Inside College Hockey | Lucia watches Gophers from pressbox, will miss NoDak series

January 3, 2009

Lucia watches Gophers from pressbox, will miss NoDak series

By Jess Myers

The good news for Golden Gopher fans is that coach Don Lucia was feeling well enough to attend his team’s game with Northeastern on Saturday. That optimistic news was tempered by the fact that doctors still don’t know what is making him ill, and he will miss Minnesota’s series at North Dakota next weekend in order to undergo more medical tests.

Lucia spoke first to his team, then to the media, at the end of the first period on Saturday, saying that he’s been feeling “under the weather” for a week, and the combination of medical tests and medication has kept him away from being on the ice with his team since then.

“The big thing right now is that all of the tests have been negative,” Lucia said. “There are three or four things it could be, but right now we just don’t know.”

Accompanied by Dr. Rob LaPrade, the Gophers’ team physician, Lucia spoke for less than two minutes, and did not take any questions, asking instead for privacy until the illness is diagnosed.

“The big thing after this is there’s really nothing more we can say so hopefully I won’t get called 10 times at home any more,” Lucia said. “You can see I’m not in stage four brain cancer or Bell’s palsy or all of the other rumors that are kind of going on out there.”

Lucia will have more testing done on Friday, which will prevent him from making the trip to Grand Forks. Dr. LaPrade would not answer a query about where the testing was being done.

“We’re making sure that Coach Lucia has the best of care and he absolutely has the best of care,” Dr. LaPrade said. “The other thing is that we really don’t have a diagnosis, so all of the speculation out there so far, all of it is wrong.

In his statement, Lucia thanked Dr. LaPrade and Dr. Richard Feist, a family practice physician with the Boynton Health Service on the U of M’s Minneapolis campus for their assistance in speeding up the process of scheduling the necessary tests, noting that many doctors are out of town over the holiday break.