URI honors founding father of South County hockey with jersey retirement
SOUTH KINGSTOWN – The South County hockey scene used to run out of the West Warwick Civic Center.
That’s where the University of Rhode Island played its home games. There was no ice time available for South County high schools, and none of them offered hockey anyway.
Everything changed in 2002 when Boss Arena opened on the URI grounds. It gave the area a love for the sport that simply didn’t exist prior.
On Monday, URI held a jersey retirement ceremony for the building’s namesake, Bradford R. Boss. It may have been long overdue for the man responsible for helping bring hockey to South County. The now-91-year-old Navy veteran and URI graduate gave a speech on the ice and looked up to watch his No. 8 blue jersey be unveiled behind the scorer’s side glass, prior to URI’s 4-1 win over the U.S. Naval Academy.
“You think of a player having his jersey retired, you think of Bobby Orr,” said Boss, who was a founding member of URI’s hockey club in 1951, in an interview after the ceremony. “I was an okay player. I was not fast, but I love the game. And you give back to the game and try, in doing so, to make it better.”
Around the turn of the century when former CVS Health CEO Thomas M. Ryan helped fund URI’s basketball arena, Boss pitched in on the condition that a hockey arena would be built as well. The Ryan Center broke ground in 2000, and Boss Arena did the same in 2001.
Boss is a member of the URI Athletic Hall of Fame, having excelled at sailing and tennis in addition to hockey. He made his fortune as an executive at the A.T. Cross Company, which is a high-quality pen manufacturing company based in Providence.
Since his graduation in 1955, Boss has always remained involved with URI athletics. He’s still a hardcore fan of the Rams’ hockey team, and he follows the local high school scene.
“Obviously, we probably should have [retired Boss’s jersey] long ago. He's so good to the university and the hockey program,” said URI head coach Joe Augustine, who’s in his 35th year at the helm for the Rams. “You look at the youth hockey down here, [Boss Arena] has made a world of difference for high school hockey and the whole nine yards. I don't even know where we would be or where the hundreds of hundreds of kids that come through the program and the high school programs would be. It's all because of him.”
Boss went to Cranston High School where he played hockey, as detailed in his on-ice speech along with stories of the URI hockey program and his family. The arena houses a plaque dedicated to his father, W. Russell Boss Jr., who’s credited as a founder of youth hockey in Rhode Island as a whole.
According to the Rhode Island Hockey Hall of Fame, back in 1974, the state of Rhode Island approved URI to build a $3 million ice forum on campus, named after Henry H. Mackal who gave a large donation to the project. URI announced the arena would be ready by 1976, but the project hit snags and was eventually canceled.
URI continued to play at the since-closed Mid-State Arena before moving to West Warwick in the 1980s. There was no organized high school hockey in South County prior to Boss Arena’s opening in 2002, which is when North Kingstown’s program put on its own sweaters for the first time, followed by Narragansett, South Kingstown and Prout in 2004.
“I can’t tell you the number of times when I came back after the Navy trying to build hockey up, and I heard, ‘Hockey will never sell in South County,’” Boss said. “They said, ‘It’s strictly a place in Providence, up near Mount Saint Charles and Burrillville, and never around here.’ It was probably an excuse because they didn’t want to go forward with a lot of stuff. But you look at it now, and that’s where we are.”
The building’s opening also led to the URI men’s hockey program finding more success.
The Rams play out of the ESCHL conference which is a part of the ACHA Division I – separate from NCAA Division I. In the first year playing at their new home arena, the Rams went 12-5-2 in league games. The next three years, they went a combined 58-0 against league opponents (109-9-5 overall), capped off by winning the ACHA D-I National Championship in 2006.
URI also added women’s hockey just prior to the arena’s completion, and the program took off in their home arena as well.
“As soon as this building was built, it was a game-changer,” Augustine said. “It's night and day.”
Plans to retire Boss’s jersey were contingent on doing it against the U.S. Naval Academy, a symbolic gesture to Boss’s career in the Navy that spanned from July 1955 to October 1958 and followed by over five more years in the reserve.
URI planned to do it last season when the Naval Academy visited in October, but problems with Boss Arena’s ice moved the game to Lynch Arena in Pawtucket and delayed the jersey retirement. On Monday, the ceremony went on as planned.
“I think the jersey represents part of my love for the sport,” Boss said. “What I’m proud of is this is an example, with the arena, of my contributions to help, I guess, the sport’s arrival… I can’t say the No. 8 is in your face, not at all. I just think it’s something that [shows] I love the sport, I contributed to it a little bit, and I think it’s a culmination of my love of the game.”
