Brendan Flanagan can’t remember when he started playing ice hockey.

He does remember giving high-fives to the St. Lawrence University hockey players his dad coached in the family’s hometown of Canton, New York.

Now Brendan plays left wing for Syracuse’s men’s club team and Paul Flanagan is the women’s Division I coach. Their shared love for hockey is a large part of their relationship, but they also have a connection that transcends beyond the walls of the hockey rink. Brendan not only looks up to his father as a role model, but as a hero who literally saved his life.

After gym class one day when Brendan was 10, another child shoved him in the locker room. The force pushed his head into a locker and the left side of his abdomen into the corner of a bench. Brendan was feeling “out of it,” and he was dragged to the school nurse.

He was given an ice pack and sent home with his dad, but after bringing him home, Paul felt that something wasn’t right.

“I threw up on the way out from the school, and he said I looked pale, I looked green,” Brendan said. “And he said something told him that something wasn’t right. He called it divine intervention that something told him that something’s not right.”

Paul took him to the hospital in Potsdam, New York. A CAT scan showed that Brendan’s spleen had ruptured and that he was bleeding internally. His veins had collapsed significantly, and after struggling to insert IV needles, the hospital workers successfully performed surgery, Brendan said.

They told him that if two to five more minutes passed, he may have died.

It was an experience that deepened their connection that’s kept them close, partly through their passion for hockey. The conversations they have about the sport bring them together, Paul said, and often lead to discussions that aren’t related to the sport.

They enjoy watching NHL games together, not in support of any particular team but simply for admiration for the game.

Even though he was exposed to the sport largely due to his father’s role as an assistant coach in the St. Lawrence men’s program and a head coach for both the SLU and SU women’s teams, he said he never felt pressure from his father to play hockey.

“I think they have a very good relationship and being around hockey, youth hockey and college hockey as much as I have been the one thing I think is really nice is that my husband has never pushed the hockey on Brendan,” said Sharon Flanagan, Brendan’s mother and Paul’s wife. “It was all something Brendan just loved for his own sake, it was his thing that he liked.”

Brendan also played football and lacrosse at Jamesville-DeWitt High School in DeWitt, New York. He tried out for the SU lacrosse team as a walk-on during his freshman year, but didn’t make the team.

Instead, he became involved with the hockey team in a matter of days.

“I think everything happens for a reason,” Brendan said. “The guys I met on the hockey team are the greatest guys I’ve ever met and they’re all my best friends, so no regrets or anything.”

His experiences with the team have been largely successful so far. Last year the team won the regular season championship of the Northeast Collegiate Hockey League, earning a spot in the American Collegiate Hockey Association Division I National Championship tournament for the first time.

“He definitely lays it all on the line I think for the team. That’s definitely his best attribute,” said junior forward and assistant captain JR LaPointe. “He’s not afraid to block a shot. He always plays through injuries … He’ll do anything for the team in order for us to win and we certainly all feed off that I think everyday.”

Brendan enjoys playing for the team and with the people that have become his close friends. Paul just enjoys watching.

“You can’t put a price tag on the friendships he’s made, the camaraderie that he enjoys,” Paul said. “From practice to practice, from game to game when they go on the road.”

Published on November 5, 2014 at 12:12 am

Contact Kevin: kjpacell@syr.edu