Forget the image of the duck, placidly coasting along the water’s surface while below, out of sight, his webbed feet churn furiously. The Hilltop boasts an updated version. Anthony Vincent, too, may seem phlegmatic on the surface, but underneath his calm exterior, twin turbines drive this quiet and unassuming sixth former to levels of academic and athletic success that are virtually unprecedented.
Consider. Now in his fourth year at Salisbury, Vincent has achieved High Honors in every one of his ten trimesters on the Hilltop. Over the same span of time, the native of Wilton, Connecticut, has been a four-year member of the varsity hockey team. No other student in the School has achieved the dual distinction of uninterrupted High Honors standing while performing as a four-year varsity athlete. Currently, Vincent carries six courses, among them Economics, Calculus, and AP Environmental Science. As of this writing, five weeks into the winter trimester – and the hockey season – he is carrying A+’s in all six.
Consider. Last year, three members of the Class of 2015 graduated with three New England Prep Hockey Championships apiece to go along with their Salisbury diplomas – the first student-athletes in New England prep hockey to achieve that distinction since the start of post-season tournament play in the late 1970s. Over that four-decade time span, Vincent is the only player in New England to achieve prep hockey championships as a freshman, as a sophomore, and as a junior. This year, his teammates elected him a captain.
People encountering his reserved, well-mannered, and humble demeanor for the first time can be forgiven if they sell Anthony Vincent short. He is not one to draw attention to himself, much less to his extraordinary accomplishments.
What is the well-spring of these accomplishments?
Vincent discovered hockey one afternoon as a five-year-old. He happened on a friend playing in a peewee hockey game at a local rink. He had never seen anything quite like it. To Vincent, his friend seemed to be having the time of his life. “Something sparked,” Vincent explains. He had, in fact, never even skated before. He joined the team. He learned to skate. “I liked the social part, I liked the competition, and I loved winning puck battles,” he recalls of those first few weeks in the sport that would become his greatest passion.
By age eight, Vincent’s skills earned him a place on the Mid-Fairfield Blues, the club he would play for up to his entrance to Salisbury. “Almost every member of the team went off to prep school,” Vincent notes. And what is it like to face them now on opposing teams? “It’s great!” Vincent states without hesitation. “It makes the competition even more intense. But off the ice,” he adds, “we’re right back to being friends.”
Leading the Mid-Fairfield Blues throughout Vincent’s years of youth hockey was Marvin Minkler, a coach whose powerful influence on Vincent and other boys is inestimable. That influence goes a long way toward explaining Vincent’s remarkable achievements both on the ice and in the classroom. As Vincent tells it, “Coach Minkler instilled the message that doing well in school would help us succeed with hockey. He would have us print out our report cards for him. If he saw a weak grade, he would communicate his concern to our parents, work with them and with us to figure out the problem, and help develop a plan for improvement. As a coach, he did not want players distracted by school issues. I learned that doing well in school is the best way to ensure that, whenever I go out on the ice, my only focus is hockey.”
Clearly, Vincent learned that lesson well.
But Minkler’s influence is reflected in other ways, too. With Salisbury’s recent focus on positive and negative images of masculinity, particularly the potential for positive and negative role-modeling by coaches, Vincent’s further observations about Minkler are particularly timely. “I think Coach Minkler, through hockey, has taught me a lot about what it means to be a man,” Vincent states, “as well as reinforcing things that my father and mother always emphasize. Not only doing well in school but overcoming adversity, being tough when situations require it, being resilient, pushing limits, mental as well as physical, not backing down on the ice or in the classroom but instead tackling challenges rather than sitting and sulking.”
Minkler’s influence does not end there. The way he used the idea of family to build a close-knit team made a deep impression on Vincent. Building relationships and supporting teammates, particularly through difficult stretches, has been integral to Vincent’s approach as a member of the Salisbury varsity team, even more so in his role as captain. “Of course captains set an example for teammates to build off of,” Vincent points out, “but it’s just as important to help a teammate when he’s down, support him by finding a way to turn something negative into a positive. Being the ‘alpha male’ is not as important as helping everyone to work together. Supporting each other’s strengths and talents,” Vincent asserts, “builds a stronger community.”
It turns out that Minkler also taught Vincent how to eat. “My mom was a big influence on teaching me how to ‘eat healthy,’” Vincent says, “but hearing Coach Minkler talk about the same things and explain how it could make us more effective hockey players had a huge effect." (And, yes, Vincent has only praise for Salisbury’s dining services and the healthy food choices they make available to the community in the dining hall.) By the way, Vincent himself has become quite adept in making bread, often alongside his mom, and in curing protein-rich beef jerky.
As with most top prep athletes nowadays, Vincent’s sport is a year-round endeavor. He has been a member, for instance, of a “split-season” (i.e. fall) team that includes Salisbury teammates Dayne Finnson, David Jankowski, Jordan Kaplan, and Cole Poliziani. From September to mid-November, the team played two games every weekend. Last fall, they won the regional tournament, earning the right to compete in the national tournament starting on March 31 in San Jose, California.
Summer means hockey camps, such as the National Hockey Training Camp at Berkshire School (Sheffield, Massachusetts) and the Harvard Hockey Camp (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Next summer, Vincent has been invited to work as a shooter at a camp for hockey goalies. Like many top players, he also has a trainer as well as a network of players around home who get together to train or play several times a week throughout the summer.
As a number of top Salisbury players have done in recent years, Vincent hopes to play junior hockey after he graduates, deferring college until fall 2017. Ideally, he will end up at a college with a strong pre-business program along with a Division I hockey program.
Level-headed as ever, Vincent makes no predictions about this year’s prep hockey playoffs and Salisbury’s prospects. He and his teammates, he assure others, know that past records mean nothing - well, except to opponents who “act like they’ve just won the Stanley Cup if they beat us,” Vincent muses. The team focuses on approaching each game the same way, striving to accomplish the same set of goals that will ensure the best chance for success each time they take the ice. It is a formula that has worked awfully well for Head Coach Andrew Will’s hockey teams during his tenure at Salisbury. And it is a formula that Anthony Vincent has applied better than most in his career as a hockey player and a student.
- Procter Smith
