(Photo: Jacob Rudner/WCSN)
6:45 a.m., nearly 12 hours from puck drop for Arizona State’s 2019 season opener: Jon Laughner leaned his back into the side entrance door at Oceanside Ice Arena. In his left hand were two coffees — one for him and one for his assistant — in the other hand he had a dog leash, donuts, his phone and car keys. “Start time,” Laughner said. “Every day, this is start time. Have to start early if you want to be good.”
It was the summer of 2017. Greg Powers said he could already envision the direction of his program in his head. Just a blip on the radar at the time, Arizona State hockey was still in its formative stages and Powers, the budding team’s head coach, needed to hire a new equipment manager.
Joey Guilmet — a 20-year veteran of equipment management — left ASU in the summer of 2017 to join the San Diego Gulls, the AHL affiliate of the Anaheim Ducks. Prior to coming to ASU, Guilmet served 12 years as the equipment manager for the Atlanta Thrashers. He worked the 2006 Olympic Games for Team USA, the US World Championship team in 2001, 2008 and 2009, the 2007 NHL All-Star Game and 1992 MLB All-Star Game.
Replacing all that experience would be difficult for a program entering its third full Division I season.
“That was pretty well known to be an up-and-coming place,” Tim Branham, the head coach of the Utah Grizzlies said of ASU and its equipment manager opening. “That was a pretty nice job. Joey was their first equipment manager and Joey is one of the best in the business.”
Powers received more than 200 applicants from which he picked about 40 to interview. He wasn’t sure who he’d find, or if any of them could fill a crucial void – taking on a job performed out of the spotlight, but responsible for vital tasks that went beyond sharpening skates and sewing up jerseys.
As Powers read through the remaining applications in his narrowed list of candidates, one phone number caught his eye. The area code matched that of Powers’ hometown. With a roll of the dice, the Sun Devil coach dialed up Jon Laughner.
“[The area code in his phone number] earned him a phone call from me, to be honest,” Powers said.
Laughner, a veteran of hockey hoping to fufill his desire to stay in the game, was at his day job when his phone rang. He saw it was an Arizona number. Laughner ran outside, picked up and said Powers’ quick message changed his life.
He got an interview.
Laughner admitted he did not have the most complete resume, it lacked lengthy experience as an equipment manager. What he had was something better, a deep-seated passion for a sport that had come to define his entire life. Powers picked up on it immediately. He flew Laughner out to Tempe, interviewed him, and Laughner left the meeting as the Sun Devils new equipment manager.
“I hired Jon because we hit it off,” Powers said. “That’s how I’ve built this staff. I hire people I want to be around every day. We spend too much time together to not like each other. He’s way better than I even imagined.”
7:30 a.m.: Laughner cleared some papers from his workbench. Under the clutter was a small speaker. He said the music keeps the skate sharpening in rhythm. As the music began to pump through the building, so too did the sharp trill of the skate sharpener meeting a blade. “This right here,” Laughner said, pointing to the machine. “This is my therapy.”
Laughner could not help but chuckle when he said it.
“I’m practically made of ice and skates,” the Arizona State equipment manager quipped while looking down at a freshly sharpened skate.
Laughner grew up on the ice. His mother — who still serves the same role — was a professional figure skating coach since before Laughner was born. She met Laughner’s father at an ice skating rink and the two parents — bonded from the beginning by their connection to skating — kept their children involved in the family trade.
“My sister skates professionally now in ice shows,” Laughner said. “I literally, as a kid, remember getting picked up from school, going to the rink, sitting at the rink to do homework while my mom did lessons then I had my hockey practice at night.”
Throughout his youth, his local rink — a medium-sized building in Indiana that was home to a youth hockey program, figure skating lessons and the average skater — was like a second home, a frozen safe haven to do what he loved. During the summertime through high school and college, Laughner would spend entire days there, working in whatever role needed to be filled. He said he worked the snack shack and learned to sharpen skates, among other tasks.
“I’ve probably spent more time at a rink than anywhere else in my entire life,” he said with an ear-to-ear smile.
That time spent around the ice lent itself to a deep passion for hockey.
At 5-foot-8 — or, as he jokingly puts it, just a short 6-foot-1 — Laughner was never a Division I prospect. He was good enough to play for the club team at Indiana University. His four seasons there were the last of his playing career. They gave him a glimpse into his future off the ice instead.
“I was the only guy who could sharpen skates at Indiana,” he said. “I was the de facto equipment guy.”
8:30 a.m.: Laughner swung open a small refrigerator stationed under his desk. From it, he pulled a stick of butter. “It’s bagel time,” Laughner said. “I don’t have tons of traditions or rituals but the bagel time happens every game day no matter where I am. I’m really not a superstitious guy, you know, there’s no time to be superstitious in equipment. I do change my socks though, it’s more comfortable when I do that.”
Laughner graduated from Indiana in the spring of 2007 with degrees in history and criminal justice, however, all he could think about was finding ways to stay around the rink.
“That change was interesting,” Laughner said of finishing college. “Graduating school was weird for me because I had a feeling my hockey playing days were pretty much over. I knew I had to stay in the game though. When you’re obsessed with something it’s way too hard to just be done with it.”
He became a youth hockey coach for nearly four years and even won a national championship with one of his teams.
After that, in 2011, Laughner left the game of hockey. His destination? Golf.
“From the rink to the links,” Laughner said through a chuckle. “I got out of hockey for a minute and started working in the golf business. I worked in golf for a couple of years but I just got that itch. I just needed to get back into hockey.”
He would do that in June of 2013. Sort of.
Desperate to get close to the game again, he went to the Utah Grizzlies — then the ECHL affiliate of the Anaheim Ducks and currently the Colorado Avalanche affiliate — and found a job … in ticket sales. It wasn’t quite what he wanted to be doing, Laughner admitted, but “it was hockey again,” he said.
“That made me happy. I was back around the ice and honestly, it was good enough for me at the time.”
10 a.m.: ASU’s players had just come off the ice after their morning skate. “Jon, can you fix this skate?” One player asked as he passed by the equipment room. “Can I grab a plug for my stick?” Another asked. “Can you help me shave the end of my stick, Jon?” The final player said. Laughner said he’s there to help. He flipped a switch on the saw to cut the sticks, opened a drawer for the plug and clicked his skate sharpener on. “This is the dry run for the game,” Laughner said. “Trust me, this is nothing.”
One equipment manager’s injury became the start of another one’s career in the industry.
Roughly three-quarters of the way through Laughner’s first season in the Grizzlies’ box office, his phone rang.
“It was the president of the team calling me,” Laughner recalled. “He said, ‘You can sharpen skates right? Look, [the current equipment manager] broke his arm we need you to get to the rink right now. You’re doing skates and you’ll be on the bench for the next weekend.’
“That was a weird rush of emotions for me. You never want to hear someone got hurt but this phone call just came at the right time for me. This was my shot to be on the bench and prove myself in that role. A lot worked out for me right there.”
So, Laughner stood behind the Grizzlies’ bench for the first time as the backup equipment manager. He was there to simply handoff sticks when players broke them and offer in-game repairs if needed. But he realized it was exactly where he wanted to be.
“I can’t even explain the thrill of standing out on the bench for your first pro game, man,” he said. “It’s wild.”
Laughner stayed with the equipment staff for the remainder of the 2013-2014 season and was promoted to head of equipment soon thereafter. Branham, who joined the Grizzlies as their head coach prior to the 2013-2014 season, said Laughner was a difference-maker in his transition into taking the helm of the team.
“He was so valuable for me because he took the excuses away from the players,” Branham said. “When you have an equipment manager who doesn’t know what he’s doing, the players have an excuse if they aren’t performing. If the equipment guy can’t perform that puts a lot of pressure on my plate too. I never had to worry about Jon. I never had to worry about players finding excuses through Jon. That was huge.”
The Grizzlies made the playoffs in Laughner’s and Branham’s first season with the team and again in the 2014-2015 season. Branham said that having Laughner there not only benefited the team’s quality of equipment but also its players.
“Everyone liked Jon,” Branham said. “He relates to the guys. He played hockey so he knows when guys are in slumps he can talk to them. He knows to keep it real with guys and he can understand them. He was an athlete too so he understands what it takes to have success.”
Of all their memories together, Branham said he remembers the run the most.
“It’s just the distance,” the Utah Grizzlies head coach said. “You wouldn’t believe how far it is from the bench to the locker room.”
One of Branham’s players snapped the tuuk — the plastic piece that holds a blade to the boot — clean off the skate in the middle of a game. Branham said the injury to that piece of equipment is rare but it happens.
Laughner had to fix it.
“We were in Orlando when this happened,” Branham said. “Jon had to get from the bench to the locker room. That meant he needed to get off the bench down the ice and run down a hallway to get there.”
A 30-second timeout provided Laughner with enough room to make his move.
“He was doing it,” Branham said. “He got down there during the break, fixed the tuuk, got back and the player never missed a single shift. Pretty remarkable that he was able to get that done.”
12 p.m.: Laughner sat down at his workbench and reached into a drawer to retrieve a few small letter C patches. There had been an error with ASU’s captain’s jerseys which caused the original lettering to be too big for the sweater. To the naked eye, there was no issue. Laughner said the slightest hiccups on a jersey drive him crazy. “Mistakes are just invitations to fix it yourself,” Laughner said as he began to sew the new captain’s patches to the jerseys. “We’re cooking with gas now! We’re rolling!”
After the Grizzlies were eliminated in the second round of the Kelly Cup Playoffs in 2015, Laughner took a job as the head equipment manager with the South Carolina Stingrays, the ECHL affiliate of the Washington Capitals. He thought it would be his big break in the industry.
Instead, his first season in South Carolina came closer to breaking him.
“In the ECHL it’s 72 games in the regular season,” Laughner said. “It can be a grind. You’re talking 12-hour bus trips and stuff like that. I wouldn’t call it a rough year but it was a challenging year in South Carolina. We made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals, so it was a long season.”
The grind of the campaign left Laughner wondering what was next. He decided that leaving hockey was best for him and moved back to Utah to take a job with Mountain Sports International — an extreme sports marketing company — as a consumer marketing & athlete relations manager.
“I just kind of thought that I love skiing,” Laughner said. “It was my favorite part about living in Utah so I kind of thought maybe I wanted a real Utah winter so I took that job. Unbelievable job. We had a rule that if there was more than 10 inches of powder, you couldn’t come into work.”
Even with the company mandating its employees miss work to go skiing, Laughner said he knew it wasn’t the right fit for him. His heart was telling him to return to hockey.
“I made it about eight months, I think, between leaving hockey and getting back into hockey,” he said. “I tried the real world. It wasn’t even really the real world by any means but it was a more real job. I still couldn’t do it. It was still too much of a desk job for me. It was a fun time but yeah, hockey is where I belong. I’ve been around the game my whole life. I missed being around the locker room and stuff like that.”
Similar to Laughner’s stroke of luck in 2013, the stars realigned during the 2016-2017 season. The Utah Grizzlies’ equipment manager — Laughner’s former assistant — was called up to work with the Ducks’ AHL affiliate and Laughner, who was already in Utah due to his job with Mountain Sports International, was on the call.
“I got lucky,” Laughner said. “I ended up finishing the year in Utah. I was actually filling in and still working a full-time job. I was sneaking off on Thursdays to fly off for the weekend and play equipment manager. After doing that it was just like, ‘Yeah I need to get back into hockey.’”
The call from Powers came that summer. When the coach offered him the job, Laughner easily accepted.
“I had said from the time that ASU got a hockey team,” Laughner recalled, “that it’s got to be the greatest job in the world.”
2 p.m.: Laughner grabbed the freshly crested captain’s jerseys and walked into the ASU locker room. He said it was time to set the room up for the game which was set to start in five hours. In 30 minutes, the room was finished. “It’ll give you chills every time,” he said pointing the room. “Now I need to take a picture. It’s too pretty not to.”
After his first season with the Sun Devils — a year Laughner said he used to just learn how to fit in and get a handle of the program — ASU hockey saw a boom in its productivity.
In the 2018-2019 season, the Sun Devils made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history and became the first independent school to do so since Alaska-Anchorage in 1992. Star goalie Joey Daccord became the first ASU hockey player to make it to the NHL when he made his debut with the Ottawa Senators following the completion of ASU’s season.
So far in 2019-2020, ASU is ranked No. 14 in the PairWise rankings with a record of 13-8-3. For the second straight season, the NCAA Tournament is in its sites.
Powers credits a good deal of his team’s success to Laughner’s dedication and hard work with the program.
“We don’t want to put 100 percent of our identity into how we look and the jerseys we wear,” Powers said. “That being said, just by how much time and effort he’s put into the jerseys here, he has changed our identity. We have an innovative and out of the box mindset in everything we do here. He’s caught on to that and he’s matched that with what he does.”
Laughner said he takes pride in developing new jerseys for ASU. As of the start of the 2019-2020 season, the Sun Devils have over 300 jersey combinations in their arsenal. When Laughner took over in July of 2017, they had just two.
“For a college program, the jersey is really, really important,” Laughner said. “It’s different than pro sports because guys sign with pro teams because of the money they’re offered. That doesn’t happen in the NCAA. I look at the uniforms as a recruiting tool. Oregon Football certainly used it as a recruiting tool. That’s where we got the inspiration to do what we do.
“We want kids to come to Arizona State to play hockey because we’re a great hockey program but they get the added bonus of wearing the best uniforms in college hockey.”
6:45 p.m.: ASU’s season opener starts in exactly 20 minutes. The players are all ready but the Sun Devils’ starting goaltender, sophomore Evan DeBrouwer, walks into the equipment room with both his skates in his hands. “They just don’t feel right, Jon,” DeBrouwer said. “I can fix it,” Laughner responding. “This here, this is where I kick into crazy mode.”
In his third season with the Sun Devils, Laughner has already made his impact. The jersey combinations rival those of some of the most creative football schools in the country. Laughner said he would be shocked if any other college hockey team in the nation had as many helmet options as the Sun Devils do.
But, like a painter, Laughner enjoys creating his masterpiece so others can enjoy it. From the ECHL to Division I hockey, the players and staff who have worked around Laughner have certainly taken notice.
“He does so much for us,” ASU sophomore forward Demetrios Koumontzis said. “We’re lucky to have him.”
“You like this guy,” ASU junior forward Johnny Walker joked. “We love him. He’s pretty good at what he does too.”
But, for Laughner, each 24-hour day spent at the rink, each night spent sleeping next to his workbench just to get back going in the morning and each stitch sewn are not done for the thanks, according to him. Laughner is just doing what he loves.
“I’ll be standing there 14 or 15 hours after I started my day, watching the game from the bench and there isn’t a game that goes by where I don’t say the same thing to myself,” Laughner said, hours after his team’s season-opener on Oct. 5, 2019, nearly 15 hours after his day began. “How lucky am I that I get to be here, watching the sport I love with the best seat in the house. It’s not bad, man. It’s not bad.”
11:45 p.m.: Laughner and his assistants are the last ones in the building. The soft rumble of the washing machines permeated the empty arena’s silence. Laughner clicked the lights off in his office and opened the side door which he opened 17 hours earlier to start his day. He would open it again just seven hours later.
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