Before graduating from Salisbury School on June 4, Dean Bauchiero just wants to spend the last few days of his senior spring soaking in the early summer sun with his friends.
Coming off a year filled with hopeful ups and disappointing downs, it’s hard to blame him.
As was the case for most prep school hockey players in the Northeast this season, 2020-21 was far from normal for Bauchiero, a native of Southington, Conn.
After Salisbury won the 2020 Stuart/Corkery Elite 8 championship over Dexter Southfield last March — days before the coronavirus touched down and took the U.S. by storm — it was anyone’s guess what the status of the upcoming prep season would be.
“Uncertainty was the main thing,” said Bauchiero, a 6-foot-4, 216-pound forward and Brown University commit. “Right from the end of summer when we were still talking about what was going to happen, it was just ups and downs, thinking we were going to able to do one thing and then when the time came, we wouldn’t be able to.
“Most of the fall was pretty much just not knowing what was going to happen. All of the guys on the team here, we had no clue. We didn’t know if we were going to have a season for prep. We didn’t know if we were going to play games at all.”
While the team was present on campus in the fall, it wasn’t able to travel for games early on. If it did, a two-week quarantine would be waiting on the other side. As restrictions began to loosen in late November, the team managed to play a few games against fellow Connecticut prep schools like Canterbury and Avon Old Farms, but that was really it.
Aside from those scrimmages and working out at the campus facilities, not much came out of Salisbury in the fall. When the team went home for winter break, several players — including Bauchiero, Sam Deckhut, Ryan Walsh, Liam Lesakowski and a handful more — went back to playing with their split-season team, Rochester Coalition.
With the prep season passing them by, ROCO head coach Kyle Quick and Salisbury’s Andrew Will realized that something had to be done to salvage the players’ 2020-21 season. They needed something to play for, and the last chance to do that was at the USA Hockey 18-U National Championships in late April and early May.
In order to compete for a national title, however, the Rochester, N.Y.-based program had to qualify first. Still unable to play games in New York and on most of the East Coast, the coaches worked together to create a schedule of games to be played in states that weren’t under such heavy restrictions, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
From that point on, Bauchiero and the rest of his Coalition teammates — previously stuck in limbo between their fall and prep team — decided it was time to put all of their attention towards ROCO’s spring campaign. By the end of their makeshift schedule, they had enough games to qualify for the national tournament and were ranked No. 3 in the country, but still had to win states to get a bid, as the New York tournament was taking place after the at-large call.
In essence, if they lost at states, the third-seeded 18-U team in the country would be done. So, they packed their bags and headed to Buffalo for seven weeks of preparation, practicing four to five days per week and setting up games whenever they could.
The group spent its two-month stay billeting at houses in and around the Buffalo and Rochester area. Bauchiero, along with Salisbury forward Sam Deckhut (St. Lawrence commit) and Gunnery defensemen Eric Charpentier, stayed at Quick’s house.
“That’s pretty much when we all decided, ‘All right, yeah, we’re going to be more of a full-season team,’" Bauchiero said. “We’ve got to start doing more instead of just being a split-season team playing on weekends here and there, doing mostly individual stuff."
Once the state tournament finally rolled around, ROCO ran through the first three rounds to appear in the title game. On the other side of the ice in the do-or-die championship affair was Nichols, the Buffalo-based prep school that the Coalition already had played three times in their spring campaign.
With a bid to nationals on the line, trailing 3-2 late, Lesakowski scored mid-way through the third to it push it into overtime. Neither team could find the winner in the extra period, so it took a shootout to decide the state champ.
Eventually, after the final stop of the shootout from Salisbury goaltender Austin McNicholas, the Coalition came out on top, 4-3, clinching their spot in the national tournament.
“That was a crazy, long weekend,” Bauchiero said. “That was our first time playing all 20-minute periods in a while, so we went through our bumps and bruises with guys getting tired here and there, but we felt good.”
With a trip to nationals secured in such high-stakes fashion, ROCO rolled into Maryland Heights, Mo., as a different team — one with a chip on its shoulder.
“We felt a lot more confident going into nationals, especially since it wasn’t a breeze going through states,” Bauchiero said. “When we got there if you looked at us as a team and compared to when we first got up to Buffalo, we were two completely different teams. We had systems in place, we had guys filling roles.”
One of those roles was filled by Bauchiero, the 19-year-old Brown commit who served as the team’s captain.
“Once we won states, you could see a flip in the switch,” Quick said. “Dean, he was our captain, and Deckhut and Ty Broad , those guys were the leaders. You could see whenever Dean would say something these kids would just listen. And it was nice to see that because I don’t think he was as outgoing at Salisbury this year, but I think he developed a lot as a leader in terms of, you know, ‘Hey guys, if Kyle says this, he’s not trying to hurt us, he’s trying to help us,’ and I think the kids bought in from his message.”
“It was great,” Bauchiero said of holding the captaincy. “Between Kyle and I, we both knew we needed someone to fill that role. We had a lot of roles on the team this year, and that was one of them that I was able to fill.”
At nationals, the team built off its impressive showing at states and ran through the early goings of the Tier 1 tournament, outscoring its opponents 25-8 in the first five games before downing North Jersey Avalanche, 4-2, in the title game. Throughout the entire tournament, ROCO trailed for just four minutes of the six games it played.
“That’s pretty impressive,” Quick said, “and again, that’s due to the hard work and the kids actually buying into the systems. They understood what the other team was doing, and it really hurt the other teams because we were just dominant physically down low.”
Apart from Bauchiero’s emergence as the leader and the team’s drive to compete for something meaningful as the pandemic wore on, the captain pointed to Quick’s voice behind the bench as a key factor behind ROCO’s championship push — treating the trip similar to a college hockey setting.
“That was the first time for me to have a younger coach, and it was great to get a connection with him,” Bauchiero said. “We’re great friends now. He’s helped me so much with so many different things. And it’s also just a lot easier for all the guys to get comfortable with him, and close with him, which then reflected on the ice. We were able to do a lot more and we could put our trust in him that what he was telling us to do what’s the right thing.”
Quick, 30, played two seasons at Salisbury from 2006-08 before playing one season in the NAHL and another at the prep level with Avon Old Farms in 2009-10.
After a season in the USHL, he went to Brown for four years of NCAA play. As a senior, however, a hit-from-behind at practice on Thanksgiving Day ended his playing career.
Seven years later, returning to the same city that he won an NAHL title in as an 18-year-old, being a part of a national championship was special for him, too.
“I think a lot of these kids look for advice,” Quick said. “I kind of look at it as me giving the advice that I would have wanted back then if I could go back and do it again, versus the advice of some people who are in it for money and all that. For me, it’s more about giving back from what the game gave to me, so I really enjoy it.”
It might not have been a normal season, but that didn’t stop the Coalition from making the most of it.
“The message in the room was always, ‘We’ve got nothing to play for in prep school, this is all we have,’" Quick said. “That was the motto.”
And while a true prep season never came to fruition at Salisbury, the cast of players that skated with ROCO made it their mission to turn a forgettable season into a memorable one.
For Bauchiero, it was a special way to end his prep school career in a year that, at one point, seemed all but lost.
“Being able to do that with a bunch of Salisbury guys,” he said, "especially a lot of first-year Salisbury guys, that just made it really great.”
Liam Flaherty can be reached at liam.flaherty@hockeyjournal.com and on Twitter @_LiamFlaherty.
