Paul Croke

Patriot Ledger Division II Gridiron All-Star, Football, 1976

Boston Globe All-Scholastic, Football, 1976

Boston Globe Old Colony League All-Star, Hockey, 1975-1976

Boston Globe Old Colony League All-Star, Hockey, 1976-1977

High School All-American, November 1976

Prep First Team Hockey All-American, 1978

 

Bill Conboy: “Pick any sport; pick any town.  Doesn’t matter the sport; doesn’t matter the town.  In 1976-1977, Paul Croke was just better athletically than everyone else in everything he did.”

 

As the 1960s turned into the 1970s in Scituate, the Arborway beckoned as an attractive neighborhood for young families.  According to reports, there were over three hundred kids calling this neighborhood home at that time.  One of them was Paul Croke Jr., the oldest of four children born to Paul Sr. and Doreen Croke.  Paul Jr. was raised by his parents to stay active, compete in a variety of sports, and generally stay out of trouble.  For the most part, Paul listened to his parents and did what he was told.  He participated in pretty much every physical activity going on in his Arborway neighborhood.  With the encouragement of his parents, and through his own sheer will, he made himself into one of the best multi-sport athletes ever to pass through Scituate High School.  This is his story.

 

Paul explains: “We had games of every type going on everywhere in my neighborhood.  Every street and backyard had a game going at one time or another.  Football…baseball…whiffle ball…street hockey, you name it.  When winter came, we’d go down to the high school pond and Merritt’s Pond behind the Egypt Garage and play hockey on the ice.  It was a competitive neighborhood.  You had the Durkins, the Foynes, the Birds…and many others.  Street hockey was big.  We had five on five games with two goalies and four subs right out on the street.  It was great.  I remember Ralphie Cox, who was a cousin of the Birds, playing street hockey with us one day.  I mixed it up with him chasing the ball and he punches me in the eye.  I’m eleven.  He’s twelve.  Of course, he turned out to be one of the greatest hockey players to come out of the South Shore.  Almost made the Olympics.  This is what my neighborhood was like in those days.  Tons of kids.  Tons of sports and games to play.  Every kid in that neighborhood participated in sports growing up.  You had to, really.

 

“We began taking hockey more seriously sometime around 1970 when Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins broke through.  There were already some neighborhood kids taking skating lessons or instructional hockey lessons up at the Cohasset Winter Garden.  They were going up there to those early morning hours.  I think the Camerlengos – Michael and Peter – were among the first to go up there from the neighborhood and learn how to skate.  I asked my dad if he’d take me and my brother Mark up there.  It was an instructional hockey program.  I don’t remember who the instructors were, but I really took to it.  After I learned the basics, I played in the house league there.  This was around 1971 or 1972.  Bobby Magner was my first coach.  He was a good coach and taught me all the tricks he knew.”

 

Initially, hockey was just another sport for Paul Croke to play and learn.  He didn’t favor it over anything else he was doing at the time mainly because his parents encouraged him to try different things.  Paul explains: “I wasn’t one of those kids who was fully committed to hockey at a young age at the expense of other sports.  I was into football and baseball.  I was taking swimming at the K. of C. and I played in a golf league at Hatherly.  My parents wanted me to try everything.  I would’ve gone out for the Scituate Braves teams, but the travel teams required a big time commitment that could be tough for some families to manage, especially families with four kids.  There’s a lot of driving involved and that can impact the amount of time some parents have with their kids.  My father wasn’t convinced that it was the best for me, mostly for that reason.  So I stayed in the house league at Cohasset and played as much as I could.

 

“My father was very supportive of me in everything I did, especially sports.  He’s from Dorchester.  Went to college for sixteen years.  He has a degree from Boston College, master’s degrees from a couple of other schools, and even a doctorate.  He took me to all the B.C. football and hockey games when I was a kid.  Experiencing college sports at a young age made a big impression on me.  The crowds were huge.  I loved going to those games with my dad.  My dad played Park League football.  He was a quarterback.  Very competitive his whole life.  He still plays golf today.  He’s 86.  My mother, who’s from Quincy, ran track at Archie’s.  She was also very supportive of me.  I got my speed from her.  My mother came from a very athletic family.”

 

Paul goes on: “Shortly after I learned to play hockey in the Winter Garden house league, I joined the Scituate Whales and played on a team coached by Charlie Hoar.  He was great.  He was big on hitting…using the body in hockey…that was his thing.  I learned a lot from him.  He taught me and the other kids how to break out of our end and set up plays.  I was getting more confident in my hockey skills at this time, but I have to say, I’d see the Breens and the Griffins up at the rink and I’d think to myself how much more I had to learn.  These guys were a little older than me, and man could they skate.  Up until this time, I really didn’t have solid skating skills.  I was doing a lot of other things and because we only had one hour of practice a week, I never really got the fundamentals down when I was young.  I don’t think it was until I got to prep school that I really learned to skate.  I just didn’t have the ice time.”

 

Paul Croke didn’t go directly to Scituate High School after eighth grade.  His parents thought he’d benefit from a private school education.  He applied to Thayer Academy in Braintree and was accepted.  Paul explains: “My freshman year I went to Thayer and played football, hockey, and baseball.  It was either freshman or junior varsity.  The fields were really good.  They had excellent coaches.  The equipment was the best money could buy.  It’s a great school.  But it was such a long commute.  And there were only two hundred and eighty kids enrolled there.  After the first year, I talked to my mother and father about not going back there.  I missed my Scituate friends and I wanted to go to school in my hometown.”

 

Paul’s interest in football, baseball, and golf left him with less time to concentrate purely on hockey, especially when he got to high school.  He remembers: “When I made the football team in high school, I had like three days after the season ended to get ready for hockey.  I hadn’t skated in weeks and I had to prepare mentally and physically for a tryout a few days after playing football on Thanksgiving.  It would take me several weeks to get my legs under me and by then we were well into the hockey season.  Same thing with baseball.  I’d have to start throwing during the hockey season to get my arm in condition for the baseball season.  So, although these sports didn’t necessarily overlap, I’d have to prepare physically for the upcoming season while I while playing a completely different sport.

 

“I should point out that back in those days, you weren’t allowed to play two sports during the same season.  So, during the high school football season, there was no bantam or midget hockey games being played if you were on the football team.  They wouldn’t allow it.  Some kids who may have chosen to play football couldn’t if they wanted to focus on hockey.  So, as a football player, I had just a couple of days after the season ended to adjust to a new sport.  And football’s nothing like hockey.

 

“In 1975, during my sophomore year, I got called up to the varsity hockey team from j.v. for a couple of games.  Matty Brennan, the first line center, suffered an ACL sprain and Coach Johnson took me off the j.v. team and brought me up to varsity.  Instead of shuffling up the lines, PJ puts me in Matty’s spot on the first line.  It seemed crazy to me, but that’s what he did.  We faced Randolph, one of the top Old Colony League teams, in my first game on varsity.  I was the first line center.  And I played the whole game.  What I can remember about that game was I drew a penalty, giving us the man advantage, and somehow I got an assist.  I hacked the puck off of a Randolph stick and one of my wings put it in the net.  We lost 2-1.  This was against that Randolph team anchored by Rod Langway.  He had the puck on his stick for at least thirty minutes, controlled the whole game.  He was that good.  He was a quarterback in football and a catcher in baseball.  There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.

 

“My j.v. team that year, 1975, was absolutely loaded.  We had three strong lines.  We had very good defensemen, two goalies, a lot of talent.  I centered Johnny Reidy and Sean Mahoney on the first line.  They were both excellent hockey players.  We went 19-1.  Our only loss was to Marshfield in the last game we played that year.  We were loaded because Coach Johnson’s rule at the time was sophomores played j.v., not varsity.  But I got called up to varsity and played every shift at center for two games until Matty came back.  It was pretty cool.

 

“My junior year was just a great year for me personally, especially in hockey.  It was 1975-1976.  The varsity hockey team was stacked with talent.  I’m talking about guys like Mike Breen, Bernie Durkin, Sean Mahoney, Johnny Reidy, Conboy, Devlin, O’Brien, Boonie Dillon.  Guys like that.  We got off to a poor start, losing two of our first four games, but we ran off ten wins and finished something like 12-2.  We may have had one tie.  We made it to the state semifinals that year.”

 

Paul Croke played a key role in that ’75-’76 team.  As a junior, he centered the first line between Billy Higgins and Paul Devlin, both seniors.  Coach Johnson had full confidence in the line, and they produced.  That year was a total team effort.  Paul: “We had some talent that year.  Devlin, Mahoney, Boonie Dillon, Michael Breen, Bernie Durkin, Billy Conboy, O’Brien, Johnny Reidy…there’s some I’m forgetting.  But all those Old Colony League teams were good – Randolph, Hingham, Marshfield, Plymouth-Carver.  We went head-to-head with Silver Lake that year.  We ended up tied with them for the league title.  [Scituate went 12-2-1 that year.  In the eight-team Old Colony League, the maximum amount of losses allowed was 3 in order to qualify for the state tournament.  Scituate lost two out of its first three games in 1975-1976].  I remember making the All-Star team that year with Mike Breen, Bernie Durkin, and Billy Higgins. The All-Star team was named before the season ended and I got to play with the All-Stars in three jamboree games against Scituate, Marshfield, and Silver Lake.  Can you imagine?  I’m playing on the All-Star team against my own team.  How crazy is that?”

 

Paul was all over the scoring sheet that season.  He had points in nearly every game with multiple two- and three-point efforts.  He was never out of the top five in league scoring all season.  He ended up third with 12 goals and 14 assists.  Paul explains: “We did end up winning the league and going to the first round of the State Tournament Quarter-Finals at Ridge Arena against Avon.  [Scituate received a bye in the pre-preliminary round].  We beat them 7-4.  The game started slowly for us and then we poured it on [Paul had 4 goals and an assist against Avon.  The front-page headline in the Scituate Mirror the following Thursday, March 4, 1976 read “Scituate Tops Avon 7-4 On Four Croke Goals”].  That was our ticket to the Boston Garden.  That win was huge, and Coach Johnson showed his appreciation for the way we handled ourselves.  We got down early by a couple of goals, but we stayed with our game plan, tied the game and then just turned it on.  There was never a point when we thought we were going to lose that game.  A total team effort.

 

“We got to the Garden Wednesday, March 3.  It was a big moment for Scituate hockey.  That game was the Division II State Semi-Final.  What’s great about that team was that we had all played together somewhere along the line when we were kids.  That SHS varsity hockey team was a mixture of Winter Garden house league, Scituate Braves, and Scituate Whales all thrown in together.  We were excited to get that far.  Think about it… the Scituate Sailors in the Garden.  It was great.  We ran into a very hot, very well-coached Acton-Boxboro team.  [Acton-Boxboro won the very tough Dual County League with a record of 19-1-1].  We started in a big hole, something like 5-2 after the first period.  The game was an 8-2 beating.  But we took it as a badge of honor to get that far.”

 

Paul Croke was named a High School All-American in November of 1976.  Selection is based on four criteria: athletic ability, scholarship, leadership, and sportsmanship.  It was still football season when he was notified of his selection.  The hockey season hadn’t started yet.  This prestigious award is presented to only a handful of outstanding student-athletes annually.  It is unknown if there’s another recipient of the award from Scituate.

 

“My senior year, 1976-1977, was a bit of a letdown.  We lost all of our talented seniors the year before.  Mike Breen, Bernie Durkin, Devlin, O’Brien, Dillon, Higgins…all those guys graduated the prior spring.  We were a .500 team and I was looking forward to playing baseball at that point.  [Paul was named to the Old Colony League All-Star hockey team again his senior year].  All year my dad was looking into colleges for me.  Being an educator, he was big on me going to college.  I applied to Merrimack, BU, and AIC and got accepted to all of them.  Springfield College too.  In my mind, I was going to college to play hockey.  Then I started thinking that I’m also going to play football and you know what, when hockey season’s over, I’m playing baseball too.  I’m thinking there’s no reason I’m not playing all three at the next level. 

 

“I started to think in terms of how much playing time I could actually get at these schools.  BU was loaded in those years.  If I went there, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t even make the team until I was a senior and even then, who knows how much ice time I would see.  BU was sending guys to the Olympics in a couple years.  That’s how loaded they were.  At some point my father said to me ‘You know, there’s always an option to go to prep school.  You can play competitive hockey and get another year of experience.’  I’m thinking to myself prep school sounds like another year of studying….like a fifth year of high school.  But I’m still just 150 pounds and I decided to give it a shot.  I looked at New Hampton Prep School and Taft and a few others.  My father took me to visit these places.  I chose Choate in Connecticut.  It’s a high school but it’s on a college-like campus.  The dorms, the rink, and the equipment were all the best you could imagine.  Everything was just beautiful.  So off I went.  To Choate.  Paul Croke at Choate.  Getting away from Scituate did me some good though.  There was a ton of schoolwork and I managed the best I could.  But I felt I was there to play hockey, not necessarily study all the time.   

 

“I quickly caught on to the prep school thing.  I was on my own and I took right to it.  I was there to play the same sports I played in high school and figured I had nothing to lose.  I decided to go right after it.  We went 7-1 in football.  Our star running back was hurt in the one game we lost.  I had a great season.  I caught 22 passes for 11 touchdowns.  Our quarterback was a stud from Beaumont, Texas.  He went to Army.  He didn’t throw to me a lot, but when he did, I made the best of the opportunity.  Fifty percent of the time he threw the ball to me I broke off and ran it in.  But we weren’t a passing offense.  We ran the ball all the time.  The coach believed in a strong running game.  In hockey, we went 17-0.  I had 22 goals and 22 assists in seventeen games.  I played right wing instead of center.  Prep was good hockey in those days.  We played a couple of really good high school teams.  We played college j.v. teams.  17-0 had never been done before 1978 and hasn’t been done since.  I was named a Prep First Team Hockey All-American at the conclusion of the season.  For one fantastic year, and with a lot of help from my teammates, I was named the best prep school right wing in the country.

 

“There’s a plaque in the rink there at Choate commemorating the undefeated season.  We have reunions every five or ten years to celebrate.  I went out for baseball in the spring and the coach puts me at shortstop.  I played outfield my whole life up until then.  But he already had outfielders.  What he didn’t have was a shortstop.  Next thing I know, I’m his starting shortstop and leadoff hitter.  Anyway, we go 22-1.  So in my one prep school season, my teams go 46-2.  How’s that for a year?  The schoolwork was tough at Choate, but it was the funnest eight months of my life.  It was totally worth it.  Going to all these places to play sports.  And the people I met.  Rockefellers, Radziwills, princes from foreign counties.  It was incredible.  I have to thank my father for pushing me in that direction.  I loved it.” 

 

After prep school, Paul had to reapply to colleges.  Paul explains: “I went up to Colby.  I almost bit.  But it’s Division II.  I’m trying to play two sports – football and hockey.  And it has to be Division I.  At least for hockey.  Football’s going to be just a freshman thing, maybe junior varsity, but I need to play Division I hockey.  Someone mentioned University of Maine to me.  At the time, Maine was Division II but were going Division I the following year.  I went up there and talked to Jack Bicknell, the football coach at the time.  He says ‘Come on up.  You can walk on with us.  I’ll even have you up for double sessions.’  The hockey coach said I’ll take you after the football season’s over.  You can walk on with us and we’ll see how it goes.’

 

“I went up to Maine in the fall of 1978.  Went right to double sessions.  I made the team as a tenth-string wide receiver.  Then guys started getting hurt.  They had no one healthy enough to return kickoffs and punts.  Just before a game a few weeks into the season, one of the coaches taps me on the shoulder and says ‘Get dressed.  You’re returning punts.’  I go up against David Berlo and the UMass Minutemen in my first game.  They hang 40 on us and I have to return seven kickoffs.  I got knocked out twice.  The following game, I started again.  This time it was Northeastern.  My mind was starting to drift towards hockey.  I was getting my head beaten in returning kicks.  It was now a couple of weeks before hockey camp and the coach told me that if I didn’t make the four-line roster by Christmas, I’d be sent home.  So I quit football with two games left in the season.  I went over to the rink with my Lange skates, walked on with the hockey team, and toughed it out for three weeks trying to make it.  After camp breaks, I’m the fifth-line center.  They’ll only carry four.  We played a bunch of pre-season exhibition games against Canadian teams until we had our first real game on a Friday night against UMass with a follow-up Saturday night.  My former teammate Johnny Reidy played for the Minutemen.  I’m still stuck on the fifth line.  Richard Cote is the fourth line center and he’s suiting up for the first game against UMass.  He’s a French-Canadian hockey player with a full ride.  He’s the guy I’m competing with for a spot on the team.  It’s me or him.  We roll it up on them 11-3 on Friday night, but Cote doesn’t do much.  I get my one-shot Saturday night.  My teammates apparently weren’t big fans of Cote, so what happens in that second game?  They set me up all over the ice.  I get two goals and two assists in a 10-2 win playing fourth line.  The next day, they put up the list of who’s making the team and I’m on it.  Think about it.  They keep a walk-on and send a full ride home for six weeks. 

 

“I had a pretty good year as a freshman.  Maine was club hockey just two years before.  So we had come a long way in a short period of time.  We made it the Division II title game, which we won.  My sophomore year we went to Division I and were ranked 19th nationally before Christmas.  It was the first year of Hockey East.  We were 15-2.  It was big-time hockey.  We played BC and BU.  We played as far away as Northern Michigan.  John Tortorella played on that UMaine team.  Joe Crespi, a center from Bridgewater-Raynham, was on that team.  It was a busy year for me.  I only came home for two days – Thanksgiving and Christmas – between September and April because I had to be right back on campus for football or hockey practices.  I played three seasons of college hockey total.”

 

More than forty years have passed since Paul Croke broke tackles, batted leadoff, and lit the lamp in the O.C.L.  He’s played almost every sport you can think of and played most of them well.  Very well.  He was an Old Colony League All-Star in two sports in addition to being named a high school All-American.  His high school teammates still hold him up as the best pure all-around athlete they’ve ever met.  His Choate teammates remind him every year that their record for most total points for one line in a season still stands unbroken.  Paul takes it all in stride.  And he still claims that golf and swimming are the two toughest sports to learn, practice, and improve at.  Paul and his wife Vickie have two daughters – Hannah and Olivia.  They live in Halifax, MA.

 

 

Edited December 3, 2019