UW-Green Bay alumnus scores with tale of hockey, life, death


A new popular book by Roger Dier, a 2007 graduate of the UW-Green Bay master’s program in Applied Leadership for Teaching and Learning, is getting notice on Amazon.com as one of the winter’s more interesting reads. Scarlet Ice, published by Minnesota’s Two Harbors Press, is out barely a month and already in its second printing. The book tells the true story of the Mankato West H.S. hockey team, rocked by the death of one of its players and a citywide meningitis outbreak, and its drive for the 1995 Minnesota state championship. Dier, at the time a working journalist in Mankato, weaves together observations on character, tragedy, and the place hockey holds in his city’s culture. Some of you will recall Dier from his efforts, at UW-Green and beyond, in promoting public health; he went on to accept a position as senior outreach specialist at the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. You can see an article in the Mankato Free Press about Scarlet Ice.