Charlie Coyle is using a Super Eight tournament loss as Stanley Cup motivation
"I’m sick of that 'almost' being my proudest accomplishment."
Charlie Coyle played his first-ever Stanley Cup Final game Monday when he took the ice with the Bruins against the Blues at TD Garden.
Before all the Stanley Cup mania started, though, Coyle penned an article for The Players’ Tribune about his most notable accomplishment in hockey: playing in the Super Eight tournament as a high school freshman in 2007.
“Boston is in my blood. Boston raised me. This place is my home.”
Tonight @CharlieCoyle_3, a lifelong @NHLBruins fan from Weymouth, Mass., will take the ice for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final representing his hometown team.
Oh, he’s ready.https://t.co/xPaCNn5YZk
— The Players’ Tribune (@PlayersTribune) May 27, 2019
“If you’re asking, ‘What’s the Super Eight?’ well then, you’re not from Mass.,” Coyle wrote. “And that’s fine, I guess — because nobody’s perfect.”
Coyle, who grew up in Weymouth, made Weymouth High School’s boys varsity hockey team as a freshman. He scored 12 points during the Wildcats’ 19-1 season, which gave the team a place in the Massachusetts Division 1A tournament, commonly known as the Super Eight, among the best high school teams in the state.
Weymouth was ranked fifth out of 10 teams in the 2007 tournament and was just one of four public school teams to make the Super Eight that year.
“We were out there going against basically these all-star teams that were hand-picked by these Catholic schools,” Coyle wrote. “Then on the other side was us: the Bad News Bears out of Weymouth – AKA Public Nuisance. Safe to say outside expectations for us were pretty low going in.”
A funny thing happened for the public school team with “pretty low” expectations, though. Coyle’s Wildcats beat fourth-seeded Malden Catholic in the first round, 3-2. They met Catholic Memorial, the top-seeded team that year, in the second round. Weymouth defeated CM 2-1.
A #StanleyCup Final gift to remember courtesy of @CharlieCoyle_3. pic.twitter.com/96mT49DOnm
— NHL (@NHL) May 28, 2019
Coyle and his teammates carried the town’s hockey hopes all the way to the state championship on the biggest stage in Massachusetts: TD Garden.
“We don’t talk about what happened next,” Coyle wrote of that championship game. “It’s not important. Barely remember it.”
Weymouth collapsed in the Super Eight finals against Boston College High School and lost, 6-1. Coyle wrote that to this day, when he visits home, he and his former teammates reminisce about their 2007 tournament run.
To a teenage Coyle, that Super Eight final may have seemed like a dream. It stuck with him, a public-school kid from Weymouth, even as he made it to the NHL and played six seasons for the Minnesota Wild. But when Coyle was traded to the Bruins in February, a door opened for a new dream’s realization.
Coyle now plays for the team he grew up cheering for, alongside players like Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron, who were on the roster when Coyle was a high school freshman in 2007. He wrote that a Stanley Cup Final victory would create a new proudest accomplishment for him.
“I can’t go back in history and change that Super Eight final,” Coyle wrote. “But you better believe I’m going to give every ounce of effort I can to create a new favorite memory in the Garden for myself, my family and my boys who shocked the world back in ’07.”
