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Bolts Well Equipped With Thill On Board

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By CARTER GADDIS The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 22, 2007

TAMPA - The blade was broken on Dan Boyle's skate. The sharpened, frozen steel edge had snapped in two during the course of a Lightning playoff game.

Boyle needed a new skate. Fast.

'Happens all the time,' he said.

So often, in fact, Boyle couldn't remember exactly which game - or even which season - it happened during the playoffs. Neither could Lightning equipment manager Ray Thill.

But Thill did remember one important thing:

'He didn't miss a shift,' Thill said.

That's because Thill, like a one-man NASCAR pit crew, flew into action from his customary spot behind the Lightning bench when Boyle came off the ice with his flat tire. The spare skate was fetched, the broken skate removed and the laces tied on the new skate in less time than it would've taken Boyle to serve a two-minute minor.

That's the thrill for Thill, who is in his ninth season with the Lightning, his eighth as the man in charge of making sure everything about the players' skates, sticks, pads, helmets, uniforms and lockers is just so.

Far more hours are spent pursuing much more mundane tasks.

Thill and his assistants - Rob Kennedy, Jim Pickard, Clay Roff and Vincent Humphries - arrive for an 11 a.m. practice around 7 a.m. Thill puts on coffee and sets to work wading through a stack of paperwork (mostly invoices for equipment orders), while the others put finishing touches on the locker room or tackle some leftover laundry.

Much of Thill's day is spent making sure the most important piece of equipment - the skate - is fine-tuned to each player's specifications. That means sharpening the blades, but it also means occasionally shaving away a minute part of the factory blade (sometimes as little as 1/32nd of an inch) to reach just the right curve a particular player needs to feel comfortable on the ice.

Part metal worker, part microscopic sculptor, Thill is showered with sparks on a daily basis. Rarely, though, is he showered with public praise.

'I think sometimes a lot of us take for granted what he does,' Boyle said. 'He's got 20 guys with different equipment, and a lot of guys are very specific about what they wear, what they want and how they want it. And he needs to know all that and respond to on-ice stuff that happens, whether it's a stick or a skate. I think it's a lot of stuff that we certainly don't appreciate as much as we should.'

Reporter Carter Gaddis can be reached at (813) 259-8291 or igaddis@tampatrib.com.

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