Leavitt Area High School hockey forward<\/a> and Maine high school referee was there.<\/p>\n\u201cWhen (Rouillard) wasn\u2019t playing, he was reffing,\u201d said Mike Keaney, who worked with Rouillard as a referee in the area. \u201c(He) was really involved in the game and whenever he had an opportunity to learn as a referee, always hung around the older referees, whether it was myself or other gentlemen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seventeen years after he last played high school hockey, Rouillard will referee his second Frozen Four, the signature event in NCAA Division I men\u2019s college hockey.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you first get that phone call of your first championship game or the first Frozen Four, it\u2019s kind of surreal,\u201d said Rouillard, 34, a Turner resident who\u2019s worked for Hockey East for eight years. \u201cI kind of went through a whole process of becoming a better official, not really knowing what would come of it. And I went through a lot of leads where I never worked that far into the playoffs and never worked the championship game until I got to some minor pro hockey.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Frozen Four, which will determine the national champion, begins Thursday with a pair of semifinals. Wisconsin will play North Dakota at 5 p.m., while Denver will play Michigan at 8:30 p.m. The winners will play for the title at 5:30 p.m. Saturday.<\/p>\n
The NCAA National Coordinator of Officials typically assigns officials to the Frozen Four games. It tries to tap officials from conferences that are not involved in the matchups. <\/p>\n
Rouillard, who works for a Minnesota marketing company, said he makes between $300 and $500 to officiate a men\u2019s college hockey game. He\u2019s officiated about 35 games this season.<\/p>\n
Rouillard first worked collegiate hockey\u2019s championship event in Tampa, Florida in 2023.<\/p>\n
This weekend, he\u2019ll call T-Mobile Arena \u2014 home to the NHL\u2019s Las Vegas Golden Knights \u2014 his office and work one of the three games.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou kind of think back, and you realize you\u2019re not sure how many you\u2019re going to have of these,\u201d said Rouillard, who graduated from Leavitt in 2009. \u201cSo to be here twice is hard to describe \u2026 it\u2019s some of the most fun that we\u2019ll ever have, so I\u2019m just trying to take every moment and slow down time a little bit and have fun with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rouillard started officiating Maine high school hockey games while at Leavitt and then the University of Southern Maine before earning professional minor league hockey and collegiate assignments. He has primarily officiated in New England.<\/p>\n
Rouillard officiates Hockey East games Friday and Saturday nights from October to early April. He\u2019s often working at schools such as Boston College, Boston University and the University of New Hampshire.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Rouillard) just worked a ton of games and took advantage of opportunities that were given (to) him,\u201d Keaney said. \u201cAnd then when he got out of high school and when he was studying and in college, he took advantage of the opportunity to work in the official development program with USA hockey \u2026 he basically traveled all over the country doing high-level junior games, got a lot of mentoring from top-level officials throughout the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a kid like (Rouillard) from a small town in Maine to make it to that level, I think it\u2019s just a tribute to his hard work, his dedication and really his ability to really take advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steven Rouillard of Turner is set to work his second Frozen Four in three years. (Photo courtesy of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[377],"tags":[5],"class_list":{"0":"post-548915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hockey","8":"tag-hockey"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116376130234730639","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/img_3306_720-e1775744869384.jpg\")
\t\t\tSteven Rouillard of Turner is set to work his second Frozen Four in three years. (Photo courtesy of Steven Rouillard)<\/p>\n