A member of the athletic halls of fame at Wayland High, Northeastern University, and the Beanpot Tournament, Jim Averill was a standout defenseman at NU.
A team captain and All-American in 1985 when the Huskies repeated as Beanpot champs, he produced 19 goals and 99 assists in 124 career games.
Averill was an integral part of “the first family of Northeastern hockey.” He played with his older brother Bob on the 1984 squad, and younger brother Will starred on the ice for the Huskies and skated on NU’s Beanpot championship team in 1988.
All three played for the late Ferny Flaman, whom Averill called “serious and fair, a coach who gave you a job and expected you to do it.”
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Their father, Bob Averill, manned the blue line for Northeastern in the 1950s, and taught circuit theory as part of the electrical engineering curriculum at NU for 20 years. The elder Averill is retired and lives in Falmouth with his wife, Claire.
“My older sister, Ruth, who just retired after 32 years as a detective with the Wayland police, and younger sister, Jennifer, also went to Northeastern and live in Wayland,’’ said the 52-year-old Averill, a 1981 Wayland High grad who lives in Newton with his wife, Susan. Will resides in Wayland and Bob in Framingham.
“Dad had all five of us on skates when we were kids, and he helped coach me and my brothers with the Natick Comets youth team,” recalled Averill, who still plays in a Wednesday night league in Natick with several friends from high school.
Averill had scholarship offers to play baseball at Boston College and Northeastern, but he felt he needed a break after the hockey season and time to focus on his studies.
He graduated from NU with a degree in mechanical engineering, and remains close to the hockey program and current NU head coach Jim Madigan, his teammate from 1981 to 1985.
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“Bob, Will, and I are still active in the alumni game, and our family has also established the Averill Scholarship Fund to help a player in need,’’ said Averill, a former president of the Friends of Northeastern Hockey and an organizer of its annual golf outing.
“I was part of some very good teams at Northeastern that won ECAC and Beanpot championships, and they were exciting times. I gave my best on the ice, and Northeastern gave me the hands-on experience through their co-op program to tweak what I wanted to do after college.’’
After graduation, Averill worked for his college physics teacher, Mickey Ligor, as an outside sales manager at Applied Measurements Inc. in Acton. He held the same position at High Tech Sales in Wayland before founding the Averill Engineering Group in Falmouth, a consulting firm to small companies.
Averill said dealing with pressure situations on the ice translated to the business world.
“If you’re down a goal, you know you need to press but also stay calm and go with the game plan and try to execute,” he said. “In business, it’s much the same. You envision the end result, but there’s a process and it can change, and you need to keep a level head to walk through it one step at a time.”
Marvin Pave can be reached at marvin.pave@rcn.com.