A former professional hockey player and now a National Hockey League coach, Ted Sator once said he would rather be known as a teacher.

At Bowling Green University, Ohio, Sator carried a 3.78 average as a health and physical education major. He combined brain with brawn on the ice as a 5-foot-ll, 1 85-pound winger. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1972. That year, he also played for the U.S. hockey team in the World University Games in Lake Placid.

In 1974, Sator was appointed head instructor and director of the NHL Conditioning Program at the Huron Hockey School in Waterloo, Ont. In 1978, he turned his attention to coaching overseas. In five years in Sweden he built up a strong reputation with five league championships.

The NHL then began to recognize Sator's abilities. He was the Philadelphia Flyers' assistant coach in the 1983-84 and 84-85 seasons. The Flyers lost in the Stanley Cup finals in 1985. In the 1984 Canada Cup, he was an assistant coach for Team USA, working under New York Rangers' general manager Craig Patrick. In the fall 1985, Patrick named the 35-year-old Sator the Rangers' head coach.

Power skating and physical play, two elements of Sator's playbook, helped the struggling Rangers win the Patrick Division title and make it to the Stanley Cup semifinals in 1986, despite a sub -.500 record in the regular season. Sator was fired by the Rangers in Nov. 1986, but just over a month later he became head coach of the Buffalo Sabres.

His coaching technique worked again, as the Sabres made the playoffs in Sator's first season behind the bench after two years in the Adams Division cellar. The relationship with general manager Gerry Meehan eventually soured, and Sator was pushed out the door at the end of the 1988-89 season.

Again, Sator found employment a month later when he signed a two-year contract as assistant to head coach Mike Milbury in Boston. For the 1991-92 season, Sator worked as a head coach in Milan, Italy. He returned to the U.S. at the-start of the 1993-94 NHL season, becoming assistant coach of the St. Louis Blues. And this season, he was reunited with Keenan, the Blues' new head coach.