After toiling for parts of 14 seasons in the ECHL and AHL as a coach, Jared Bednar finally reached the NHL when the Colorado Avalanche hired him to be coach during the 2016 offseason. In his three full seasons as coach, the Avalanche has improved from a non-playoff team to an appearance in last spring’s postseason.
While he got his start in the NHL in Rocky Mountains, he got his start as a player in the Appalachian Mountains as a 21-year-old playing for a popular Penguins enforcer.
After completing his junior career in 1993, Bednar signed with the Huntington Blizzard, an expansion ECHL franchise in southwestern West Virginia and spent parts of three seasons with that franchise.
“It was good,” Bednar said when the Avalanche visited Pittsburgh in October. “I went down there, it was an expansion team my first year. We got beat up a little bit then I spent parts of two more seasons there. That’s where I met my wife. She’s from Huntington. Spent some time there in the offseason as well. Then ended up getting traded down to South Carolina. … Lots of good memories there. Still good buddies with some of the guys I played with there.”
Bednar’s time with the Blizzard was primarily distinguished by his rambunctiousness as he reached triple digits in penalty minutes in each of his two complete seasons in Huntington He racked up 115 penalty minutes as a first-year professional in 1993-94 then led the team with a robust 215 in 1994-95.
He had an accomplished mentor for that aspect of the game.
Bob “Battleship” Kelly.
The former enforcer, who was perhaps the Penguins’ most popular player in the 1970s, served as the Blizzard’s head coach for its inaugural season of 1993-94.
“He was quite a character,” Bednar said. “I remember talking to him. He was a rough-and-tumble guy obviously. That was a little bit of my game. I was able to sit down and pick his brain over the course of a season there and talk with him and try to get some tips and take anything along that I could implement in my game from his experiences. He was real good to me down in Huntingdon for sure.”
