LEWISTON — The Lewiston Maineiacs’ skate blades sliced a bit deeper into the ice at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee on Wednesday. The players had a bit more zip to their strides, they carved out crisp corners and accelerated more quickly with the puck.

After three losses in a row in which they were outscored 18-4, it was a practice the Maineiacs desperately needed.

And they got three of them this week, under the watchful eye of the only player born in Jamaica ever to play in the National Hockey League, Graeme Townshend.

“With a down week like this, sometimes you need something like this for the players,” Maineiacs’ coach Don MacAdam said. “Graeme’s an excellent coach, and you could tell, the boys really responded to him.”

Townshend, who is the skating coach for the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League, emigrated to Toronto when he was just 4. Never a standout player in AAA (Townshend played Junior B as a midget-aged player), he proved many naysayers wrong, following up a four-year NCAA career at RPI with an 11-year career in the NHL, AHL and IHL.

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It should be noted that fellow Jamaican-born skater Peter McNamee played 175 games in the World Hockey Association with the Vancouver Blazers, Phoenix Roadrunners, and San Diego Mariners, but that was before the WHA-NHL merger.

Townshend skated for the Maine Mariners and the Boston Bruins in the late-1980s before stops in New York, PEI and Ottawa, among others. He maintains a house in the Portland area, and returns there for two weeks every month to be with his family.

This time, a friendly call from a former coach (MacAdam coached Townshend with the PEI Senators of the AHL) lured the sure-footed skating instructor to the Colisee, where he went over many of the basics he’s learned through the years. 

“There’s a term used in hockey, ‘power skating,'” Townshend said. “I don’t believe that actually exists. It’s really ‘hockey skating.’ Power skating comes from a figure skating philosophy. That’s initially what happened with hockey, figure skaters came into the game to teach players how to use their edges better. As the game has evolved over the last 30 years, we’ve implemented more of a ‘hockey skating’ style, and that’s come more from Russia.”

Townshend was a student of the game, and particularly skating, from the start.

“More and more players have come over from Europe, and I was an inquisitive guy,” Townshend said. “I marveled at how good they were, and I wanted to learn. I started out with a guy named Paul Vincent in Boston, and what I teach, and what Paul teaches, aside from the edges and technique, is more positiional, tactical skating, depending on the age of the players.”

At the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League level, he said, the players know how to skate — they have for a long time or they wouldn’t be here — but the techniques he teaches are more tactical and strategic, based around on-ice positioning.

“Players at this level, we spend more time on positional skating, and how to get their bodies into better position to defend, better position to score goals,” Townshend said. “These are things that, over the last five or six years in the NHL, with the re-emphasis on the rules the way it’s been, we started to study some of the best players in the game.”

Some of the players, Townshend said, like Detroit’s Niklas Lidstrom, had already adapted their game. So he studied them.

“We’ve developed some drills to teach their skating tactics,” Townshend said. “We had a lot of success in San Jose with that. We had several players who were drafted because of their size, their ability, whatever, but skating was their weakness, and they became prominent players on that team.

“Hockey is one sports that, in my opinion, is still somewhat in the dark ages when it comes to player development,” Townshend continued. “Look at football for example. A kid plays football from the time they’re in Pop-Warner, yet by the time they get to the NFL, what’s one of the first things they teach them how to do? They teach them to block and tackle. You’d think that a guy playing football since age 12 could tackle, but obviously they can’t, because they’re teaching those things. It’s the same thing with hockey. We have to teach guys to shoot the puck again.”

Townshend recalled his first trip to the NHL with the Bruins in 1989 as evidence.

“When I got to the NHL, I thought I was a pretty good player. Then I saw Cam Neely, and I realized maybe I’m not that good after all,” Townshend said. “He explained to me, ‘When I was first in the league, I was primarily a fighter, and I had to work at my game to get better.'”

With help from Townshend, the Maineics took a step in that direction, one of many they hope to take this season.

“Players sometimes just need that confidence, to see that they can play at the next level,” Townshend said.

“We have a good group of skaters on this team, from the beginning that’s been one of our best assets,” MacAdam said. “What Graeme’s brought is a new way of looking at things, and hopefully that will help make us that much better.”

Graeme Townshend, the Toronto Maple Leafs skating coach and a former Maine Mariner works with some of the Lewiston Maineiacs during Wednesday morning’s skate. In the background is Maineiacs coach Don Don MacAdam.

Graeme Townshend, the Toronto Maple Leafs skating coach and a former Maine Mariner talks with Lewiston Maineiacs head coach Don Don MacAdam during Wednesday morning’s skate session.