MHS Hockey Coach: Players No Longer Looking to Leave

Kurt Mithoefer was a freshman in 1998, the first year Merrimack competed in New Hampshire high school hockey.

That inaugural season, in fact, MHS played only at the junior varsity level.

Though Mithoefer said the team made the playoffs as a varsity squad his senior year, in 2002, the eight campaigns that followed weren't pretty.

The Tomahawks became a perennial cellar dweller, essentially serving as an annual 'W' on the Division II schedule for the likes of Bow, Dover, Goffstown and Spaulding, teams typically among the Division II elite.

That was, of course, until Mithoefer returned to Merrimack as head coach prior to the 2010-'11 season.

Merrimack has made the playoffs each year since, twice clinching the D-II top seed, and Mithoefer said many of the town's top hockey players are now staying at MHS, as opposed to seeking greener and more fruitful pastures at local private schools such as Trinity and Bishop Guertin.

"The kids are staying," he said. "I think the kids are seeing that the program has improved a lot since when it started and now, instead of trying to go to a Trinity or elsewhere, they're saying 'hey, Merrimack's a legit team, they're always in the top four of Division II, maybe I'll stay and have a good career.'"

MHS is expected to return all but two members of its state runner-up unit that fell to Bedford in this year's state championship.