OUT OF OFFICE: Dan MacKinnon

When Dan MacKinnon and his son weren’t destroying the competition on the tennis courts, he spent a lot of his time supporting his scouts. …and the Girl Scouts. Check out what the Devils Senior Vice President & Assistant General Manager has been up to during his time away from the office.

Midwest Mac

We basically split our time between two places. I live in Plymouth, Michigan, that’s where I’ve always been based out of. We also have a summer place off Lake Erie in Ohio. The area is a little bit unusual for the Midwest. The guy who developed the property was inspired by how Hilton Head was set up. This whole community is built around a golf course. There’s a lot of recreation and entertainment, like tennis courts, a gym, places to get a bite to eat or drink. You just park your car and you don’t drive it for the rest of the weekend.

Two Kids On the Block

My son, Will, is 20, and when this all started, he was finishing up his sophomore year the University of New Hampshire, where he plays hockey. My daughter, Maggie, is 18 and she was getting ready to go to Michigan State for her freshman year to study political science. They weren’t allowing students in person, so she started online. She also does club figure skating there. At the beginning we played a bunch of board games, but everyone has since gotten tired of that, and moved on to outside activities. It was a lot of good family time.

Quite The Racket

I had an epic summer-long tennis battle with my son. We had a see-saw battle going for about six months before he went back to school. We paired up for a doubles tournament at the tennis club and took the title. So that’s a good memory for future years.

Dan With The Plan

At the outset of all of this, there was a fairly high sense of urgency because we didn’t know what the calendar would look like. We thought it could all be still on the regular schedule with draft and free agency in June and July, respectively. There’s always a lot of work that gets done out in the field late in the year with our scouts – tightening up your lists and whatnot. And then those opportunities get taken away from you because you can’t get out to games, so it pushed us to video, which we always use as a resource but now it became a primary tool for scouting. So that was a change for us. We spent a lot of time on Zoom talking to pro and amateur scouting staff, and then in June Fitzy had us take a little breather because it was a lot of screen time up to that point. It was a great idea because then in July/August we got back at it and everyone had a lot of energy and focus. I thought it was the most prepared we’d ever been for a draft, with all the time we had to get ready.

Mac-azine Reading

We worked through a few series on TV and Netflix. I also read a couple biographies. I think I read a Winston Churchill biography every two years (laughs). I also read a lot of magazines and articles. It’s part of a fundraiser for the Girl Scouts, so I sign up for a bunch of magazines from them, like Business Week, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair and one or two more. Robyn has a few also, like Cosmopolitan. We having magazines rolling into the house all the time.