Garry Kearns is a

Canadian Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...

retired

ice hockey Ice hockey (or simply hockey in North America) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an Ice rink, ice skating rink with Ice hockey rink, lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. Tw ...

head coach and player who was in charge of the program at Rensselaer for five seasons.

Career

Kearns joined the Rensselaer program a year after it won its first national title in

1954 Events January * January 3 – The Italian broadcaster RAI officially begins transmitting. * January 7 – Georgetown–IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system is held in New York, at the head ...

. After sitting out his freshman year (a standard practice at the time), Kearns joined the varsity squad for the 1955–56 season and led the engineers in goals (26), assists (32) and points (58), finishing in a tie for second in NCAA scoring. despite his superlative campaign the Engineers finished third out of four teams in the

Tri-State League The Tri-State League was the name of six different circuits in American minor league baseball. History The first league of that name played for four years (1887–1890) and consisted of teams in Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia. The second league ...

and were left out of the NCAA tournament. The following year Kearns scoring prowess declined but the Engineers managed to win their conference title. Unfortunately they were once again passed over as second-place Clarkson had a superior record (18-2 compared to RPI's 14-6-1). For his senior season Kearns was named as

team captain In team sport, captain is a title given to a member of the team. The title is frequently honorary, but in some cases the captain may have significant responsibility for strategy and teamwork while the game is in progress on the field. In eithe ...

and responded with a resurgent 56 points in 21 games. Despite this the Engineers were left out of the tournament yet again after finishing second to the powerhouse Golden Knights in their conference. After graduating Kearns pursued a short professional career with Milwaukee of the United States Central Hockey League then turned to coaching high school hockey. In 1964 Kearns returned to

Troy, New York Troy is a city in and the county seat of Rensselaer County, New York, United States. It is located on the western edge of the county, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just northeast of the capital city of Albany, New York, Albany. At the ...

to become the head coach for his

alma mater Alma mater (; : almae matres) is an allegorical Latin phrase meaning "nourishing mother". It personifies a school that a person has attended or graduated from. The term is related to ''alumnus'', literally meaning 'nursling', which describes a sc ...

. Kearns became the fourth head coach in the span of three years and was entering as the program was in its nadir. After three years with virtually no recruits and no athletic scholarships available the ice hockey program was in jeopardy of becoming an afterthought. The team struggled to a 10-10-2 record in his first season but once the last recruited senior class graduated the Engineers slipped to dead-last in the ECAC the next year, finishing 3-19 and being outscored 42 to 161. Kearns' team again finished last in 1966–67 season but almost tripled their win total (8) when his first batch of recruits began hitting the ice. By his fourth year with the program Kearns had gotten the Engineers back to .500 with an 11–11 record and followed that up with a 12-8-1 mark. In 1969 Rensselaer made their first appearance in the ECAC tournament since 1964 and provided the first of only two losses to the dominant

Cornell Cornell University is a private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson White in 1865. Since ...

team headed by Kearns' former coach

Ned Harkness Nevin Donald Harkness (September 19, 1919 – September 19, 2008) was an National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCAA head coach of ice hockey and lacrosse at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cornell University and of ice hockey at Union ...

. With program no longer in dire straits, Kearns left to start a career as an architect. He was inducted into the Peterborough & District Sports Hall of Fame in 2010 and the RPI hockey ring of honor the following year.

College Head Coaching record

Source:

Awards and honors

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kearns, Garry 1935 births Living people RPI Engineers men's ice hockey players RPI Engineers men's ice hockey coaches Ice hockey people from Peterborough, Ontario Canadian ice hockey forwards AHCA Division I men's ice hockey All-Americans 20th-century Canadian sportsmen