As college students at Arizona’s universities and community colleges prepare this weekend for their upcoming fall semester final exams, Tucson Roadrunners forward Beau Bennett can (yet again) relate.
For one, Bennett’s Roadrunners (19-5-0-0), the class of the American Hockey League so far, could see their winning percentage jump to .800 for the season with a win Friday at the San Antonio Rampage (10-9-5-2). Faceoff is at 6 p.m.
To be sure, with that .800 mark, the Roadrunners set the AHL curve by posting the league’s highest win percentage. Tucson has, no doubt, earned an “A,” with its own midterms fast approaching.
But Bennett has aced the fall 2019 semester on his own, too — albeit more literally.
“I just turned in my final yesterday,” Bennett said earlier this month after a post-road trip practice at Tucson Arena. “I got a 95%.”
In between assessing scouting reports and the adjustments Tucson coach Jay Varady is making to the Roadrunners own system of play, Bennett has spent much of the past few months also studying up on mass communication theory, or, more specifically, “Media Issues in American Pop Culture.”
“MCO 240,” he said, proudly — that being the course number of the aforementioned first class of the degree program he’s enrolled in via the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University; his bachelor’s degree will be in mass communication and media studies.
“I enrolled, I want to say, in 2016. Once it came down to actually getting classes, I kind of put it off to the side,” he said. “But this year, I finally told myself, ‘I need to do this.’”
On the ice, virtually simultaneously, Bennett turned a slow start, statistically speaking, into a point-per-game pace.
While he missed Tuesday’s win over the Iowa Wild with an upper body injury, Bennett has 10 of his 12 points this season over his last eight games, putting him near the top of the Roadrunners scoring chart over that time.
Bennett isn’t new to the idea of college — or even figuring out how to balance cracking open the books with his evolving hockey career.
Rather than go the Major Junior hockey route, Bennett enrolled ahead of the 2010-11 academic year at the University of Denver — a college hockey powerhouse that afforded him the opportunity to work toward a mass communication-related degree while competing at the NCAA Division I level.
But he left school early, turning pro after two years of college that saw him notch 14 goals and 38 points in 47 games. Since then, the 28-year-old veteran of exactly 200 NHL games and more than 100 AHL contests. He said that over his seven-year pro career that’s taken him from Pittsburgh, to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to St. Louis, to Chicago, briefly to Belarus and now Tucson he’s had it in the back of his mind that he’ll be finishing his degree — and sooner rather than later.
“I know both my parents are proud of me … but my sister is about to graduate (college) in a year, and my brothers both graduated,” he said. “So I don’t want to be the only kid who didn’t graduate. Even though I went and played hockey, I really want to have a degree.”
Added Kirk Bennett, Beau’s father: “He made a promise to me that he’d get his degree. It’s not like I would treat him any differently, but he knows what it’s like when a dad makes a promise, or a mom makes a promise to a kid. You want to uphold that promise, and it gives you credibility. That’s what he’s doing now.”
While Beau Bennett said he was about half done with a degree at Denver, only about half of those credits were transferable to ASU. He estimates that he’s about one-quarter to one-third done with a typical four-year program.
The difference this go-round, though, is that Bennett isn’t heading to lecture halls or getting in line at a dining hall. Rather, he’s in an online program and able to keep up with his studies on his own time — that being when games, practices, team meetings and, of course, lengthy road trips give way.
“I actually like going at my own speed. At one point I was, I think, five weeks ahead of the class,” he said, noting that he relishes the idea of challenging himself off the ice while still fighting for another NHL shot.
Bennett said it’s just a coincidence he signed with the Arizona Coyotes organization — he’s on a one-year, two-way deal that allowed the NHL club to assign him to Tucson so far this season — while already enrolled at ASU. Although he laughs whenever anyone brings up how he jokingly — via Twitter — committed to ASU all the way back in 2014, when it was announced that the Sun Devils would add men’s ice hockey as an NCAA Division I sport.
“I love being in Arizona, I guess,” he said adding that eventually graduating from ASU isn’t necessarily about finding something to do for work once his hockey career is over.
“I just want to prove to myself I can do it,” he said. “I always like to keep my brain going. I’m not a huge video gamer or anything like that. Everyday, I go grab a crossword. I do a crossword while I eat lunch – just to keep my brain on. So I figured I might as well use that time doing classwork and finish this degree.”
