Tom Mulligan has the training and experience to help cure a lot of things.
But, when it comes to Tampa Bay Lightning fever — which is running rampant in the area these days — the team’s head trainer and Arbor Greene resident can only suggest one solution:
Watch more Lightning hockey.
“This is great,’’ Tom says. “I’m not playing, but the next best thing is to be a part of it and help contribute, and I love just watching the excitement of people in the area. Last year, the run we had was fantastic. To do it again would be great.”
Tom, his wife Kellie and children Tyler, 13, Zachary, 10, and Abby, 8, have been fixtures in New Tampa since 2002, when they moved into an apartment at Richmond Place before finding their first of two homes in Arbor Greene.
Kellie is an occupational therapist at Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel, and the Mulligan kids all currently attend or have attended Richard F. Pride Elementary and Louis Benito Middle schools.
“For my kids, they get to go to the rink and talk with the players, and Tyler even got to help at rookie camp,’’ Kellie says. “He was literally filling bags of ice, but still, he was there.”
The Mulligans are among the holdovers from a time when roughly 75 percent of the Tampa Bay Lightning team lived in New Tampa. Although retired former stars (and local media personalities) like 2004 Stanley Cup-winning captain Dave Andreychuk and Chris Dingman still live here, the current crop of players tends to settle elsewhere. But, Tom said the Mulligans love the area and the schools too much to follow suit. There may not be any hockey wives for Kellie to lean on, but they say there is a bustling community in Arbor Greene that rallies together.
“Tom travels so much that I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without our friends and our community, even if it’s just friends helping meet my kids at the bus if I’m running late from work,” says Kellie.
The Arbor Greene community might be Tom’s biggest fans. While many would most likely gather for Lightning playoff games anyway, a good many do so knowing their neighbor is a part of this year’s championship-contending team.
“One of the cool things from last year my wife and I talked about was a few families in the neighborhood getting together and renting a 15-foot blow up projection TV,’’ Tom says. “Everyone was so into it and excited. My wife sent me a few pictures when they did it and I shared them with the team. That was pretty cool.”
At our press time, the Lightning had advanced all the way to the NHL’s Eastern Conference finals, where a best-of-7 series against the Pittsburgh Penguins is all that stands between the team and a second straight appearance in the Stanley Cup finals.
Tom, a Quinnipiac College (now University) in Hamden, CT, graduate with a B.S. in Physical Therapy and a minor in Biology, has played a big role in helping the team get here, helping all of those injured Lightning players get healthy and ready. Heck, even the most fervent Bolts fan might make the case that Tom holds the key to the team’s Stanley Cup chances, considering the questions the New Bedford, MA, native has been asked this postseason.
“Is Steven Stamkos going to make it back from a blood clot in time?”
“Is Anton Stralman ready to return from his broken leg?”
“How are the ‘upper body’ injuries that have been keeping JT Brown and Erik Condra sidelined coming along? Oh, and by the way, just between us….what exactly are those upper body injuries?”
The return of each of the aforementioned players would certainly bolster Tampa Bay’s championship hopes, and Tom, the longtime Lightning trainer, would love to see it happen.
But, he’s not saying.
“You get the questions, but the people that we are close to and friends that we have in the area and in the neighborhood, they understand that I can’t talk much about that,’’ Tom says. “You hear the questions. I wish I could give them the answers.”
This year’s Lightning team has already surpassed the expectations that were tempered when the injuries piled up near the end of the regular season. Tom and his staff are working hard to get the Lightning’s key players back on the ice.
“I mean, a lot of the credit goes to the whole training staff and it’s led by Tom and they are the best around,’’ says Stralman, a defenseman who broke his left leg on March 25 before finally returning for the Pittsburgh series. “It’s a long season and they keep our bodies in the best condition they can be. This time of the year, everyone is hurting but the training staff keeps us close to 100 percent. We all owe a lot to the trainers here.”
Tom, a former varsity defenseman in high school back in New Bedford, landed the job as the Lightning’s trainer by chance. In the summer of 2002, when Tom was the head trainer of the Providence Bruins (Boston’s American Hockey League affiliate), he happened to call an old friend who told him that the Lightning trainer at the time was taking a job with the Florida Panthers.
Tom decided to apply and ended up getting the Lightning job.
A Dream Come True
It didn’t take long for him to experience the goal of anybody working in hockey — being part of Tampa Bay’s Stanley Cup-winning celebration in 2004.
“That was my second year with the team when we won the Cup, and everything just happened so fast,’’ Tom said. “Hopefully you think you’ll get another chance, then 12 years go by and you start to wonder if it will ever happen again.”
In the grand tradition of the Stanley Cup, each member of the organization gets to spend a day with the most famous trophy in sports. Tom took the Cup over to his parents’ house in New Bedford for a small celebration. A picture with Tyler, who was then 16 months old, actually sitting in the Cup made the cover of the local newspaper.
“I wasn’t necessarily the coolest (kid on the block), but the Cup was,’’ Tom says.
Since the Lightning’s only Cup win, Tom has traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Helsinki, Finland, as a trainer for the USA’s World Championship teams in 2008 and 2012, and was a trainer on the USA team which lost in the Bronze medal game (to Finland) at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
However, he’d love another Cup so his kids could enjoy it, even though it extends his time away from his family.
“With playoffs, it can be so unpredictable that it’s hard,’’ Kellie said. “And for Tom, even on off days, he’s going in for treatments. The cool thing is, it’s so exciting to be part of the playoffs. As a family, we get to share in that and the kids are part of it. It makes all the sacrifices worth it.”
She was dumbfounded. She went to the doctor for a quick blood test to confirm, and then met her husband at Walmart, where he was shopping. She surprised him with a baby Christmas stocking.