Former hockey player builds industrial arts program

By Chris Horvath

Staff Writer

Industrial arts teacher Pat Rabbitt took the long route to get to Shores – literally.

Raised in Merritt, British Columbia, Canada, Rabbitt eventually ended up 3,665 miles from his hometown.

And while he is known for working in the “shawp” (he is Canadian after all), it was hockey that led him here.

“I was about 8 when I started playing hockey,” Rabbitt said. “My friends didn’t want to play one year, and I was going to quit, but my mom said, ‘I already had the check written out for the season, so why don’t you play one more year?’ So I did. After that, I had a great year, and I never had a second thought about quitting.”

Rabbitt played for the Merritt Centennials in his hometown for two seasons (1976-77 and 1977-78).

Then, the following three seasons, he traveled 700 miles south to the United States to play for the Billings (Mont.) Bighorns.

He also played for the Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada) Blades, Wichita (Kan.) Wind, Milwaukee Admirals, and Montana Magic before coming to Muskegon with a friend of his to play for the Muskegon Lumberjacks in their first two years of being an organization in 1984-85 and 1985-86.

Rabbitt said that stress and anxiety sometimes caused him problems during his hockey career.

“I ended up calling it quits after my two years with the Lumberjacks,” said Rabbitt, who was an eighth-round pick of the St. Louis Blues in 1980. “I was at a point where I was struggling with depression and anxiety from playing all those years, and I had two babies and my wife at the time, so I thought it best to just be finished.”

Rabbitt ended up working for a handful of different companies, including Eagle Ottawa in Muskegon, before coming to Shores in 2002.

“When I first started (at Shores), I joked that we had three things that worked in the shop: the radio, the pop machines, and the welding stations,” Rabbitt said. “Everything else we had to fix.”

Rabbitt said he was the fourth teacher in four years that the industrial arts program had.

“The school was on the verge of shutting the program down,” he said. “The school had just passed their first bond, and they gave a ton of money to the library and the art wing, and students were upset that none of the money came down to the shop.”

So Rabbitt had to ensure students that the school cared and that he and the students had to show they cared too.

“A lot of students seemed to think that the district didn’t care about them after the bond gave no money to us,” Rabbitt said. “But I told them that they were wrong and that the district really does care about you guys. I told them until we change our mindset, they could give us $30,000 for new equipment, but that won’t matter because it’ll look just like the rest of the equipment out in the shop unless we start to take better care of this place. Let’s work on leaving this place is better shape than we found it and come back in five years, in ten years, and see how much this place has improved and changed.”

When the next bond that was passed, Rabbitt said he was pleased and thankful that a portion of the money was used for his shop.

“They sunk $175,000 down here just for the improvements and the infrastructure,” Rabbitt said. “We replaced the lights in the classroom and in the shop, the vacuum system, the garage doors, and I added a door into my metals room. Thanks to the improvements made to the shop, it’s very multifunctional, and we were able to make it into one environment. I can keep an eye on what’s going on in the classroom from the shop, and I couldn’t do that years ago.”

Rabbitt said he loved that the district cared about his program through thick and thin.

“It was pretty rough down here at the start,” Rabbitt said. “I never talked down about what we had; regardless, the district believed in our program all through the years when all the other schools didn’t believe in their programs and were starting to get rid of them.”

In addition to his shop, Rabbitt also made a brief foray back into the hockey world when he became the head coach at Shores for two seasons.

His team posted a 20-6-2 record in 2012-13 and an 11-15-1 record in 2013-14. The 2012-13 team won the conference title.

But it is in the “shawp,” where Rabbitt now focuses his attention. One of Rabbitt’s main philosophies throughout his years in the shop is “Aggressive goals without aggressive behavior.”

“I try to always be calm and collected with the student, even if on the inside that isn’t true,” he said. “One of my biggest goals is for everyone to get everything done, and that means taking some extra time for all students. I know what I try to create, I treat every student with dignity and respect at all times. I try to give them the best experience in the shop environment.”