'We have to get that hunger back': Gary Graham introduced – again – as Ice Flyers head coach

Pensacola Ice Flyers head coach Gary Graham was reflecting on his time in Fort Wayne during the introductory press conference announcing Graham as the Ice Flyers’ new head coach on Thursday.

Fort Wayne, a team in the ECHL, is a program with high standards. The Komets lead the league in attendance with 10,000-11,000 fans at a game on any given night. “And the pressure to win is like no other,” Graham added.

After winning the Southern Professional Hockey League championship in 2013 with the Ice Flyers, Graham was quickly hired by the Komets to become their head coach that next season.

“I remember my first year, thinking I’m still young, star coach coming up – I just won my first championship. I’m having a slow start at Fort Wayne, and my wife at that time is getting heckled in the stands as we lose,” Graham said. “I go to my office and I hear fans going, ‘Graham, go back to Pensacola.’ It was tough that first year.”

Long story short, the Komets started winning in the second half of the season and eventually became the eighth seed for the Eastern Conference in the 2014 Kelly Cup playoffs. Then Fort Wayne did something that had never been done before in ECHL history: beat the No. 1 seed – then the Reading Royals, who were the defending champions. Fort Wayne fell in the conference semifinals to Cincinnati.

The Komets made the playoffs for the next five seasons that Graham was the head coach, ultimately never winning a championship trophy.

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Fans may have been yelling for Graham to return to Pensacola. And 10 years later – with a few different stops along the way – Graham, on his own terms, has made his way back to Northwest Florida.

“It’s been very exciting watching the team from afar, as I pursued my own goals elsewhere. But now it’s kind of funny how things come full circle,” Graham said. “I think it’s going to be an exciting season. We have a lot of returning players, which is very exciting for me. We have a lot of guys that are hungry to come back, that are motivated. Guys that necessarily aren’t happy with the way the season went last year, so they’re coming in with a chip on their shoulder.”

It also took 10 years for Graham to see the 2013 championship banner hung up in the Pensacola Bay Center. He said it was an “exciting” moment not just to see the banner that his team won, but the other three banners from 2014, 2016 and 2021 hung up next to it.

Plus, he said he’s impressed by all of the improvements the Bay Center has, including a new jumbotron and other digital screens, plus the upgrades to the Ice Flyers’ front office staff – which went from a two-person team to a “great, young, motivated team of people.”

After watching games online for the last 10 years, Graham said he’s looking forward to seeing the game atmosphere in person.

“When I watch the games live on TV, it’s hard to tell that stuff. I like the wiener dog race – that’s the one thing I like. … I’m a dog guy, so I love that,” Graham said with a smile. “I always call (team owner) Greg (Harris), he’s like merchandising ninja of the SPHL. We have more jerseys, more colors – I mean, it’s like the Sherwin-Williams of colors in my locker room. … He knows that that’s important. It’s the atmosphere, it’s what you’re putting on the ice.”

The last 10 years

Quickly after winning the SPHL championship in 2013, Graham received a call from Fort Wayne. Before his one-year stint in Pensacola, Graham was an assistant coach with the Komets – who were then in the Central Hockey League and the International Hockey League.

Fort Wayne, during that season which was its first in the ECHL, missed the postseason. But the owners, the Franke family, needed to “know the league” a little better after the year. So, the family hired Graham to scout the Reading Royals-Florida Everblades playoff series, creating player personnel files.

While scouting, Graham met with Everblades owner Craig Bush – a close friend of the Franke family – who started asking him questions “almost as if (Bush) was interviewing for his job,” Graham said.

“I was answering all the questions: tactics, strategies, all that,” Graham said. “When I left there, I was like, ‘Well, that was really weird.’ I really didn’t understand why that was going on.”

Graham then went to Cincinnati to continuing scouting for Fort Wayne.

“I went and did that one, and I sent all the files. I guess I did a good enough job with all that stuff where the Frankes then told me Al Sims was retiring and they wanted to interview me for the head coaching job,” Graham said. “That’s how it all started happening pretty quickly.”

It was a dream situation for the Fort Wayne, Indiana, native: coaching his hometown team. “That was probably the only reason I left Pensacola, because I had so much fun here the first time,” Graham said.

Graham posted a 251-130-51 overall record with the Komets before moving on to coach in China during the 2019-20 season, followed by a couple seasons in the junior hockey system and a partial season in England in 2022-23.

But when he found out Rod Aldoff was resigning from the Ice Flyers, he called team owner Greg Harris almost immediately.

“I didn’t know what I was doing yet. My agent had some deals overseas in some countries that, frankly, I didn’t feel like living in. I was just like, ‘Let’s go back to where it started for me,’” Graham said. “I know Greg, he knows me. He’s going to let me do my thing. He’s going to trust in my decisions. … It’s so important, when you have that synergy with your owner, where he knows you and you know him.”

Graham, who remains close friends with Aldoff, said he understands why Aldoff resigned. Aldoff previously said he wanted to spend more time with his family. His son is entering high school, and Aldoff is hoping to help out his son’s high school hockey team.

Graham was fortunate enough during COVID, when he was coaching in China, that there wasn’t a hockey season – so Graham got to be around his son that season.

“As coaches, we miss our boys’ hockey seasons every year. I’ve never seen my son play. I watch him online, but you miss your son growing up pretty much in the wintertime. You’re around during the summertime. But Rod’s been missing that,” Graham said. “Sometimes, these boys, they need their dad around. … I think he felt it was time.”

A different league

In the 10 years that Graham has been gone, he noted that the SPHL not only has different teams, but the quality of play and the quality of players is “a lot better.” He spent a lot of the offseason watching film on different players, he said.

But until Graham sees certain players and teams on the ice, “you don’t get a feel for anything.” Once he sees certain players on the ice through the early stages of the 2023-24 season, that’s when he can start understanding certain calibers of other players.

“The first third of the season, I always tell my guys it’s more of a player assessment side. It’s really where I’m looking to see what guys I want to go into the second half of the season with,” Graham said. “Are they buying into the culture? Are they doing the little things? Are they putting the extra work in? Do they fit the way that I want to play systematically?”

A lot of time in the offseason has also been spent networking with coaches and agents. Graham has already built good relationships with certain agents, but is now trying to get back to certain college coaches – a lot of which have changed in the last decade.

Graham said he met several coaches in Minnesota while at one of his son’s hockey tournaments. His son, Connor, plays for the North Iowa Bulls out of the North American Hockey League, where he’s a goalie.

While in the ECHL, Graham mentioned he was talking to a lot of coaches from higher level Division I programs. With the SPHL, he’s going to be targeting a lot of smaller Division I programs and Division III schools.

There’s no Division II college hockey.

“Rod’s been great at helping with that. He’s been sending me a lot of contacts and setting the table,” Graham said. “A lot of exchanging of business cards and networking and saying, ‘Listen, I was sending Rod guys, now I’m going to send you guys.’ And I said, ‘That’s music to my ears. Here’s my card.’”

On the ice

Graham is looking for the Ice Flyers to be “more of a puck-possession team” compared to last season, while also being a faster and more physical organization. He said the power play “was exciting” last season for Pensacola, but didn’t like what the Ice Flyers did at even strength.

“Look for us to be more of a puck-possession team. That’s really what my teams are known for,” Graham said. “When you possess the puck more, you’re going to draw more power plays, you’re going to dictate momentum, you’re going to dictate the terms of how the game’s played more.”

Graham also mentioned a more “up-tempo” style of play, which means players will need to be in top form conditioning-wise.

“We’ve been talking to them about that this summer, so we’ll see what kind of shape they’re in,” Graham said.

The Ice Flyers return a lot of players, including captain Garrett Milan, who finished second in the SPHL with 69 points (26 goals, 43 assists) last season.

“He’s got a chip on his shoulder,” Grarham said. “He really wants to lead this group this year.”

Pensacola also returns goaltender Brad Arvanitis, who finished the season with a .919 save percentage and a 2.71 goals-against average in 20 games. Graham noted that Arvanitis “really settled things down” midway through the season, when the Ice Flyers were one of the best scoring teams in the league, but sat sixth in the standings. “Those numbers don’t usually work that way,” Graham added.

Arvanitis is currently on a professional tryout contract with the New York Rangers, and is at the team’s ECHL affiliate in Maine.

“But we signed him first during the summer, so not only is he a protected player, but also own his rights,” Graham said. “If he does not make an ECHL team, we would expect to see him unless he gets picked up.”

As training camp gears up to start on Oct. 11, the Ice Flyers will have 12 forwards, eight defensemen and three goaltenders in attendance. Plus, there are eight players currently in ECHL camps.

Graham also highlighted defenseman Cooper Jones, who is no stranger to the SPHL. He’s seen time with Knoxville, Evansville and Macon. Most recently, Jones was on loan to three different teams in the ECHL before spending 2022-23 in France.

Graham noted that Jones reminds him of Steve Bergin, another shorter defenseman who was with the Ice Flyers during Graham’s first go-around. Jones stands at just 5-foot-8.

“He can amplify offensively as well, and jump up into the rush, which is a big thing with our system – getting the (defense) involved offensively. We look to get our (defense) more involved, this year, offensively,” Graham said. “Cooper really fits well into the way that I like to teach the game from the backend.”

Season starting soon

With training camp starting soon, players will have three practices before an exhibition game on Oct. 13 against Birmingham – just one of a few exhibition games throughout the entire SPHL. The regular season begins on Oct. 21, also against Birmingham, at the Bay Center.

“One thing I can tell you, is how excited the guys are,” Graham said. “They understand the culture and what we expect here. Last year, we fell short on that. We’re looking forward to raising the bar and trying to set our standards a lot higher. ...

"We have to get that hunger back. We were the hunted for a long time here. When you win three championships, every team is building their team during the summer focused on beating Pensacola. We have to get back to that mentality where we have to be the one’s that (are) hunting," Graham continued. "I think that’s the one thing with the leadership group that we’ve got to make sure that we do, is really get that hunger back in us. I look forward to seeing how they respond to that."

Ben Grieco is a sports reporter for the Pensacola News Journal. He can be reached on X (@BenGriecoSports) and via email at BGrieco@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola Ice Flyers bring back Gary Graham as head coach