Category: Sports

Frank Seravalli was standing behind the players’ bench at Bucks County Ice Sports Center when his phone buzzed. He didn’t reach for it — which is not his usual instinct.

Seravalli, a former Daily News reporter, is one of only a handful of NHL insiders. His job is to talk to athletes and decision makers around the league. Missing a call or a text can mean missing a story, and in a competitive media environment, in which quick, accurate information comes at a premium, being “late” isn’t ideal.

But on Jan. 12, in the midafternoon, Seravalli was busy. He was coaching Germantown Academy’s varsity hockey team. It was the third period and the Patriots were up, 6-2, in a rematch against Episcopal (5-2 on the aging scoreboard, which was missing a number).

Despite their lead, Seravalli’s players didn’t relent. With 35.6 seconds remaining, sophomore Mick Tronoski fired another shot into the net. A smattering of fans cheered.

After the two groups shook hands, Seravalli walked off the ice. He pulled his phone from his pocket, and read that the Columbus Blue Jackets had fired their head coach, Dean Evason.

He retweeted a team statement, 27 minutes late. The NHL insider shrugged.

“I mean, it’s just life, right?” he said. “What are you going to do?”

Since July, Seravalli, 37, has served as GA’s head hockey coach. It is a daily commitment, one that he takes as seriously as his podcast and TV hits for various outlets. Five times a week, Seravalli oversees hourlong practices, and coaches hour-and-a-half games, with some 7 a.m. morning lifts mixed in.

He is not above doing the grunt work, either, like ordering gear, setting the schedule, and keeping the team’s stats. He reviews film, plans workouts, and runs the middle school program, all while keeping an eye on promising players in the area.

NHL insiders do not have an abundance of free time, so when Seravalli first told his family that he’d be coaching high school hockey, they thought the idea was absurd. And maybe it is a little absurd. Seravalli is not an alumnus of Germantown Academy. He is not doing this for the small stipend he gets halfway through the year.

But he is doing it for a reason. Just over two years ago, Seravalli’s cousin, Anthony Seravalli, died unexpectedly. He was 41 and left behind a wife and three sons.

Frank always looked up to him. Anthony was mature for his age, even as a teenager. He was a team captain and a star defenseman at Germantown Academy in the late-1990s, back when the school was winning Flyers Cups and producing NHL-caliber talent.

GA hockey’s stature has diminished since then. New York Rangers goalie great Mike Richter once played for the Patriots, but for years, the program was essentially dormant. Local recruiting wasn’t a priority. It was unclear whether there would be enough players to field a team in 2025-26.

Until Seravalli arrived. He has told the school he’s willing to make a five-to-10-year commitment to restore the program to what it was. In his mind, this is the best way to honor his late cousin.

“I thought of him, and how big high school hockey was 25 to 30 years ago, and how I could help make that big again,” Seravalli said. “And I was like, ‘Maybe, this was supposed to happen.’”

A ‘fixture’ of GA hockey

Germantown Academy was an unlikely hockey powerhouse in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. The coed school had an enrollment of only 1,200 students, from kindergarten through 12th grade. These numbers allowed the Patriots to fill only one varsity team most years.

It paled in comparison to some of the bigger programs in the area, like La Salle College High School, which was able to fill four teams (one varsity and three junior varsity).

Nevertheless, GA found success. Players took pride in its underdog identity, especially while playing local behemoths like Council Rock and Malvern Prep. Germantown Academy won two Flyers Cups — the hockey championship for eastern Pennsylvania high schools — in 1982 and again in 1983, and a state championship later that year.

The team won three more Flyers Cups in 1991, 1994, and 1995, and went 100-0-6 in regular-season league play for over five seasons in the mid- to late-1990s.

Anthony Seravalli was a key part of GA’s team. He joined the varsity as a freshman in 1996, and quickly established himself as a leader. Dan McDonald, a defenseman who was two years older, would drive him to school every morning.

The underclassman would rarely — if ever — call out sick with an injury or illness. His teammates estimated that he’d be on the ice for about 70% of Germantown Academy’s games (a hefty workload for a young player). Seravalli was a physical presence, standing at 6-foot-2, with a big windup slap shot that was hard to miss.

He carried no ego, despite his abilities. Anthony was inclusive with all of his teammates, including those who spent more time on the bench. In 1999, a few players got injured, and Seth Gershenson, a self-described “bench guy,” was asked to play some shifts.

Before Gershenson took the ice, Seravalli pulled him aside to give a few words of encouragement.

“He respected my effort and willingness to go out there and get beat up a little bit,” Gershenson said.

Many local players also participated in club hockey. They saw it as a way to get noticed in eastern Pennsylvania, which was not exactly a hotbed for the sport. As a result, club teams often took precedence over high school teams.

But this was not the case for Seravalli. GA always came first. Gershenson referred to him as a “fixture.”

“He took being a captain really, really seriously,” Gershenson said, “and he took the success of GA really seriously. He took pride in our success much more than whatever his club team was doing.”

Frank Seravalli grew up in Richboro, Bucks County, just a few minutes from the Face Off Circle, where Germantown Academy played at the time. By age 6, he was attending games and practices to watch Anthony and another cousin, Jason Jobba.

The elementary school student would stand in the same spot, behind the net, with a fizzy Coke in hand, and his face pressed up close to the glass.

“Watching your cousins who are a bit older, those are your heroes,” Seravalli said. “And for me, that’s part of where my love for the game came from.”

The Seravallis were a big, tight-knit group. Almost everyone played hockey, and almost everyone went to work at the family construction business. This was the path Anthony took, but he also found time to give back to his alma mater.

In 2004, while Frank was playing at Holy Ghost Prep, Anthony returned to GA as an assistant coach. He had a knack for connecting with the players, most of whom were familiar with his high school career.

One example was Brian O’Neill, a GA alum and former U.S. Olympian who is now playing pro hockey in Sweden.

O’Neill was a talented skater, but he lacked defensive fundamentals. This was one of Anthony’s strengths, and when O’Neill was moved to defense in his sophomore year, he began to work with the assistant coach.

Seravalli constantly reminded him to keep “stick on puck.” It was a message that O’Neill had heard for years but never fully understood. That changed when the coach stepped in.

“It was easy for him to sell me on what he was trying to teach, because I had a lot of respect for him as a player and a person,” O’Neill said. “He didn’t really have to earn my trust. That was already there.”

The goal was to put pressure on his opponent, in a way that didn’t involve hitting or cross-checking. The coach ran drills in which O’Neill would hold a puck in his right hand, and the stick in his left, to focus on keeping the stick down.

“It’s amazing,” O’Neill said. “You would think, ‘OK, I can’t grip the stick with my other hand, so I pretty much am playing with one hand,’ and all you can do with that is pretty much stick on puck.

“You would think you would be way worse at defending, but it’s actually the opposite, because all you’re focused on is stick on puck. And you’re not focused on hitting.”

The concept finally clicked. O’Neill, who went on to play in the NHL, still uses it to this day.

“[Anthony] was the guy that gave me the most advice on defense,” he said, “and that definitely made a huge impact on my career.”

‘Please help save our program’

When he was young, Frank Seravalli would visit his family’s construction business in Northeast Philadelphia. He’d often notice workers perusing thick copies of the Daily News over lunch, and dreamed about having a byline someday.

In 2009, that dream became a reality, when the paper hired Seravalli out of Columbia University’s journalism school to cover the Flyers. He stayed for six years, before leaving for the Canadian television network TSN, where he worked as a senior writer and NHL insider.

In 2021, Seravalli started his own business, the Daily Faceoff, which was sold to a media group in Denmark in 2024. He’s now building a hockey network at the streaming service Victory+.

A typical day includes a radio interview in the morning, a podcast taping at noon, and more radio and television hits at night. Interspersed are hours spent texting and calling sources throughout the league.

It is a frenetic lifestyle, one that requires Seravalli to be glued to his phone. Finding time to coach a high school hockey program seemed impractical, if not impossible. But Seravalli was drawn to the idea. So, when he saw the job opening last year, he decided to apply.

The school’s athletic director, Tim Ginter, could only laugh when he read the insider’s resumé. Among his references were two NHL general managers, an executive with the league, and a former NHL head coach.

“He’s like, ‘Call [former Anaheim Ducks head coach] Dallas Eakins,’” said Ginter. “And I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”

Seravalli interviewed for the position in the spring. He talked to two of the team’s captains, J.P. McGill and Joey Lonergan, who explained that their program was in jeopardy.

GA had lost five players in 2025. School officials didn’t know how they were going to fill those spots. McGill and Lonergan had heard stories about the 1990s and 2000s teams, but returning to that level seemed like a long shot.

The Patriots hadn’t played in a Flyers Cup since 2009. After years of shrinking rosters and coaching changes, the team was moved for 2009-10 from the Suburban High School Hockey League to the lesser Independence Hockey League, which isn’t eligible for Flyers Cup entry.

“Essentially their plea was, ‘Please, help save our program,’” Seravalli said. “‘We’re not even sure we’re going to have a team next year.’

“I couldn’t say no at that point. I knew I was hooked.”

Seravalli met with Ginter shortly after. He made a succinct but powerful pitch.

“If you don’t have interest in changing your program, and really tearing it down and rebuilding it, I’m not your guy,” the insider told him. “But if you are interested, I’m willing to make a five-to-10-year commitment to build this the right way.”

He was hired in July. Seravalli rarely mentioned his full-time job, but it didn’t take long for the teenagers to figure it out. One day, while McGill was “doomscrolling” on the internet, he spotted his high school coach on Bleacher Report Open Ice.

His reaction: “Oh [expletive].”

“I texted some of my teammates,” McGill said. “I’m like, ‘He’s the Adam Schefter of the NHL!’”

Added junior defenseman Jack Stone: “He’s a reporter, so obviously he knows what he’s talking about.”

The insider started to use his connections behind the scenes. He’d ask current and former NHL head coaches for advice, among them Eakins, who now works for Adler Mannheim in Germany.

Eakins encouraged Seravalli to model the behavior he wanted to see in his team. He emphasized how important it was to show not only that he cared about the program, but about the players as people.

He also shared some mistakes he’d made in his own coaching career, with the hope that Seravalli could learn from them.

“Sometimes people [will] say, ‘OK, I’m a coach, now I have to take on a different persona,’” Eakins said. “And I told him, don’t do that. Don’t go in there and pretend to be [Florida Panthers head coach] Paul Maurice.

“You’ve got to go in there and be Frank Seravalli. Because as soon as you step outside of that, you’re cooked. You can only pretend to take on this other persona for so long.”

The tenor of the program changed almost immediately. Before Seravalli’s arrival, on-ice practices and team lifts were optional. Sometimes, as few as two or three players would show up. Now, they were mandatory, and everyone was expected to arrive on time.

The teenagers learned this the hard way. In October, during preseason workouts, Seravalli organized morning weightlifting. Two players — who will remain anonymous — slowly waltzed into the gym, 15 minutes late.

Seravalli didn’t say anything in the moment. But after the workout, he brought the team down to the field house to run sprints. The two late arrivals were put on the sideline, so they could watch their peers suffer on their behalf.

“And I just said, ‘Look, we have a standard here,’” said Seravalli. “‘You have to make the commitment that everyone else is to show up on time and be ready.’

“And I’ll tell you what: Since then, no one’s been late.”

The players have embraced the newfound discipline. Stone said it’s something that they didn’t realize they needed, but they’re grateful to have. McGill agreed.

“He’s way more intense than what we’ve had in the past,” McGill said. “Which, to some people, can be intimidating. But if you want to play at a high level, that can’t be intimidating.

“There’s no getting away with anything around here anymore. Frank has done a great job of holding us accountable to what the new standard needs to be.”

A different type of connection

Not long after he was hired, Seravalli moved the team from the Hatfield Ice Arena to the Bucks County Ice Sports Center (formerly known as the Face Off Circle). The building looks just like it did when Anthony was in high school.

The white-and-blue paint is faded, but intact, and so is the thermostat, set to the coldest possible temperature. Five days a week, Seravalli walks past the spot where he stood as a child, watching his cousins with wide eyes, as they swept across the ice.

Anthony’s death was a shock to the entire family. He no longer roams the halls of the construction firm. He is no longer behind the bench at the Face Off Circle.

But when Frank is skating around that rink, with GA students spinning past him, he feels connected to his late cousin.

“I can’t really explain how or why I ended up here,” he said. “I just know that it’s for a reason.”