Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Jarrod Skalde Autographed Card

I have featured Jarrod Skalde twice before (here and here), focusing on his playing career and unique career path, spanning 19 seasons with a total of 29 teams in 8 leagues and 6 countries.

After retiring from the game, he became a head coach, first as a player/coach with the Bloomington PrairieThunder of the IHL, then winning a championship and best coach award in the ECHL with the Cincinnati Cyclones (a team he'd played for in the IHL in the 1990s) before starting as an assistant and graduating to head coach with the AHL's Norfolk Admirals. As the Admirals' parent team - the NHL's Anaheim Ducks - decided to move their team closer to home to become the AHL iteration of the San Diego Gulls (a team he's played for in the 1990s when it was in the IHL), he and the team agreed to part ways.

It's unclear whether he was tired of moving his family around (though in March, he seemed pleased to move back to an area he and his wife had loved) and/or the Ducks had found the perfect scapegoat for finishing with a 27-39-10 record with a team whose top talent was either in the NHL (John Gibson, Emerson Etem) or injured (Max Friberg, Chris Wagner, Nicolas Kerdiles) - but the fact remains that he is now currently unemployed.

I'm fairly confident he'll find work soon enough - or whenever he's ready, at least; it's what he's always done.

Here he is wearing the New Jersey Devils' white (then-home) 1980s and early-1990s uniform (with red and green as highlight colours instead of red and black), from Score's 1991-92 (Canadian) set (card #282, part of the Top Prospect sub-set), signed in-person in the 1990s in black sharpie:

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