Derek Lalonde wants to usher in an era of development, unity and triumph for the Toledo Walleye.

“We want to have a culture in this locker room that, whenever you come into this locker room, you’re expected to give everything you can for Toledo on that given night,” Lalonde said.

The Walleyes announced June 2 that Lalonde would take over the spot vacated by Nick Vitucci in February.

Vitucci, now director of hockey operations for the Walleye, said he feels confident in his successor.

“We’re thrilled that we were able to land [Lalonde],” Vitucci said. “The criteria we set up as far as what we wanted in our coach, he fit every part of it.”

The criteria, Vitucci said, included a track record of success, championship victories, a position as top coach at a talented junior league and knowledge of Toledo’s league.

Lalonde said winning is his goal, but first and foremost, he wants to foster a sense of community and teamwork.

“It’s all about that balance of development, but winning is also development,” Lalonde said. “Any competitive hockey player at this level, they still want to be coached, they still want to be communicated to and they want to win. If you can achieve the communication, the teaching, the structure for development, usually the winning follows.”

Lalonde grew up close to the Canadian border in upstate New York, where he said each hockey game was a uniting event. 

“Having a good experience growing up, where hockey was second nature to everyone, you grew a passion for it,” Lalonde said.

Lalonde took his passion and went on to play for Cortland State University, where he was goaltender from 1991-95. He was also a physical education major at the school.

“It’s probably exactly where I belonged, talent-wise,” Lalonde said. “I went there for all the right reasons: the opportunity for a good hockey experience and the education I wanted.”

Lalonde got his first assistant coaching job two months after graduation. He coached at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (1995-98) where he was also a graduate assistant and master’s student.

“When you first start coaching, the last thing on your mind is ever making a living because the money is not there as a young coach,” Lalonde said. “You do it for the right reasons: you have a passion and the excitement for it.”

Lalonde has since been assistant coach at the University of Denver (2006-11), Ferris State University (2002-06), Hamilton College (2000-02) and Lebanon Valley College (1998-00). He said many of his previous head coaches influenced his coaching style today.  

“Bob Daniels at Ferris State University, George Gwozdecky at the University of Denver: these guys were perfect mentors for my growth,” Lalonde said. “I took a little bit of who they both were and kind of blended that into who I am.”

Lalonde most recently coached and acted as general manager for the Green Bay Gamblers. He led the team to a record of 111-54-14, including regular season and playoff championships in 2011-12.

“Being the head coach and general manager at that level, you wear so many hats,” Lalonde said. “Its very overwhelming at times. It prepares you for anything.”

Lalonde also coached the U.S. Under-19 National Team, which earned gold at the World Junior A Challenge in November.

“First, for the U.S. Hockey Federation to choose me was a great honor,” Lalonde said. “Then, having that two weeks short, intense tournament of putting a team together getting that team to buy into a common goal.”

Lalonde chose Toledo because of the success of the Mud Hens brand as well as its association with the Detroit Red Wings, who Lalonde said showed they “cared a lot” about the Walleye.

Lalonde said he is excited to bring his family to Toledo. Wife Melissa is a Cleveland native and Lalonde said her parents still live there.

Melissa and their children, Alex, Luke, and Abby, came to the press conference as well as a Mud Hens game last weekend, which Lalonde said, “really helped in the transition.”

Vitucci and Lalonde will work together to fill the assistant coach position. They will interview likely candidates in the coming weeks. Lalonde said Dan Watson, the current assistant coach who served as interim head coach, is definitely in the running.

“We would love to have [Watson] as a candidate,” Lalonde said. “Just the profile we’re looking for in that position is someone who’s played at this level, who’s experienced coaching at this level and a lot of [Watson’s] strengths fit with what we’re looking for.”

Lalonde said he hopes he can follow in the footsteps of Vitucci, because the former coach exemplifies what Lalonde deems most important in the coaching profession.

“[Vitucci is] a very genuine person and he is a person who does things right,” Lalonde said. “That’s who you want to be in Toledo when advisers call, when kids call, when they look at Toledo. They do things the right way. I want that to be my legacy and to have that continued legacy of Toledo.”

Sometimes you have to finish something before you really understand why you wanted to do it in the first place.

Clark Gregg was sitting in a theater at the Seattle International Film Festival in early May, watching the premiere of one of his movies. This was not, in and of itself, an unusual occurrence for the 52-year-old actor. Gregg has attended more than his fair share of big premieres over the past few years — ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been born and a certain S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Phil Coulson became, rather surprisingly, one of its most beloved figures.

This premiere was different. This wasn’t a bombastic superhero epic where the fate of the world was at stake. This was a small independent film, made on a shoestring. Gregg was still playing an agent, ironically enough — a down-on-his-luck showbiz representative of child actors, looking for that one special client who could relaunch his career. And he wasn’t just acting in this one. Director: Clark Gregg. Writer: Clark Gregg. This film — “Trust Me”— was his baby.

But even with all the work he had put into it, Gregg didn’t completely realize why he’d been so compelled to bring this story to the screen — not until he watched it that night. He hadn’t understood how personal it was for him, and how much it said about his own life.

“I went, ‘Oh, God. That’s what made me write this.’ It’s about how having a daughter, or a child that you love, can completely change who you are. And I have a 12-year-old daughter, and it never occurred to me that that’s what was driving me to write this. But here, two and a half years after I wrote it, that’s clearly what was motivating this.”

The To-Do List

“Trust Me” tells the tale of how Gregg’s character, Howard Holloway, stumbles across a child-star-in-the-making named Lydia (played by newcomer Saxon Sharbino) and attempts to launch her career despite pitfalls and surprises that come from both inside and outside the movie business.

“I was writing a bigger piece about a bunch of different kinds of stories, about grown-ups and children and Los Angeles. And it was just going to be an epic that would never get made. And this one felt different,” Gregg said in an interview with Toledo Free Press.

“From the beginning, it felt like an unusual mashup of kind of a comedy of desperation, about this former child actor, and a film noir about the brutality of a certain part of show business. It never was meant to be an exposé — I don’t think it’s representative. It felt like a story that was representative of an idea about success and stardom.”

Though Gregg has plied his trade as an actor for decades now — from performing in small off-Broadway productions to consistent roles on TV and film — he is no neophyte behind the camera. In addition to writing the screenplay for the 2000 Michelle Pfeiffer/Harrison Ford thriller “What Lies Beneath,” Gregg made his directorial debut with a 2008 adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel “Choke.” (Gregg also wrote the screenplay.)

But while in “Choke” he had a relatively minor role on camera, in “Trust Me” he is the lead, which, combined with his other responsibilities, was even more pressure than he expected.

“The most I’ve ever experienced. And at the same point, it was so laughably too much to handle that it became kind of funny. It was just you’re so thrown out of an airplane without a parachute, and a couple of napkins that you might be able to use to slow your fall, that you can only laugh and see if there’s a way you can pull it out. And I woke up nightly leading up to this, thinking of directors or actors I could give one of the two jobs to.

“And yet, I had this vision for the piece stylistically and for the role — and I felt the guy needed to be as old as I am for you to really buy that this is his last shot. And my partner, Mary Vernieu, really pressured me to not give up the part. And she’s kind of dependably brilliant about these kind of things.

“I got there, trying to get through a 20-day shoot of this ambitious, odd movie, and I realized that I was going to feel just as vulnerable and over my head as Howard Holloway did,” Gregg said. “For all the things I might sacrifice, it was going to work to support the performance.”

I love trouble

The similarities between Howard and Clark first became clear to Gregg as he was working on the original story, a piece of work that resists easy classification. “Trust Me” merges elements of comedy and drama into a tale that sees both the humor and the tragedy of Tinseltown.

“It came out of me that way,” Gregg said of the script. “Like life. Like some stuff I’ve been through and survived in a very different sphere, which is, everything’s fine, and you’re trying to work on something and collaborate on something, and then suddenly there’s a lot of money involved, and things get dark. And you find out what you stand for, and what your dreams are, and what you’re willing to do for them, and what you’re not.”

Gregg answered a lot of those questions himself as he was working to make “Trust Me” a reality. “I had a lot of people say, ‘We won’t. This doesn’t fit into a category. It’s kind of two different things at once. And we won’t give you the money to make it unless you change it.’ And I couldn’t. I was lucky to have a partner who liked it, and really kind of believed in what we were trying to do,” Gregg said, referring to fellow producer Vernieu.

“Because I felt like a lot of the movies that I loved that walked that line, a lot of them were in the ’70s. And I wanted to try and make a movie like that. I wanted to try something new, and not try to fit something into a box. I think that the purpose of independent film is to try, you know, to not succumb to those kind of commercial pressures and to try something risky. And that’s what we went for.”

Brightest star

They say that 90 percent of being a great director is finding a great cast. If that’s true, Gregg is an impressive director indeed. In addition to the “name” actors that fill key roles in “Trust Me” — Amanda Peet, Sam Rockwell, Felicity Huffman, Allison Janney, William H. Macy — Gregg’s film also features great performances from its unknowns. Most crucial of all is the role of Lydia, Howard’s hopeful superstar, played by Sharbino.

“Mary and I, and our other partner Keith Kjarval, agreed if we didn’t find someone that special — one of those people who people would go, ‘Who the hell is that?’ — if we didn’t find someone like that, we wouldn’t make the film,” Gregg said. “For a minute, that’s where we were. And when I hear people, so many people, have been touched and blown away by Saxon, and I still can’t believe that we found her. Because I didn’t believe that we would.

“One of the smartest things of the many that Mary talked me into, was how important it was to have Lydia and her father Ray played by actors that weren’t household names. That we didn’t know enough about. Because there’s kind of this unknown quantity to Howard, and the movie is very much seen through Howard’s eyes.

“So to find this brilliant character actor, Paul Sparks — who I had seen on ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ and remarked on — to kind of realize that that was the same person that I was looking at on this tape that Mary presented, who in real life couldn’t be more different than his ‘Boardwalk’ character, and is this kind of very masculine, soft-spoken Oklahoman. When we found both Saxon and Paul, that’s when I felt that we had a shot at making the movie work.”

The air that I breathe

Gregg is promoting “Trust Me” during his hiatus from “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” the ABC series that resurrected Agent Coulson following his untimely demise in 2012’s “The Avengers.” There’s no doubt that the expansive fan base he has earned during his time wearing Coulson’s suit and shades has helped shine a light on Gregg’s other work. And it’s clear he’s thrilled by the response he’s gotten from Marvel devotees.

“The cool thing about the friends that Agent Coulson has made, and that I have made since Agent Coulson became a part of my life, is there’s a real deep connection. Because Agent Coulson, in the Marvel world of superheroes, is the guy with no powers. Who’s a bit of a nerd. Who’s probably been to a Comic-Con like I have. And there’s a real ownership — they brought him back to life when he died, with their human cry. So there’s a connection between those people and I, and it’s one that I’m very honored by.”

And whether it be through “Trust Me,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” or directly via his presence on Twitter, it’s clear that continuing to connect with people is a big part of what drives Gregg as a person.

“I spent most of my 20s doing plays in New York and it was really amazing, the greatest education. An intimate relationship with an audience that’s missing in film sometimes, most of the time. And then suddenly, there’s this way to connect with the people,” Gregg said. “I had taken up Twitter when my wife (actress Jennifer Grey) was on ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ and found out that people kind of liked Agent Coulson.

“And suddenly you see the stuff you worked so hard on, in a vacuum, in a soundstage, to make it good, and make it real and make it work, and see that blowing people away, or in some cases not. It’s really — it’s a connection with people you’re trying to work for. And one of the reasons I came out to Hollywood is because it’s communication, it’s a form of communication. And at its deepest, it’s even a form of nonverbal, emotional communication with, you know, an unimaginable number of people.

“And that’s why films are exciting. You can reach so many people. You can touch and inspire them, if you’re lucky, the way that I have been touched and inspired by other people’s films and television.”

“Trust Me” is available On Demand and will be shown theatrically in select cities beginning June 6.

The life of Sylvania musician and retired educator Eddie Boggs will be celebrated with a tribute concert combining two of his greatest passions: music and serving others.

Eddie Boggs: A Tribute of Song is set for 2 p.m. June 22 at the Franciscan Center at Lourdes University, 6832 Convent Blvd., Sylvania.

The event will feature performances by Bob Wurst & Sundown, David Browning, Jean Holden, First Creation, Tim Ellis & Flatland Grass and Sam DeArmond. The event will also have remarks from Sylvania Schools Superintendent Brad Rieger and Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

In lieu of tickets, donations will be accepted to benefit The Victory Center, a Toledo nonprofit that offers counseling and wellness programs for cancer patients and their families. After the concert, a musical jam is planned to last until 6 p.m.

The tribute concert was organized by a group of musicians who approached Boggs’ family wanting to do something to honor and remember him. Boggs, 68, died Jan. 9 after an eight-month battle with cancer.

“‘Thank you’ are two little words that cannot express how it feels that so many people miss him and have a story to share with our family about him,” Boggs’ wife, Chris Boggs, wrote in an email to Toledo Free Press.

“It is overwhelming. He was a simple man. He loved life and he lived to lighten people’s loads. And his avenue was music and kindness. … We miss the music, so to hear it from his friends means everything! … Each participant has their connection with Eddie and we hope the songs reflect the stories. What a memory for our family! What a gift they are giving us!”

DeArmond, who is related to Boggs by marriage and was mentored musically by him, said he plans to perform “You’ve Got A Friend” and “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor.

“I chose these because Eddie was always there to lend a helping hand to not only me, but countless others. And ‘Fire and Rain’ is a song that we all can connect to about losing someone that meant a lot to us,” DeArmond said. “He deserves to be remembered at the highest level.”

Wurst said he wants to leave his song choices a surprise, but said each will have meaning and be attributable to Boggs.

“One I’m going to be doing is the only song — the only serious song — Eddie and I ever sang together in a show,” Wurst said.

Wurst said he, like many others, respected Boggs as a musician, but even more as a person.

“He was very kind and courteous to anyone he talked to,” Wurst said. “I think it would be impossible for anyone to meet him and not like him.”

Holden, who plans to sing “In This Life” by Bette Midler, performed with Boggs at numerous charity events over the years.

“Eddie was always ready to lend a hand to raise money for worthy causes and I was always willing to work with him if he called me,” Holden said. “He was a wonderful musician and just a wonderful guy.”

Holden said she felt a special connection with Boggs because of their shared Southern roots. Boggs grew up in rural Kentucky while Holden was born in Arkansas and grew up in Louisiana. Both moved to Ohio as teenagers.

“That old Southern charm — he was just bubbling with it,” Holden said. “That common politeness and courtesy. … I loved that about him.

“We all loved him,” Holden said. “[The concert is] just to share our love for Eddie and to embrace Chris and the family and let them know that we loved him so much. It just does not seem like he ought to be gone. … He just had such a love in his heart for everybody.

“It will be good for all of us to be together,” Holden added. “There will probably be a lot of tears. But he will be there.”

Musician Kerry Patrick Clark, a close friend of Boggs’, was also slated to perform at the tribute event, but his tour schedule will keep him out of town. Although disappointed to miss the event, Clark said he’s happy so many fellow musicians will be coming together to celebrate Boggs.

“I think it speaks to the heart of the man, the teacher, the musician, the entertainer,” Clark said in an email to Toledo Free Press. “He not only fostered and supported so many local and regional artists, but invited them to participate in some big or small way in one of his many shows.”

Boggs, who retired in 2007 after 37 years as a teacher and school counselor, also left a lasting legacy as an educator, Rieger said.

“Probably the greatest character trait of Eddie is he had tremendous empathy,” Rieger said. “He always seemed to have his radar up for students on the margin and find a way to bring them back in and make them feel valued. Eddie used every opportunity he had with the students to elevate their worth and dignity.”

Recalling the student trips Boggs led to Washington, D.C., where he would stop to sing and play guitar outside the Capitol, Kaptur said Boggs often reminded her of a “strolling minstrel.”

“He brightened the Capitol whenever he was here,” Kaptur told Toledo Free Press in January. “He was uniquely gifted and he was uniquely generous.”

Boggs’ family said they are humbled by the gesture.

“It is a testimony to who Eddie was and how he treated others,” Chris said. “For those who attend, myself and our family extend our sincere gratitude for remembering Eddie, in whatever way he touched your life, and we thank God for blessing us with such a loving man.”

This summer’s Toledo Free Press benefit CD for the American Red Cross, “Red, White & You, Too!” is dedicated to Boggs and contains one of his signature songs, “Uptown Boogie Down Saturday Night.”

Another tribute event, being organized by the Sylvania Area Chamber of Commerce and the City of Sylvania, is planned for Aug. 17 in Downtown Sylvania.