With college degree, Millen can coach anywhere now

Cloquet hockey great Corey Millen has seen it all - from the time he laced up his first pair of skates to his current position as an assistant coach with the Des Moines Buccaneers of the United States Hockey League.

"I am really enjoying where I am at right now," Millen said via phone last week. "Since leaving Cloquet a couple of years ago, I've had my plate pretty full."

That is an understatement. While he was back home, Millen coached the Cloquet-based Minnesota Wilderness to the Robertson Cup and the championship of the North American Hockey League in the 2014-2015 season. He coached one more season in Cloquet after that, then moved on to become an undergraduate assistant for his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.

"One of my goals has always been to coach at the college level, but, because I didn't have my four-year degree, that eliminated me from those types of positions," the two-time Olympian said. "I always thought coaching at the college level would be a lot of fun because of the age of the kids. So I went back to college and got the degree - now we'll see what it leads to."

The 1982 Cloquet graduate played for the 1984 and 1988 U.S. Olympic teams. In 1988, while playing at the Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, he was Team USA's leading scorer with 11 points in the six games.

A check of the University of Minnesota record book shows Millen is still third all-time in scoring. When you start looking at the players who have played for Minnesota it is an amazing accomplishment. Guys like Neil Broten, Scott Bjugstad, John Pohl, Steve Christoff, Rob McClanahan, are just a few of the greats who played for Minnesota and none of them have scored more points. In fact, only John Mayasich and Pat Micheletti scored more points in their college careers and Micheletti played 11 more games than did Millen. Millen averaged 2.03 points compared to Micheletti's 1.66 points per game.

He played eight seasons in the NHL. Millen started with the New York Rangers and also played for the Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils and Calgary Flames.

"What I like about coaching is it really is the closest thing to playing the actual game," Millen said. "It is a great way to stay in the game, but it is also extremely difficult because there just aren't a lot of positions for coaching at the Division I college level."

Following his one-year stint at Minnesota, Millen was hired as director of hockey operations at the Air Force Academy by another northern Minnesota native, Frank Serratore.

"Almost all colleges now have a director of hockey operations, but they all use it in a different way," Millen said. "I worked with a lot of video and tried to help out wherever I could. Air Force is a well oiled machine and have a really good staff and they do a heck of a job, so that was a good experience there."

After last season Millen was looking to get back behind the bench. He landed a job as an assistant coach for the Des Moines Buccaneers under Gene Reilly, who has been an assistant coach at Maine, Harvard, Northeastern, Colorado College and UMass-Lowell. Reilly was part of the 1999 Division I National Championship program for Maine.

"He's a great coach with a lot of knowledge," Millen said. "What I enjoy is that it is back to coaching and basically doing everything. When you're in junior hockey you are doing video. You're arranging this and tweaking that. You're doing a bunch of different things and it is a good experience. It is just good to be back on the ice and coaching."

"I like this level of hockey," Millen said. "The guys listen and try and learn as much as they can."

Still, the ultimate goal for Millen is to become a Division 1 college coach.

"There are only 60 of those head coaching jobs available," Millen said. "Each team has a couple of assistant coaches, so you can see there just are not a lot of jobs open. You have to be in the right place at the right time and have the right contacts."

Getting that college degree "was a huge step for me," Millen said. "It was really tough to get done. Going back to school after being away for so long was not easy. School has changed and the technology is so much different, but I am really happy that I got it done."