently playing in the NHL, most notably Gary Suter ’82, who won the league’s Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year in 1986 and was a five-time all-star. In addition to Suter, 1987 graduate Kevin Dean played four years for the University of New Hampshire before winning both the American Hockey League championship with New Jersey’s farm team in Albany, N.Y., and then the Stanley Cup during the same 1995 spring with the parent-club Devils.
A standout collegiate player who won an NCAA championship with Wisconsin and was in 1994 the program’s first Olympian, Barry Richter ’89 was a second-round pick of the former Hartford Whalers. As recently as 2003, Aris Brimanis ’90 (New York Islanders, Anaheim Mighty Ducks, St. Louis Blues) and Mike Farrell ’97 (Washington Capitals, Nashville Predators) had spent time in the NHL.
In June of 2003 in Nashville, Ryan Suter (Gary’s nephew) of the United States National Team Development Program (USNTDP) became the first former Culver player to get drafted in the first round of the NHL draft, when the hometown Predators took the Madison, Wisconsin, native seventh overall. Ryan Suter played for Culver’s top team as a sophomore before joining the USNTDP.
Fellow USNTDP program participant John-Michael Liles played two years at Culver before moving on to the Under-17 and Under-18 National Teams and then Michigan State. He began the 2003-04 season with the Colorado Avalanche to become the sixth former Culver player to reach the NHL. A 2003 finalist for the Hobey Baker Award honoring college hockey’s best player, Liles ended his first professional season in 2004 by being named to the NHL All-Rookie Team. Both Liles and Suter represented the United States in the 2005 World Championships held in Austria, and Suter joined Liles in the National Hockey League in 2005-06. Liles also competed for Team USA in the 2006 Winter Olympics.
