$900 AND A BAG OF CLOTHES: GREG CRONIN'S PATH TO THE IOWA WILD
Aug 5, 2025This article originally appeared in Issue 22 of Wild Times Magazine.
$900 A BAG OF CLOTHES
Greg Cronin graduated from Colby College in 1986 without a plan. For several months, he worked odd jobs around Boston, repairing roofs and building decks with his cousins. One day, he overheard people talking about New Zealand.
“I don’t know what motivated me to do it,” said Cronin. “The light bulb went off in my head.”
Cronin, who had previously traveled outside of New England sparingly, mostly for hockey tournaments, left Boston with a bag of clothes and $900 in his pocket. For seven months, he worked his way around the world, spending time in California, Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia.
“I just roughed it,” said Cronin. “I worked different jobs. I stayed in youth hostels. I stayed on park benches. I hitchhiked. I bought a car at an auction in New Zealand. It was the first time in my life that I was on my own. I'd meet people at hostels and get jobs from sheep farms to boat yards to construction sites because I had to make money.”
Cronin describes the trip as his first real taste of managing his own resources and attitude on a daily basis.
“It creates a real black and white world,” said Cronin. “You’re either going to be on a park bench or find a place to stay.”
GETTING STARTED
Cronin returned to Boston in the spring of 1987, where he decided to give coaching a try under Michel Goulet, his former head coach at Colby College.
“I kind of liked it, but wasn’t sure I wanted to do it,” said Cronin.
After one season at Colby College, Cronin elected to continue his education at the University of Maine, pursuing a master's degree in business while holding a graduate assistant position with the hockey team. After two seasons with Maine, Cronin joined Colorado College for three years before returning to the Black Bears.
Maine was led by head coach Shawn Walsh and assistant coach Grant Standbrook, who built the team into a powerhouse throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
“Shawn Walsh and Grant Standbrook were the biggest mentors I had in coaching to this day,” said Cronin. “I caught on to an identity coaching with those guys that motivated me to stay in it.”
Walsh, a young, brash coach, was in the process of elevating the University of Maine from an afterthought in Hockey East into a perennial powerhouse. When reflecting on what drove Walsh’s success in upending Hockey East’s hierarchy, Cronin cites Walsh’s organizational skills, ability to communicate his vision, and willingness to hire people who would challenge him.
“His organizational skills allowed him to have credibility when he communicated his vision for Maine hockey,” said Cronin. “It was extremely attractive to people in recruiting, and he took guys from the traditional powers of the Hockey East. He hired people based upon their talent and their ability to make the environment around him better.”
Standbrook possessed a unique ability to demonstrate how athleticism and skills from different sports translated to hockey. Cronin still remembers watching Standbrook lead post-practice skills development sessions.
“Paul Kariya was the poster child for this,” said Cronin. “He chose Maine over every school because of Shawn and Grant, but it was mostly Grant. Paul had this incredible appetite to get better all the time and Grant was going to be the guy serving him that menu.”
Maine was able to pull some players away from traditional powers but generally had to do more with less. Despite not having top talent, the Black Bears kept winning.
“We were the most prepared because Shawn was so organized,” said Cronin. “We were a team because his vision was communicated and ran through everybody. The expectation for the standard and style of play was constantly recycled and communicated from the first line through the fourth line. The collaboration ran through Grant, who could take those competitive advantages and convert those into on-ice performance.”
“The stuff that they did, I still do. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
A NEW PROGRAM
During the summer of 1996, prominent figures from the American hockey community convened in Boston to address glaring shortcomings in international play. Apart from the 1980 Olympics, the USA had struggled to medal, much less win, in Olympic, World Junior, and World Championship appearances.
Jeff Jackson, who won two national championships as the head coach of Lake Superior State University and another as an assistant, was tasked with building USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program (USNTDP) from the ground up.
“Lake Superior State and Maine were a couple of the programs that were doing more with less,” said Cronin. “They were looking to find people who could run, organize, and build a program based upon that identity.”
Jackson brought on Cronin and Bob Mancini, the head coach of Michigan Tech, to help build development and recruiting models.
“The development plan wasn’t uniquely mine,” said Cronin. “It was Grant’s and it was Sean’s. He was hiring me because he wanted that Maine capital, that competitive advantage to help build the USA program. We sat in a hotel and talked about it for hours about how we did it at Maine, down to skill development and off-ice conditioning. Back then, nobody had strength and conditioning coaches. Nobody really had weight rooms, for God’s sakes.”
The nascent program was based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan due to its proximity to other junior teams and heralded public school systems. Players lived with local billet families to ease the transition as they relocated.
“Very few people in New England and Minnesota were leaving their homes as sophomores in high school,” said Cronin. “You had to include schooling so the parents could feel comfortable.”
Jackson, Mancini, and Cronin dove headfirst into recruiting and scouting, traversing the country to evaluate players over the course of eight months. After developing scouting profiles, they held an invitational tournament and chose a pair of teams.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t think we’d make it,” said Cronin.
The project proved doubters wrong, with the United States reaching its first gold medal game at the 1997 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships and earning a silver medal after losing 2-0 to Canada in the final game. The United States, which had previously won bronze twice in 23 trips to the World Juniors, has since won seven gold medals, another silver, and five bronzes.
GOING PRO
Representing the United States opened doors for Cronin in his journey to coaching to the NHL. While coaching at the 1997 World Junior Championships, Cronin ran into Gordie Clark, the Director of Player Personnel and assistant coach for the New York Islanders.
“We were just talking hockey, and he asked me my goals and what I wanted to do,” said Cronin. “I said, ‘Well, I want to get this program up and running, and I want to coach in the NHL someday.’”
As the USNTDP built momentum and credibility, Cronin’s profile as a coach also grew. With the Islanders in search of assistant coaches, Clark offered to put Cronin in front of Mike Milbury, the team’s General Manager who had served in the same role for Team USA at the 1996 and 1997 World Championships.
Cronin joined the Islanders as an assistant coach in 1998, serving in that role for five seasons before leading Bridgeport, the team’s primary AHL affiliate, from 2003-05. He also worked as the Islanders’ Director of Player Development from 2002-05.
“Mike had the bright idea to accelerate development by creating summer opportunities for kids to train them,” said Cronin. “Zdeno Chara, Tim Connolly, Roberto Luongo, Raffi Torres, and tons of other guys all went through it. It didn’t really gain traction until around 2009 or 2010, when you started to see more player development coaches.”
During the mid-2000s, hockey was approaching another significant change. The prevalence of fighting, which had been a prominent part of the game for decades, was beginning to draw increase scrutiny and would decrease drastically following the 2012-13 NHL lockout.
“The biggest difference is that there were fights every game,” said Cronin. “Teams carried 11 forwards because the 10th and 11th forwards would fight. Each NHL team had four or five heavyweight fighters, and they needed them because guys would get hurt.”
“After the lockout, the development piece of it all picked up. From a stylistic perspective, that’s the biggest change. The pugilistic style of game got replaced by skill and playmaking.”
Cronin spent the 2005-11 seasons as the Head Coach of Northeastern University before taking on an assistant role with the Toronto Maple Leafs (2011-14) and returning to the Islanders (2014-18). In 2018, he became the Head Coach of the Colorado Eagles, bringing his development experience to the AHL in support of the Colorado Avalanche over the course of five seasons (2018-23).
“We sent 30 players into the NHL,” said Cronin. “Guys like Callahan Burke, who was an undrafted free agent. I think that out of those 30 guys, 14 of those were undrafted signings, which was really unusual.”
“Colorado kept trading draft picks to get better for the Stanley Cup runs. Only four or five players out of those 30 were first-round picks. The rest were after the first round or undrafted free agents.”
In a new age of hockey, Cronin drew from his roots at Maine to build processes that prepared players for success at the next level.
“AJ Greer’s career really jump started with us and he just won the Stanley Cup with Florida,” said Cronin. “Logan O’Connor and Pavel Francouz were in that first group with Colorado that went on to win the Stanley Cup with the Avalanche.”
“It’s not unlike what we did in Anaheim the last two years. There’s so many young players who are going to take off; McTavish, Zellweger, Carlsson, LaCombe, Colangelo. They were all a part of the same process we’ll use with the Iowa Wild.”
SURF’S UP
Iowa’s new head coach loves to travel. He has been to Korea, Taiwan, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, China, the Alps, and numerous other places. Sometimes, he hikes. Other times, he surfs.
Cronin started to surf shortly after he moved to Long Island. He would run on the beaches and see people out in the water on their boards, something he hadn’t seen in Boston.
“I thought to myself, ‘jeez, that looks fun,’” said Cronin. “I just got into it. Just like anything, it’s practice, practice, practice.”
Cronin taught himself to surf, which was a humbling experience. Lessons from strangers ultimately helped him learn proper technique.
“The guy that turned the light bulb on for me was this old Navy guy who was watching me in Newport Beach,” said Cronin. “The water was like, 65 degrees, and I didn’t have a wetsuit, so I’d freeze, run onto the beach, lay out like a strip of bacon, try to warm up, and go back out.”
Cronin says he can still remember the face of the man who came up to him while he was warming up on the beach.
“I can’t believe you’re getting up,” said the man.
Cronin thanked him, thinking it was a compliment.
“No, you’re doing it all wrong. Your feet are all over the place. I’ve never seen anybody get on the board like you’re doing.”
When Cronin stood up on his board, his toes would face directly toward the nose of the board. It was a small miracle that it didn’t shoot out from under him every time, but it had worked so far.
“I was getting up with both feet pointing toward the beach,” said Cronin. “I had crazy balance, I guess. Hockey, right?”
The man drew a surfboard in the sand and showed Cronin the stringer, or the board’s center line. He had Cronin practice push-ups on the beach and aligned his feet properly. The final piece of advice was to use his head and shoulders like a steering wheel.
“How long have you been doing things like this?” asked the man.
“Two summers,” replied Cronin.
“Oh my god,” exclaimed the man. “You’re going to see a different world of surfing. Go back out there and do what I told you.”
Cronin did, and the teaching worked to perfection.
"I couldn’t believe how easy it was,” he remembers. “That’s how I learned.”
FREEZE, FLEE, OR FIGHT
In Cronin’s travels, he has found that he is someone who likes to challenge himself.
“Every experience in life is going to provoke a response,” said Cronin. “Humans are going to fight, they’re going to freeze, or they’re going to run. Everybody’s different, you know.”
"If you run towards it, you obviously have to have some intelligence to calculate the potential damage. I’m not that much of a madman that I’ll put myself in danger, but the more you challenge yourself, I think the more profound of an understanding you have of yourself.”
Discerning how to motivate others to push themselves is an important part of coaching, one that Cronin is acutely aware of in the changing environment of professional hockey.
“Some players won't push themselves to a place where they could actually realize a greater level of talent,” said Cronin. “Ultimately, it’s our job to get them to perform at the highest possible level.”