John Tortorella, who coached the Tampa Bay Lightning to its first Stanley Cup championship in 2004 and earned the Jack Adams Trophy as the NHL’s top coach, and nine-year National Football League linebacker Stephen Cooper, headline the University of Maine Sports Hall of Fame inductees.
There are six individual inductees along with two teams.
Tortorella, a 1981 UMaine graduate, and Cooper, a 2003 grad, will be joined by three-time All-America East women’s basketball selection Liz Wood (’16), eight-time New England swim titlist Elizabeth Carone (’81), track and field record-holder Mike Viani (’89) and All-American baseball pitcher Scott Morse (’87).
The teams chosen were the 2015 men’s cross country team, which was recognized as the national champion after winning the IC4A championship in New York City, and the 1994 softball team, which earned the school’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in a women’s sport.
The induction dinner and ceremony will be held on Friday, Oct. 21 at Jeff’s Catering in Brewer.
The inductees were chosen by the UMaine Sports Hall of Fame Committee and approved by Director of Athletics Ken Ralph.
The 64-year-old Tortorella, who was recently hired to coach the Philadelphia Flyers, has coached the New York Rangers, Vancouver Canucks and the Columbus Blue Jackets as well as the Lightning.
He has piloted 12 of his 19 teams to Stanley Cup playoff appearances.
The fiery Tortorella has a record of 673 wins, 541 losses, 37 ties and 132 overtime losses. He has a 56-64 Stanley Cup playoff record.
He became the first UMaine player to win a Stanley Cup when he was behind the bench with the Lightning in 2004.
A winger at UMaine, he earned the reputation as one of UMaine’s most hard-nosed players as he joined the program and younger brother Jim, a goalie, in the second year of its existence (1978-79) after transferring from Salem State in Massachusetts.
Tortorella amassed 39 goals and 71 assists for 110 points in 99 career games before going on to a long minor league playing and coaching career, which eventually landed him in the NHL.
Cooper earned Associated Press All-American accolades as a linebacker for the Black Bears in 2002, the same year he was named the Atlantic-10 Defensive Player of the Year. He had been the Co-Defensive Player of the Year the previous season.
The two-time finalist for the Buck Buchanan Award, given to the Football Championship Subdivision’s Defensive Player of the Year, registered 374 tackles, 57 tackles for loss, seven interceptions and 25 sacks at UMaine.
He led the team in tackles for three consecutive seasons.
The San Diego Chargers signed him as an undrafted free agent, and he recorded 503 tackles, 9.5 sacks, eight forced fumbles, eight interceptions and five fumble recoveries over a nine-year career.
Carone paced the Black Bears to three New England championships and a second-place finish her senior year.
She won four New England individual championships in the 50-yard backstroke, 100-yard individual medley, 200 individual medley and 50-yard breaststroke and also swam a leg for the triumphant 400-yard medley relay, 800-yard medley relay and 200-yard medley relay teams.
Her 400-yard medley relay teams won two New England titles.
When she graduated, she was part of three school-record medley relay teams.
The hard-throwing Morse, who was chosen a third team All-American in 1986, still holds the school record for consecutives wins with 10.
He is fourth on UMaine’s all-time wins list with 26 during his career and he is also fourth in strikeouts with 248.
He pitched the Black Bears to consecutive College World Series appearances in 1985 and ‘86. His 96 strikeouts in 1986 is the fourth-most in a single season by a UMaine pitcher.
He was a fifth-round draft pick of the Texas Rangers in 1986 and spent four years in the Ranger organization, reaching as high as AA. He was 20-18 with a 3.36 earned-run average in his four pro seasons with 247 strikeouts in 291 ⅔ innings.
When Wood graduated from UMaine in 2016, she was the only women’s basketball player in school history to finish her career ranked in the top-10 in five major career categories. She was first in games played (127), third in steals (282), sixth in rebounds (902), seventh in total points (1,462) and eighth in assists (363).
She led the team in rebounding in all four seasons and was the 2013 America East Co-Rookie of the Year, an All-America East second team selection in 2014 and 2016 and a first teamer in 2015, when she also earned Co–Defensive PLayer of the Year accolades.
Wood helped power the Black Bears to back-to-back 20-win seasons in 2015 and 2016 with a pair of America East co-regular season titles. In her senior year, Wood and the Black Bears recorded 26 wins, the second highest single season win total in school history.
Wood, who was awarded the prestigious M Club Dean Smith Award, was named the America East Female Scholar Athlete of the Year in 2016.
Viani owned 11 UMaine track and field records at the time of his graduation and remains part of the current school-record 4×200-meter indoor relay team and the 4×100-meter relay team. Four of Viani’s times still remain present on Maine’s top-10 list, including marks in the indoor 400m (3rd), indoor 500m (8th), outdoor 200m (5th) and outdoor 400m (8th).
He concluded his impressive career with three ECAC individual and relay titles and multiple state championship crowns. The four-time All-ECAC honoree was selected to the All-New England Team on three occasions and was UMaine’s top point scorer in each of his final three years with the Black Bears.
The two-time IC4A qualifier was the first UMaine athlete to break 49-seconds in the 400m.
Since there was no NCAA Division I cross country competition in 2015, IC4A race became the measuring stick as it attracted the top teams in the country and UMaine won it as it did the New Englands that year.
UMaine was paced at the IC4As by several of the top long-distance runners in program history, including Frank Preti who finished second in New York, Roger Bell (3rd), Ed Dempsey (8th) and Al Wunderly (10th).
The 1994 UMaine softball team went 32-17 behind UMaine Sports Hall of Fame pitcher Deb Smith, who won three games in the final day of the America East tournament to propel Maine to the title and into the NCAA tournament.
Smith, who led the team in hitting at .399 and posted a 19-8 record in the circle, was named the conference’s Most Valuable Player and she was also the MVP of the tournament.
