Couch: Inside Adam and Kristin Nightingale's wild ride back to East Lansing to lead Michigan State hockey

EAST LANSING – Oh to be a fly on the wall in 2008 when Adam Nightingale told his wife Kristin that he wanted to leave his six-figure job as a construction superintendent, say goodbye to their new home in Charlotte, North Carolina, pack up their 5-month-old son and take a job coaching hockey at a boarding school in Minnesota for $16,000 a year. No worries, dear, it comes with housing. We’ll live on campus.

“I was like, ‘HUH!?’ ” Kristin said.

If the conversation had gone differently from there, Adam Nightingale probably wouldn’t be Michigan State’s hockey coach today.

Fortunately for him, Kristin has been all in from the beginning. Not all in on hockey. But all in on him and their life together.

“Well, yeah, if that's what you want to do, then let's do it,” she told him.

Fourteen years later, Adam has a corner office in a newly renovated arena on the campus where they first met. His family is settled into their home in DeWitt. Kristin’s parents have moved nearby, finally able to trust that their daughter and grandchildren might be in one place long enough to make it worth following them.

Adam is just beginning his first season as MSU’s head coach, thrilled with the staff he was able to recruit, operating out of a significantly upgraded Munn Ice Arena, parts of which are unrecognizable from his own playing days in the early 2000s.

This is a heckuva hockey job and landing spot for the Nightingales. But to call this the dream would be to cheapen the journey. The dream, Adam realized at that famed boarding school in Minnesota, was to coach hockey — it didn’t really matter the level — and to make enough of a living doing it to support their family, which, since 2008, has grown to five, including children Trevor, 15, Emmerson, 12, and Keeton, 10.

Adam spent the past six years working and coaching in the NHL (for the Buffalo Sabres and Detroit Red Wings) and then coaching the U.S. National Team Development Program in Plymouth, Michigan. But it’s his two stints at Shattuck-St. Mary’s — an Episcopal prep school and hockey factory in Faribault, Minnesota — that were the most formative in his coaching career.

That’s where he made coaching mistakes that he won’t make again. And learned to believe in players more than they sometimes believe in themselves. It's where, during his first two years there, he also coached lacrosse, supervised a dorm and taught economics. And when he returned in 2014 (at a livable wage with a more high-profile coaching gig within the school), he spearheaded the renovation of an old building into a hotel, The Inn at Shattuck-St. Mary’s. “It’s actually really cool,” he said.

About the only thing Adam didn’t do was stock shelves overnight at a local grocery store. But he did try once. Money was tight and Kristin was pregnant with Emmerson, so ...

“I went down and applied. Kristin didn’t know,” Adam said. “I actually got a call back that they decided to go in another direction.”

Soon after his rejection, his old coach at MSU, Rick Comley, called with an offer to be MSU’s director of hockey operations and video coordinator, a job Adam held from 2010 to 2014, through a coaching change, from Comley to Tom Anastos.

But Adam missed actually coaching. And so, when he was offered the job leading Shattuck-St. Mary’s bantam (under-14) AAA team, he and Kristin — and now Trevor, Emmerson and Keeton — returned to Minnesota, thinking they were in it for the long haul. They liked it there. They enjoyed the community. They had good friends, including a couple from their church that drove 10 hours with five kids to watch Adam’s first game as MSU’s head coach two weeks ago.

Adam had learned a lot coaching Shattuck St. Mary’s fourth midget team during his initial years there. That was not considered a plum assignment by the standards of a place that’s produced dozens of NHL players, including stars Sydney Crosby and Jonathan Toews.

“No one wanted to play on that team,” Adam said of the fourth midget team. “It's like people were mad. ‘This is the worst thing.’ And off that first team that I coached, we had 12 guys get (college) scholarships and two guys were NHL draft picks.

“I do believe that players are capable of more than coaches give them credit for. And I think our job is to give them a vision of how we want to play the game. And their job is to get to that level.”

After four years arranging travel and living in the video room at MSU, Adam was so excited to be on the ice coaching again, he skipped some important steps when he first took the reins of his new bantam team.

“I got too much into the hockey stuff early and glossed over the person side of it,” he said. “And I remember getting to the end of that year (in 2014-15) — and we'd only lost like six or seven games, we’re in the national tournament — and I was like, 'We're not a team. I'm never going to let this happen again.’ And so that next year, I really laid my foundation for how I think the game should be played, for one, but also prioritizing what really matters when you're building a team.”

That next year they won a national championship. Then the Buffalo Sabres called.

“We went back to Minnesota the second time saying, ‘You know what, let’s be settled,’ Kristin said. “ ‘We’re going to stay here. It’s a great place to raise kids, yada yada.’ And Adam was content with his team. And then the Buffalo Sabres thing comes up and it’s like, ‘Whoa-K.’ ”

Another adventure instead.

From preps to the pros

Adam had plenty of connections in Buffalo, which simultaneously added Shattuck-St. Mary’s legendary coach Tom Ward to its staff. Ward is one of Adam’s greatest influences in coaching and had hired him twice in Minnesota. Adam’s older brother, Jason, was already there, too — and still is as the assistant director of amateur scouting.

There, as a video coach, Adam was head coach Dan Bylsma’s “right-hand man.”

“We watched every game back together,” Adam said.

Bylsma, best known for his time coaching the Pittsburgh Penguins, was let go after the season and Adam took a job with the Red Wings, where he had a similar role for two years with head coach Jeff Blashill, before Adam was promoted to assistant coach for his third season in Detroit.

Everywhere he went, it was still his experiences at Shattuck-St. Mary’s that helped him connect with players.

“I didn’t make it bigger than it was,” Adam said of speaking to NHL players. “Like, they’re just normal people. And they happen to be good at hockey, and they want to be coached and you spend time with them and help them. I think in the NHL, though, you’ve got about two weeks to show that you can help them. And if you can’t, they’ll just move on.”

Adam wanted to be a head coach again, and the U.S. National Team Development Program gave him that opportunity in 2020.

Two years later, he was in Germany coaching Team USA in the under-18 World Championships when he got the call from Alan Haller. The MSU job was his.

Fixing all that ails the Spartans

At MSU, Adam Nightingale knew he was taking over a program with a fan base that had lost faith, a fractured hockey alumni and a program that had been for down so long that none of the players they’d be recruiting would remember MSU as the hockey school it once was.

Teenagers might not remember, but coaches in the business do. That helped him in luring associate head coach Jared DeMichiel away from UMass and plucking assistant coach Mike Towns from Clarkson, both of whom had been key cogs in successful rebuilds at their previous stops.

“They've been in this position and I thought that was really important,” Nightingale said. “I certainly don't have all the answers and I need people around me that have that experience of going through it.”

DeMichiel’s experience coaching goalies also allowed Nightingale to bring back former MSU captain Brad Fast as director of player development, since he didn’t need a separate goalies coach.

“I wanted a guy to really watch our players from the individual development side, and make sure we stay disciplined and have a plan for each guy,” Nightingale said. “All coaching staffs at the end of the year will put together a plan for the most part. Whereas (Fast) can do it in real time and see exactly where guys are at.”

Nightingale brought strength and conditioning coach Will Morlock over from the U.S. National Team Development Program. The group Morlock trained over the summer included a number of NHL pros, one of whom moved his girlfriend and dog from Winnipeg to work with Morlock.

To recruit the top players, you have to be seen as a place that can develop them.

“I see it when teams are making a decision in the draft. Some (schools) their kid might go a little higher because (the teams) know (that school) is going to do a good job,” Nightingale said. “We've got to do a good job and make sure on a daily basis we're teaching and helping guys grow, not just on the ice, but in the weight room. … When they're trying to send a prospect (somewhere) and they want him to develop, if they're going to send a guy the college route, a lot of times it's because they need to add strength. That's a huge piece.”

Part of building the program, as Nightingale sees it, is also healing an MSU hockey alumni base that hasn’t been fully engaged or united in recent times, separated somewhat by eras — Ron Mason and Comley mostly. Nightingale, perhaps, fits this task as well as anyone could. As a player, he took a recruiting visit to MSU when Mason was still coaching, transferred to MSU at the beginning of the Comley era, then later worked under Anastos.

“I feel like I do have a pretty good feel of kind of where the program's been,” Nightingale said.

Among the early successes: Justin Abdelkader picking up the whole tab for everyone at the alumni golf outing in August and the 2007 MSU NCAA championship team buying a suite at Munn for this season that can be used by any former player or group of players.

Nightingale is also careful to give both Anastos and former coach Danton Cole, fired in April, plenty of credit for the transformation of Munn Arena.

“Now our job is to get it done (on the ice),” Nightingale said.

MORE: Couch: Adam Nightingale explains how he plans to resurrect Michigan State's hockey program

'It's pretty cool that she's the way she is'

Adam Nightingale’s first-floor office at Munn Arena presses right against the sidewalk, so close that people sometimes peer in his windows while he’s working. Students have used the patio outside his office, mistaking it for a open workspace.

“As long as they come to the games,” he quipped.

He’s a bigger deal on campus now than he ever was as player from 2003 to 2005, after he transferred in from Lake Superior State. To Kristin, he wasn’t a big deal at all back then. When they met late in their time as students at MSU, Kristin had never seen Adam play hockey for the Spartans. Nor was she impressed that he did.

“I liked Adam as a person and that's what mattered,” she said. “He’s good guy. As good as they come. And funny. So I was sold, I guess.”

Both of them are Michiganders. Adam from Cheboygan, Kristin from Wayne. Adam described his parents, still both in good health, as “super excited” for him. When Kristin’s parents moved to DeWitt recently, they left the only house she’d ever known them in.

Adam is grateful his in-laws were understanding as he moved their daughter around for hockey — beginning with a brief minor league career in Greenville, South Carolina, and then Charlotte — and then to Minnesota to coach for peanuts.

“I think it would have been really easy for her or her parents to be like, ‘What are you doing moving my daughter? You're gonna to work for 16 grand!?’ ”

Instead, when Adam and Kristin first moved to Minnesota, she ate lunch every day with Trevor, then a baby, in the dining hall because it was a free meal.

Thinking about her unwavering support throughout the years was enough to leave Adam misty-eyed when he mentioned her by name last spring, shortly after landing the job at MSU.

“Even if I would have told her when I was at the national team, ‘Hey, I want to take a job down in Tupelo, Mississippi, coaching,’ she'd have said, ‘Alright, let's do it.’ ” Adam explained. “I think, too, it’s understanding that I'm gone a lot and we've got three kids and she does a great job with the kids and I just think, I never want to take it for granted. It's pretty cool that she's the way she is.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan State hockey: Inside Adam Nightingale's wild ride back to MSU