Long trip worth it for Penner, Bears

BOSTON – It’s a long way from Manitoba to Maine, but when you’re willing to drive eight hours to a hockey camp you’re not even sure you want to attend, what’s a couple-thousand-mile college recruiting trip?

And if there’s a Division I college hockey scholarship offer waiting in the wings, why not?

So it was that the University of Maine’s game-winning goal against Boston College Thursday night – a goal that sends the Bears to their fifth national championship game – originated all the way back in Winkler, Manitoba, a little more than two years ago when Maine assistant coach Grant Standbrook first spied Dustin Penner.

“I played my last year of high school and there was nowhere to go for me,” said the 6-foot-4, 230-pound second-line forward. “I was deciding whether to quit hockey. Then my cousin called me up and told me I should try out for his team in Bottineau.”

Minot State University-Bottineau (N.D.) played mostly exhibition games and Penner was relegated to the fourth line that first season, but his size, along with his productivity, began to increase impressively.

“When I first went to Bottineau, I was 6-3, 185, and by the next year, I was 6-4, 215. Then I was 6-4, 220, the next year. I just grew into my body and grew stronger,” said the junior redshirt.

Penner’s second season forced people to take notice of his blooming talent as he accumulated 30 points in 23 games.

Several solid Major Junior teams were actively recruiting Penner, but then fate took a turn as Standbrook decided to attend a camp, that same camp that Penner wasn’t too sure he wanted to attend.

“There was a long weekend in the summer and my wife had us in a pairs golf competition and she wasn’t happy that I was leaving to go to Saskatoon to a hockey clinic with players from squirt and peewee to bantam, midget, and junior,” Standbrook said. “I really went for one reason, to see a defenseman who contacted us, and Dustin happened to be in that particular game. He played really well and caught my attention.”

Standbrook, the only American college hockey coach present at the MVP Discovery Camp, asked Penner how he had somehow escaped the attention of college coaches and sold him on the idea of checking out NCAA Division I.

“He was going to junior college in North Dakota, but he broke his leg his first year and his career was virtually over after playing in a league that’s not as competitive as our leagues, so I was trying to find out how he’d done against that competition,” said Standbrook.

When Standbrook learned that some of that team’s outside competition included the traditional powerhouse Warroad (Minn.) Lakers, he was sold.

And Penner was soon sold on Maine.

“I didn’t know if I should even go there or whether it was a waste of my time, but I scored something like 14 goals in five games, and then I got this card from a kid after the game and it said Grant Standbrook on it,” said Penner, 21. “So I go ‘What’s this?’ and I went upstairs looking for him.”

Standbrook convinced him to come take a look at Maine, and that was it.

“I came here one summer and it was unbelievable. I loved it,” Penner said.