SARANAC LAKE — When Saranac Lake native Patrick Keough moved to McLean, Virginia in 2017, he was finally ready to step away from coaching hockey and to “be a parent for a change.”

But after hearing that the two coaches for his son’s high school hockey team, the Langley High Saxons, didn’t show up for spring season practices — and after watching a Langley player vape in the penalty box during a game — Keough, who has had over 30 years of coaching experience within multiple USA Hockey programs, had enough.

“That really bothered me,” Keough said. “So, that following Monday I asked the head coach after practice, ‘What are you going to do about that? Are you just going to let that roll?’ They lacked the fortitude to address it.”

He eventually applied for the head coaching job and within one season, the Langley hockey program had completely turned around. The Saxons won the school’s first-ever Northern Virginia Scholastic Hockey League state title. This past March, Langley won its third consecutive title — its fourth in six years. Keough was also named All-Met Coach of the Year by the Washington Post.

To Keough, accolades and win-loss records don’t mean a whole lot to him. He added that he didn’t win the championship.

“I was never on the ice, I never touched the puck,” he said. “I wasn’t the one who won the championship. It’s not my job to win championships. It’s my players’ job to win championships, my job is to build champions. That’s how I approached the game. I believe that there is greatness in every player and I try to get them to focus on that possibility.”

Keough’s goal has always been to build a program and a culture where players can thrive. And after achieving everything he’s set out to achieve in his six seasons at Langley, Keough is hoping to turn around the James Madison University men’s hockey team, which competes in American Collegiate Hockey Association. He officially signed on to be the next head coach a little over one week ago.

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The start

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Keough got his first taste of coaching shortly after he graduated from Saranac Lake in 1978, when he helped coach a bantam hockey team in the Saranac Lake Pee Wee Hockey Association, in between semesters at college.

He had committed to play hockey at West Point Academy following a successful senior hockey season that included Saranac Lake winning its second consecutive Northern Athletic Conference Championships.

While Keough didn’t stay at West Point and left the academy halfway through his first year, he transferred to Siena College in Loudonville. At Siena he was one of the original players of the school’s inaugural hockey team.

After graduating from Siena, he was commissioned in the U.S. Army and spent a few years in uniform. He served mostly in airborne and special operations units, participated in combat operations in Panama in 1989 as well as a number of the other LIC deployments that occurred in the 1980s.

In 1994, Keough was involved with a group of about seven or eight other people who wanted to build a hockey rink in Prince William County, Virginia and start a new ice hockey program. Once it was built, he became the head coach of that club. He was responsible for coaching development of the entire program.

“I began to have some stabilization and I committed to coaching,” he said. “I was very quickly picked up by USA Hockey to be the associate coach and chief for this part of the country. With that came the responsibility to develop and deliver coaching development programs. I got to work with a handful of NHL teams and from 1994 on. I apprenticed myself to become a student of the game and I’ve been fortunate enough to commit a good portion of my life to the game since then.”

While he and his family move around quite a bit, since his wife is the second highest ranking intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, one of his most memorable wins came when coached his daughter’s pee wee hockey team in Chicago, Illinois.

“Whenever we would move to a new location, the first year I was there I was like, ‘Give me whatever team nobody else wants,'” he said. “I don’t want to say her team was the Bad News Bears, but if there is a Bad News Bears of hockey, they were pretty close to it.”

In one of the final games of the season against an undefeated team, Keough’s team trailed by three goals in the final period.

“I remember telling them that we just needed to get on in the net and the rest will follow,” he said.

Despite a few of his players tearing up, because they were losing so bad, Keough’s pee wee squad ended up winning the game.

“It was literally one of the only games they won all year, but it was probably the best win I ever had in my career,” he said.

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Coaching

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Keough remembers sitting in a locker room in between periods in the Olympic Center’s 1932 Rink in the late 1970s.

While in a close game against Lake Placid, then-Saranac Lake boys hockey coach Mark Gilligan waited until the final minutes of the intermission before talking to his players.

“This game will go to the team that wants it more,” Keough remembered Gilligan saying.

“I never forgot that,” Keough said. “I never ever forgot that because as it turned out … so many things in life come down to how much you are willing to commit to it.”

While serving in the military, Keough said he faced a lot of challenges in that world.

“(But) in the back of my mind I could always hear Gilligan saying, ‘This all comes down to how bad you want it,'” he said.

And after coaching for more than 30 years, across nearly ever level of hockey and in five different states — New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia and Texas — Keough says he often thinks about how much that Saranac Lake Pee Wee Hockey Association had an affect on my life.

“That says a lot about the people that put the work into that 50 years ago,” he said. “I still think back to Mr. Perras’ ‘Shamboni,’ I think back to all of the dads that would be on the Petrova rink, clearing snow and going out there in the middle of the night to flood the rink and it’s a pretty amazing experience.”

Keough said hockey was a pretty big deal back in those days. Saranac Lake had cheerleaders for hockey games and it was a full-on community event.

“You think back to the ’60s and the ’70s, there were no distractions,” he said. “There was no internet and there was no gaming. In the winter, you either played hockey or you skied or you had nothing to do.”

The game of hockey has drastically changed over the course of 50 years, from a much more “full-on violent game” to a game built on speed and skill, he said.

“We could get in full-on fist fights in a high school game and the most you got was five minutes for fighting,” Keough said. “There were no face masks back then — they came on toward the end of my high school career. There was no face masks, mouth guards were optional and equipment wasn’t great. It was a violent game, you could get in a fist fight. That was part of the game. The primary, defense thing that the sport pushed for was to separate the man from the puck and if possible separate the man from consciousness. There was no finesse to the game, it was just about overpowering them.”

Everything began to change following the the 1980 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, according to Keough. Television got better and people could see the finesse that European hockey players were teaching and playing.

He approaches the game by making sure his players focus on possessing the puck, while assisting them in their decision making.

“Back in the day, everything was about what to think and now today it’s all about how to think and decision making,” he said. “So training my players to give them a framework for decision making. That is the key.”

Keough added that, within sports, it’s important for kids to learn things about themselves and about life that will help them later and will prepare them for the bigger picture of life. He aims to show them through hardwork and patience.

Shortly before Langley’s playoff run this season, Keough decided to add a senior hockey player who had been on Langley’s JV squad for the past four years. Keough wanted him to be a part of the team after years of consistently working to get better.

When Langley won the state championship, the player’s father walked right up to Keough.

“He comes over and put his hands around me and gives me this big bear hug,” Keough said. “He just said ‘Thank you, you just changed the course of my son’s life.’ That’s the only s*** that counts in coaching.”