Herbert Paul Brooks (August 5, 1937 – August 11, 2003) was an American ice hockey player and coach. His most notable achievement came in 1980 as head coach of the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic team at Lake Placid. Brooks' team upset the heavily favored Soviet team in a match that came to be known as the "Miracle on Ice".
Brooks also coached multiple National Hockey League (NHL) teams, and the French team at the 1998 Winter Olympics. He returned to coach the U.S. men's team to a silver medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. When Brooks died in a car accident in 2003, he was the director of player personnel for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Brooks was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1990 and the IIHF Hall of Fame in 1999. He was honored posthumously with the Wayne Gretzky International Award in 2004 and inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2006.
Brooks was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Pauline and Herbert David Brooks. He attended Johnson High School, where his team won the 1955 state ice hockey championship.
Brooks continued his ice hockey career with the University of Minnesota Gophers from 1955 to 1959. He was a member of the 1960 Olympic team, only to become the last cut the week before the Games started. Three weeks later, Brooks sat at home with his father and watched the team he almost made win gold in Squaw Valley. Afterwards, Brooks went up to the coach, Jack Riley, and said, "Well, you must have made the right decision—you won". This humbling moment served as further motivation for Brooks, an already self-driven person.
From 1960 to 1970, Brooks set a record by playing for the U.S. national team eight times, including the 1964 and 1968 Olympic teams. While playing for the Rochester Mustangs in the United States Hockey League in the 1961–62 season, he formed part of the highest-scoring forward line in USHL history at the time, along with Bill Reichart and Ken Johannson.
After retiring as a player, Brooks first tried his hand at selling insurance. Lou Nanne, who played with Brooks on the 1968 team for the United States, helped recruit Brooks to become a coach. He was brought on to coach the freshmen at his alma mater, the Minnesota Golden Gophers in 1970. He coached the Minnesota Junior Stars from 1971 to 1972. Brooks was hired as head coach of Minnesota in 1972. He would lead them to three NCAA championship titles in 1974, 1976, and 1979. Nine members of the 1979 team that won the championship in March would be recruited for the 1980 Olympic team, which Brooks was already recruited to coach.
Brooks had been hired due to lobbying from Nanne and USA Hockey executive Walter Bush (after Jack Parker declined the position). Hand-picking his team, he named several of his Minnesota players to the team, as well as several from their rivals, Boston University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To compete with the Soviet Union team specifically, Brooks stressed peak conditioning, believing that one of the reasons the Soviet team had dominated international competition was that many of their opponents were exhausted by the third period. Brooks got Jack Blatherwick to work with him on testing the team in conditioning, as he had done for Brooks with testing the 1978–79 Minnesota Golden Gophers team on the ice and in a laboratory setting. The two worked on developing practice plans and drills to get the team in the best condition possible. Then, working with team doctor George Nagobads, shifts would be timed on the bench to make sure no one would be on the ice longer than 40 seconds to keep them ready to endure the Soviets in crunch time. The schedule for the team would be 63 games long, considerably longer than previous US Olympic teams. One particular game inspired a famed exercise when the team had a 3–3 tie with Norway. Brooks had his team do a sprint from the goal line to the first blue line and then back before then getting them to go to the red line and back, then making them go from the goal line to the second blue line before finally having them go from the goal line to the other goal line, which was called a "Herbie". It lasted for over an hour, even after the rink lights were turned off. The practice of doing a "Herbie" was not new to Minnesota players, as the team would do the practice at least once every two weeks, usually on the Monday after playing games on the weekend. The schedule saw them play the Soviet team two weeks before the Olympics, which saw the U.S. lose 10–3. The American team went into the February 22 game for the Olympics having not lost once (with a tie to Sweden). They were tied 2–2 after one period and trailing 3–2 entering the third period before rallying with two unanswered goals to win 4–3. The victory was labeled by Sports Illustrated in 1999 as the greatest moment in 20th century sports. Two days later, the U.S. beat Finland to formally clinch the gold medal.
After his team's Olympic gold medal win, Brooks moved to Switzerland to coach HC Davos in the National League A. However he resigned from this position in January 1981, only six months after being hired, with the team having a poor record and Brooks facing criticism for what were described as "rough practices".
From 1981 to 1985, he coached in the National Hockey League for the New York Rangers, where he became the first American-born coach in Rangers' team history to win 100 games. Brooks was fired on January 21, 1985, by the Rangers, where he was replaced by general manager Craig Patrick (his assistant for the 1980 Olympic Team) after the team was 15-22-8 and struggling in the Patrick Division alongside strife with team captain Barry Beck. In July 1985, after failed negotiations with the Minnesota North Stars, Brooks stated that he was through with coaching and would take a job as a national sales representative for Jostens, a memorabilia manufacturer.
Brooks was offered the position to coach at St. Cloud State University, an NCAA Division II school (as presided by university president Brendan McDonald, who had ideas of elevating the program to Division I in the future) in May 1986 and turned it down initially. However, he was convinced by John Mariucci (head coach at Minnesota for Brooks in the late 1950s) to take the position because Mariucci (who died the following year) felt Brooks could get the school to think about elevating itself to Division I in the future; at the time, the state of Minnesota had just two Division I programs for hockey. Brooks took the job with the condition that the team would elevate itself from its status at NCAA Division II to Division I level along with start work to try to build a new arena. Brooks spearheaded funding for an arena with sheets of ice in Olympic size in his one season with the team. With practices dedicated to the power play and penalty kill on a constant basis as opposed to the norm of dedicating to it once a week, the team won 25 games, a team record for over a decade and won the Northern Collegiate Hockey Association tournament to reach the NCAA Division II Tournament for the first time, where they went all the way to the Third Place game; Brooks later called it the most enjoyable year he had had in coaching. Brooks left the team after the season, with his assistant Craig Dahl stepping in as head coach, where he would coach for the next 18 years before being succeeded by Bob Motzko, who was also an assistant to Brooks at St. Cloud State. The team would play as a Division I independent for the next three seasons and move to a new arena in 1989, which saw them reach the NCAA Division I Tournament for the first time in school history.
Brooks returned to the NHL to coach the Minnesota North Stars in 1987 on a two-year contract. His hiring by the North Stars in 1987 was the last time a college coach was selected to coach an NHL team until North Dakota coach Dave Hakstol was tapped to coach the Philadelphia Flyers in May 2015. However, management fired him in the summer of 1988 after one season, which both saw them finish as the worst team in the league but also finish one point out of a playoff spot due to the playoff structure that had them narrowly behind the Toronto Maple Leafs for the fourth spot of the Norris Division.