In the winter of 1997, Nashville Predators Head Coach Barry Trotz had just returned from a scouting trip for his soon-to-be NHL expansion team. Waiting for him back in Nashville was General Manager David Poile and an interesting piece he’d clipped from The Hockey News.
The article detailed how the Buffalo Sabres invited defenseman Bob Boughner’s father to join the team on the road so he could catch his son’s NHL debut in person.
“David says to me, ‘We're not going to be very good next year, and we've got to make it fun,” Trotz recalled. “He asked, ‘What do you think about doing a dads trip?’”
Trotz’s reply?
“That’s a heck of an idea.”
They didn’t know it at the time, but the NHL fathers trip had just been born.
The First Trip
For the first run of Poile and Trotz’s experiment, the Predators players invited each of their dads to join them on their back-to-back road trip to Buffalo and New Jersey in January 1999.
“They weren’t hot spots,” Trotz laughed. “But it just worked out that we played back-to-back, and we felt that a lot of the dads could fly into New York or drive from Ontario.”
An itinerary was planned that would embed the fathers into the daily life of the team. From travel to morning skates, pregame meals and team meetings, the dads were there for all of it.
Current Predators Head Coach Andrew Brunette remembers the first trip well.
“It was really cool,” he said. “We were in New York City and we got to look around. And I think the one thing [I remember] was the dads - or at least my dad - were in awe of the amount of food there was… He just couldn't believe it.”
There was plenty of fun to be had outside the rink as well, and the Predators made sure their dads were well taken care of, from presents to poker and group happy hours.
Everything on the first trip was running smoothly, until Tom Fitzgerald Sr. - dubbed the inaugural dad’s captain by Coach Trotz - decided to call an audible.
“Fitzy’s dad says, ‘So I'm the captain, if I want to change something I can, right?’” Trotz recalled.
“You're the captain,” Trotz replied. “You're in charge now.”
As the story goes, the Preds dads were supposed to enjoy a private billiards tournament and happy hour before heading over to Marine Midland Arena - now the KeyBank Center - to catch their sons in action against the Sabres.
But warmups started that evening with no dads in sight. Then the puck dropped. Still, the Predators dads were nowhere to be found.
“I asked our team services guy at the time to just check that nothing had happened, that all the dads were OK,” Trotz said. “He goes, ‘Oh, no, they're OK. Everything's good.’”
Confused, Nashville’s head coach asked where his players’ dads were.
As it turned out, Fitzgerald Sr. got on the bus that evening with updated directions for the driver. Instead of heading into Buffalo, the Preds' fathers went across the border for an impromptu “sightseeing” escapade in Canada before getting stuck in traffic on the return trip.
“They didn't get to our game ‘til almost the end of the first period,” Trotz laughed. “But they were having a ball.”
With the dads along for the ride, the Predators would ultimately sweep their back-to-back set - a first for the fledgling franchise - against two of the League’s best teams.
“I think by winning those two games here, it did cement [the trip],” Trotz said. “We found that it had a lot more value and that it was beyond hockey. It wasn't an Xs and Os thing, it was that the guys competed hard. I remember guys saying, ‘We’ve got to win this. And we’ve got to dig in here, because I am not going to sit in my room and listen to my dad fill me in on all the stuff if we don't win this hockey game, so let's win.’”
Nashville’s Tradition
As the Predators continued their new tradition, other teams around the League took notice.
“I got a couple of calls from other coaches asking if the trip got in the way at all,” Trotz said. “And I told them no, it was actually the opposite… The guys dug in. And it gets to be a grind during the year, a little bit like Groundhog Day… I think having something like a dad's trip to break the monotony is a good thing.”
More teams soon began their own versions of Nashville’s experiment, and before long, nearly the entire League was doing it.
“We broke the mold when we came into the League,” Trotz said. “I think the NHL had a lot of traditionalists and I think in Nashville we had to do it our own way. We can't be Toronto, we can't be Montreal or Boston, or any of those types of teams. We just had to do our own thing.”
