Bill Lechner was a young coach just starting his career, so inexperienced he had yet to earn a spot on the bench, when he had his first encounter with Willard Ikola.

Lechner, serving as an assistant at Hill-Murray and providing scouting reports from the stands, was headed to the Pioneers’ locker room between periods of a game at the old Met Center in Bloomington when Ikola stopped him in his tracks.

“He called out my name, ‘Hey, Bill’ ” Lechner said. “The first thing I thought is, ‘How the heck does he know my name?’ The next thing I thought of was, ‘Should I ask him for his autograph?’ ”

Ikola was unmistakable in his tweed sport coat and trademark houndstooth cap. He’d long since achieved legend status before meeting Lechner, guiding Edina to so many state tournament appearances he’d become the leading character on statewide TV each spring.

What the cameras never showed was the profound influence Ikola had on his peers, especially young coaches such as Lechner. 

“Ikola said to me, ‘Son, you tell coach (Terry) Skrypek you should be on the bench,’ ” Lechner said. “Go get on the bench and enjoy the game from there.”

Lechner, in his 27th season guiding Hill-Murray, solicited advice from Ikola over the years, and each time Lechner won a state championship (2008, 2020) he would receive a personalized, hand-written letter of congratulations from Ikola in the mail. Attending the state tournament, even in retirement, was a spring tradition for Ikola, who passed away on Jan. 20 at age 92.

Curt Giles, who is in his 26th season coaching the Hornets, never played for or coached under Ikola, but he’s heard plenty of stories from those who did.

“The one thing you would always hear about Willard, out of so many positive things, was he cared for his kids,” said Giles, who has led the Hornets to five state titles. “He wasn’t shooting for records. He was a humble guy. He talked about his teams and his kids. It was never about him.”

Ikola often spoke fondly about socializing with other coaches, when beverages would flow freely and power-play alignments would be sketched out on cocktail napkins. Lake Conference coaches were a tight bunch in Ikola’s heyday, and he was among the ringleaders organizing regular dinner outings for the group, including their wives.

“Willlard set the bar for all of us, not only for his record, which stands for itself, but for the way he treated people,” said Bruce Johnson, the former Robbinsdale Armstrong coach who also served as the executive director of the Minnesota Hockey Coaches Association. “The word that comes to my mind is classy. He was such a classy guy. He never looked at other coaches as inferior in any sort of way, no matter where you were in terms of your program’s success.”

Johnson, like Giles, heard countless stories from former Edina players, many of whom would become Armstrong assistants, about Ikola’s coaching style. It was well known that Ikola, who served in the U.S. Air Force, could be a strict disciplinarian. For road games, he set the departure time for the team bus and stuck to it, no matter who might be running late. Ikola wasn’t a fan of boomboxes in the locker room or players wearing mismatched socks on the practice ice. Practices with no pucks — all skating and conditioning — were regular occurrences when Ikola really got his ire raised.

“(Former players) would tell me stories of Ike’s expectations of their performances and behaviors at practice,” Johnson said. “Those are what grabbed me. It was a matter of doing things exactly the right way. He felt like the players had to have that attention to detail to be as good as they could possibly be. That was the Edina way.”

Those same expectations were deeply embedded in the Edina program when Giles took over.

“He built the foundation here, the expectations here,” Giles said. “He cared how kids should act in the community, what kind of men they were growing up to become and go into the world after hockey is done.

“He set such a high standard, and what’s wrong with that?”