Benjamin Hochman | Post-Dispatch
Sports columnist
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The thin man with a gray mustache in a dark suit paced in the middle of the locker room while addressing his soldiers in skates. On the whiteboard nearby, written words screamed in all capital letters: WE ARE A TEAM OF DESTINY!
“Short, unselfish shifts!” said Shawn Walsh, the University of Maine men’s hockey coach, in pregame footage before the 1993 national semifinals (now known as the “Frozen Four”). “Shoot low — you goal scorers are going to snipe, get low. We’re all humans; we’re all going to make mistakes, myself included. Don’t even worry about it. Let’s stay positive. Let’s win the 60-minute war. We don’t care who’s going to win the little battles. … James, it’s your team, it’s your locker room. I’ll leave you alone.”
At that point, Walsh slipped out the door and the fresh-faced Maine captain walked to Walsh’s spot.
“We’ve been the best team all year, boys — nothing’s going to (expletive) stop us now!” said Jim Montgomery, now the Blues coach, in the 1993 documentary “Out of the Woods” (available on YouTube). “No matter what happens in the first period, second period, it’s a 60-minute game. No one can play with us 20 players for 60 minutes. No one. We’re a (expletive) calm and confident bunch, and we’re going to win this thing. Like I’ve said before, I’m confident in every one of you. Every one. Lets do the job, lets win this game, let’s play Saturday night.”
Maine won the game 4-3. And on that Saturday night, Maine was down 4-2 at the end of the second. In the third period, Montgomery scored three goals — and Maine won the national championship game 5-4.
In a recent sit-down interview, I asked Monty about his mentors, in efforts to learn more about what makes the coach tick. Who were the men who molded him, who made him? He named five.
“When I went to college, Shawn Walsh was a such a dynamic leader — he was the best orator I’ve ever been around,” Montgomery said of the late Walsh, who died in 2001 after being diagnosed with cancer. “And I can’t even come close to him, but I stole a lot of the things that he did that I thought, as a player, made me want to go through the walls. Or made me want to be better. Or spend more time at getting better. And just the way he organized practices and stuff like there wasn’t wasted minutes of what we did.”
Montgomery’s father, Jimmy, was “my No. 1 role model and mentor because he was a terrific athlete and he understood ‘team’ at a high level. And he pushed that upon me from the time I was, like, 8 years old. So I think it kind of led me to be more of a person that tried to get everybody to be better as a player.”
Jimmy Montgomery, who raised his family in Montreal, represented Canada as a boxer in the 1956 Olympic Games. Jimmy was also a standout football player. A story in a 2019 piece in The Athletic discussed a standout moment in Montgomery’s childhood — he scored a hat trick, yet his father “gave me (expletive) the whole ride home because I didn’t work.” The message stayed with Jim: Talent alone won’t make you great.
And other coaches have made Montgomery a great coach.
“Grant Stanbrook was the best one-on-one teacher I’ve ever been around,” Montgomery said of the Maine assistant coach. “So I stole a lot from him, and then when I became a head coach for the first time, I hired him as a consultant. And I didn’t know he knew as much about the team game as he did. Because (at that point) we sat and we talked hockey a lot.
“John Stevens was a huge impact on me. He was the captain of my American Hockey League championship team. And when I got my first head coaching job (in 2010 in a junior hockey league), I went and spent two days with him at his place. He was just let go by Philadelphia as the head coach at the time. And some of the stuff that he shared with me, like I had not even thought about. An example — a ghost roster.
“What do you want your team to look like? Well, you actually go through process of writing down first-line center, first D-man, goaltender, fourth-line guy, what traits. It helps you select your team a whole lot better. An attribute of what you want that guy to be. And then just organizing practice plans and stuff like that. It just made me significantly better for my first head coaching job, even though it was in junior hockey.”
It was fascinating to hear that Montgomery “is not afraid” to call other coaches and just ask question after question. Over the years, he’s done so with major names in the National Hockey League. One notable name — former Blues coach Ken Hitchcock — now a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“I’m very lucky that here, now in St Louis, we have Ken Hitchcock as a resource,” Montgomery said. “We call him the coach of coaches, you know? And he’s just an endless resource of knowledge. He’s funny, but he’s so sharp still about the game. He stays current. And there’s so many different things, whether it’s talking to the captains, it’s dealing with the power play, it’s dealing with the D-man that he’s just like — this is the way I would handle it. And that’s what I want. I want to know how he would handle it, and I might take two things that he talked about and make it mine.”
This 2025-26 season is Monty’s first full season as the Blues’ head coach. As we watch him coach here in training camp and listen to him speak, we’ll also see and hear a bit of Walsh, Stanbrook, Stevens, Hitchcock and Jimmy Sr.
“I don’t think you have just one (mentor),” Montgomery said, “because I think if you’re mindful and open-minded, you will have a lot of people you learn something from. As far as coaches, there are so many coaches that I stole a little bit from. And there’s some that I was like, ‘I’ll never do that.’ Because that’s part of the process. I don’t want to treat a person or I don’t want to handle that situation like that.”
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Benjamin Hochman | Post-Dispatch
Sports columnist
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