With Omaha program he helped build in Frozen Four, it'll be old home week for Boston U. coach

OMAHA, Neb. - It was the summer of 1996, and Mike Kemp was attending a USA Hockey camp at Lake Placid when he got the call telling him he had been hired to coach the startup Nebraska-Omaha hockey program.

Kemp's first order of business was to find an assistant, and he went to one of the top figures in American hockey seeking recommendation. Two-time U.S. Olympic coach Dave Peterson pointed at David Quinn, who was standing rink-side.

"You need to talk to him," Peterson told Kemp.

A New Englander through-and-through, Quinn had never been to Nebraska and knew nothing about it. But he needed a job after he and the rest of the staff at Northeastern got fired. Omaha turned out to be a key stop in a circuitous career that two years ago led Quinn back to his alma mater, Boston University, where he succeeded Jack Parker.

If things break right next week, Quinn's Terriers would play Omaha, now coached by Dean Blais, for the national championship.

"UNO will always hold a special place in my heart," Quinn, 48, said Tuesday. "It was an incredible opportunity to be part of something from the ground up. I still have a lot of friends there, and I know a lot of former players will be coming out. But to be honest with you, when you're in this situation, you don't take a lot of time to think about those situations because you're focused on beating North Dakota."

Omaha (20-12-6) opens its first Frozen Four a week from Thursday in Boston against Providence (24-13-2). Boston U. (27-7-5) will take on North Dakota (29-9-3) in the second national semifinal. The title game is April 11.

That Omaha and Boston U. made it this far with young teams is a mild surprise.

The Mavericks were picked sixth in the eight-team National College Hockey Conference. They finished third and made the NCAA tournament as an at-large team. Senior goalie Ryan Massa stopped 73 of 74 shots in wins over Harvard and RIT and was named Most Outstanding Player in the Midwest Regional.

Boston U. won only 10 games last season, Quinn's first as head coach, and was picked sixth in the 12-team Hockey East. The Terriers have nearly tripled their win total and are in the Frozen Four for the 22nd time, and first since winning the national title 2009, when Quinn was Parker's associate head coach.

The Terriers beat Yale and Minnesota-Duluth to win the Northeastern Regional. They're led by freshman Jack Eichel, a Hobey Baker Award finalist who has 24 goals and a nation-leading 67 points.

Quinn is known as a prolific recruiter, a skill he honed scouring the small towns of western Canada for overlooked players who would make up the first few teams at Omaha in the late 1990s. Those early teams played to large crowds and were surprisingly competitive.

"It was hard, but when you have a university that is committed to hockey the way UNO is, it certainly makes your job a lot easier," Quinn said. "With the fan support we had, with the facilities we had, with the resources we had, it was an incredible six years. I look back on those six years with a lot of fond memories, a lot of satisfaction, a lot of pride."

Quinn left Omaha to take a USA Hockey job. He was Parker's right-hand man at BU for five years, then coached in the American Hockey League and was a Colorado Avalanche assistant before returning to the Terriers in 2013.

Kemp, now an associate athletic director at Omaha, said he could see Quinn's rise in coaching coming.

"He had the 'it' factor from day one," Kemp said. "My thought as head coach was that you get your assistants for a set period of time and, if they do well, they go on to greatness in other programs. We had a good stretch together."