Silvertips’ new coach traveled long, bumpy road to Everett

EVERETT — Dennis Williams hasn’t had much time to relax the past three months.

The 38-year-old was named the Everett Silvertips’ head coach in late May. Then it was back to Bloomington, Illinois, to pack up and sell the house and attend the NHL draft in Chicago. Then he had to figure out where in the Northwest his family was going to reside before heading west for the latest chapters in both his professional and personal life.

Even the past few weeks have been full, first with training camp, then with two-a-day practices and preseason games in advance of Saturday night’s Western Hockey League season opener against the Portland Winterhawks.

“I don’t know where the days go,” Williams said. “The nice thing about it is that we as coaches get to come in here and be a hockey coach. It’s not work. I always joke that I talk to people who wake up early in the morning and (say) ‘I’ve got work.’ I get to go to the rink and coach. How great is that? There’s no better job.”

Williams has been on-the-go so much he sometimes forgets to take off his skates when he enters his office at Xfinity Arena.

His somewhat bare workspace displays the necessary trappings of a coach: a dry-erase board with illegible writing, a quasi-up-to-date depth chart, several suits hung on a rack in the corner. There’s a picture of Williams and his wife, Hollie, posing with hockey sticks on their wedding day. A child’s size stick with pink tape leans against one wall. Both are indications of the prominent role family plays in Williams’ life.

Hollie and Dennis met while Williams was an assistant coach at Utica College in upstate New York, and they’ve been together ever since, with stops in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, Texas, Illinois and now Washington. Their 8-year-old daughter, Emerson, was born when Williams was an assistant at his college alma mater, Bowling Green. Five-year-old Elyse arrived while he was coaching the Amarillo (Texas) Bulls.

“If (Hollie) had any (hockey background) she’d probably be giving me the business when I come home after games,” Williams said with a laugh. “After a game no matter how angry (I am), when you hear (the girls’) voices, the world stops. The little ones come running into the office and you can go from being as mad as you want watching video to ‘Hey girls, how you doing?’ It’s pretty amazing.”

Williams’ family has helped him keep his career in perspective during his rise through the coaching ranks. There have been snags and difficulties along the way. Just in his early 20s when he took over as head coach at NCAA Division III Neumann in 2004, Williams lost half his team to an off-ice incident. He had to recruit players from the student body to fill out the roster. The team finished the season 2-9-1.

Five years later, Williams experienced a similar situation at Bowling Green. In 2009, the program was on the verge of being axed in a money-saving move. Players began transferring and head coach Scott Paluch left to take a job with USA Hockey. A year after being hired as an assistant at the Division I school, Williams found himself named interim head coach at age 29. The team finished 5-25-6.

“I look back and I wouldn’t change anything I did there,” Williams said. “You always want to win games, and at the time as a young coach it seemed like everything was on you. You didn’t know how to handle it. Now I look back at it and everything happens for a reason. I’m not glad I experienced it because you want to have success, but to overcome that and learn through it, it’s just like we tell our players.”

The Bowling Green program survived, but Williams moved on. It was in the arid plains of the Texas panhandle that he found sustained success as the head coach and general manager of the North American Hockey League’s Amarillo Bulls.

He led Amarillo to three consecutive 40-win seasons from 2011-14, amassing a career record of 168-44-2-24, three straight South Division titles and a Robertson Cup title in 2012-13 when he was named Coach of the Year. Then came three seasons as head coach and general manager of the then-expansion Bloomington Thunder of the United States Hockey League.

During his journey, Williams formed a bond with the management of Consolidated Sports Holdings International, Inc., the company that owns the Bulls, Thunder and Silvertips. Those connections no doubt helped lead to his hiring in Everett.

But so, too, did his reputation for preferring an up-tempo style of play, something the Silvertips have not been known for.

Williams will implement his system along with long-time assistant coach Mitch Love, who remains on staff after former head coach Kevin Constantine’s contract was not renewed this offseason.

“I think in today’s game your defense and their ability to be part of the offense is such a crucial part of the game,” Love said. “I think for me with the group of ‘D,’ I think a big emphasis will be more involvement in the offense in terms of jumping up at the right time in the offense whether it’s more of an active role in the offensive zone of movement and getting pucks to the net. I think that’s one thing Dennis brings to the table that might be different than Kevin or other coaches. But I think at the end of the day, each coach likes to play the game a certain way and you can only go as far as your personnel take you. … Every coach in this league is very good and it boils down to the execution of your players.”

The two coaches are still getting familiar with one another. Both are active, on-ice participants during practice and take turns sketching on the dry erase boards.

Fortunately, Williams can leave his skates on for that.