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Biography & Autobiography General

Turk

One of the NHL’s great coaches: From Summerside to Madison Square Garden

by (author) Fred MacDonald

edited by Glenna Jenkins

Publisher
Acorn Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2024
Category
General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781773661162
    Publish Date
    Oct 2024
    List Price
    $74.85

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Description

Gerard “Turk” Gallant started playing hockey as a young boy in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He moved up through minor hockey, playing above his age group and garnering the attention of major junior teams and the NHL. The Detroit Red Wings drafted him as an eighteen-year-old and he became a rising young star, being selected to an NHL All-Star team the same year he played for Team Canada in the World Championships. When a back injury ended his playing career, Turk applied his talents to coaching.

He began, in 1995, by shaping the Summerside Western Capitals into a winning junior A team. It won the Royal Bank Cup ( now the Centennial Cup) in 1997, the first from the Maritimes to win in the tournament’s twenty-six-year history. In the Quebec league, Turk did the same for the Saint John Sea Dogs, in 2011, as it became the region’s first major junior team to win the coveted Memorial Cup. Stints coaching at the semi-professional level led to a stellar career in the NHL, where he took two teams, the Vegas Golden Knights, in their inaugural year, and the New York Rangers, an Original 6, to the Stanley Cup finals. In 2021, Team Canada won a gold medal, at the World Championship, under Turk Gallant.

Award, which goes to the NHL’s top coach. He won in 2018. He was also inducted into several sports halls of fame. Turk lives in Clinton, PEI, in with his wife Pam.

About the authors

Fred MacDonald was born and raised in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. An athlete throughout his life, he was selected to the Canadian national junior baseball team in 1965. In addition to being a schoolteacher, Fred wrote a Saturday feature covering Island sports for the Charlottetown Guardian, for almost fifty years, and was a popular TV broadcaster with CBC Charlottetown, for nearly a decade. His first literary work recounts 100 years of Maritime harness racing and was published by the Charlottetown Guardian in 2001. A Tale of Two Fiddlers was released in 2021 by Acorn Press Canada. Fred won the PEI Heritage Award in 2001 and the Charlottetown Heritage Award in 2021. He and his wife Gail co-author Atlantic Post Calls, a journal that covers harness racing in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario. They live in Kingston, Prince Edward Island.

Fred MacDonald's profile page

Glenna Jenkins is a writer and editor whose Prince Edward Island roots date back to the early 1800s. Although she comes from a hockey family, she doesn’t claim to have athletic abilities aside from having completed several marathons, triathlons, and cycling gran fondos, and a recent ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Her literary work includes Somewhere I Belong, historical fiction published by Acorn Press Canada and listed in Best Books for Kids & Teens, 2016, and a number of short stories published in anthologies by Acorn Press Canada and MacIntyre Purcell Publishing. In 2016, she won the Atlantic Canada writing competition for memoir. She is presently completing her second novel, a sequel to Somewhere I Belong. She lives in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, with her husband, John.

Glenna Jenkins' profile page

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