The where and when are still to be determined, but there’s no doubt that Parsons, the Kingston native who played at Archbishop Williams High School, will soon set the record for goals scored by a minor pro player. The 39-year-old winger netted No. 674 on Thanksgiving Night, leaving him just four from passing Kevin Kerr’s 677.
The funny thing is, there was every reason to doubt Parsons would ever be in such a position. He only scored 18 goals in 107 career NCAA games at UMass-Lowell, after all – but there was a reason.
It took famously hard-nosed former NHLer Nick Fotiu to put Parson’s soft hands to use. As a rookie head coach for the East Coast Hockey League’s Nashville Knights, Fotiu agreed to his first-year pro’s request to play forward in 1992-93, and Parsons scored 27 goals – amazingly, his career low for a season – as a third-line winger.
Parsons was soon on a tour of the ECHL, playing in Tallahassee, Fla.; Johnstown, Pa.; Lafayette and Baton Rouge, La., through 1998-99. The first of his six 50-goal seasons came in his only year in Johnstown (1995-96), and while it wasn’t his favorite stop, none was more important: He met his wife, Kristen, when he was a Chief.
“Definitely the silver lining to that year,” said Parsons, today the father of daughters Abby (8), Maggy (6) and Maddox (5).
The next season was big, too: In ’96-97, Parsons first played under well-traveled ex-NHLer Doug Shedden (Pittsburgh, Detroit, Quebec, Toronto) for the first time with the ECHL’s Louisiana IceGators. Shedden next brought Parsons with him to Flint, Mich., where they won the 1999-200 United Hockey League championship, and then to Memphis of the Central Hockey League, where they won back-to-back titles (2001-02 and ’02-03). Parsons scored at least 54 goals in his first three seasons with Memphis, and was twice named CHL Most Valuable Player.
The closest the ride came to ending was after 2006-2007, when Parsons’ Quad City Mallards moved to the American Hockey League, leading the UHL to morph into a “new,” scaled-down version of the IHL. (The “original” IHL, like the AHL a step below the NHL, folded after 2000-2001.) Bloomington claimed Parsons in a dispersal draft, and Parsons decided he could handle the two-hour drive from the Quad City region (on the Mississippi River, encompassing communities in Illinois and Iowa) to the U.S. Cellular Arena in Bloomington, home of the Prairie Thunder.
Despite the long drive, Parsons is never far from reminders of the record he’s pursuing.
A player-assistant to head coach Jarrod Skalde, Parsons is more concerned with the three-game losing streak Bloomington took into Friday night’s game at Muskegon, Mich. After that, the Prairie Thunder returned home to play the Kalamazoo Wings on Saturday night.
The goal-scoring record isn’t likely to be the last milestone of Parsons’ career. He’s only 30 games from 1,000, five points shy of 1,300. With a team-high 21 points in 14 games this year, he’s certainly not playing like a guy who’ll turn 40 next month.
“People ask all the time when I’m going to retire,” he said. “This could be my last year, and I could be talked into another. If I see I’m not physically able to play as well as I want, then I don’t want to do it.