Cullen enjoying Dad duty during offseason

On a beautiful July day at the Tharaldson Little League Complex in Fargo, North Dakota, Matt Cullen was standing at the fence along the third base line of one of the fields, watching his oldest son participate in the first game of a double-header.

Cullen played baseball through high school and loves it, so he enjoys coming to the diamond. Which is a good thing, because he spends a lotof time here during the summer, as all three of his boys - Brooks, 11, Wyatt, 9, and Joey, 8 - are on different teams.
When they're not playing games - and they have at least one Monday through Thursday, sometimes with tournaments on the weekends - they'll come to the field, hit balls and play catch and Hotbox (also known as Pickle). While they watch NHL on the Flyduring hockey season, during baseball season they switch to Quick Pitchand keep Cullen posted on how the Pirates are doing.
"It's fun, and the kids really seem to love it," Cullen said. "It's fun in the summer just to be able to sit back and be dad and cheer them on. Pick them up after they've had a tough game and celebrate with them after a good game. Either way you go for ice cream after the game and everybody's happy (laughs). It's great."

With Matt's wife Bridget away visiting a friend, he was in charge the weekend our staff came to visit, with some help from Grandpa. Matt's dad Terry lives nearby and was there throwing a ball around with Wyatt and Joey, who were each sporting Pittsburgh gear.
While Cullen was a shortstop in baseball, Brooks likes to play first base while Wyatt prefers catcher. "Wyatt likes catcher a lot because he wants to play goalie. So I kind of made a compromise with him," Cullen said with a smile.
"He can play forward in hockey, but when he plays baseball, he can do catcher because that's like being goalie. So that's our tradeoff. He likes it. He's pretty good back there."
The entire Cullen family spends a lot of time at the hockey rink as well. Matt skates and works out in the morning, while the boys have had a hockey camp on and off throughout the summer and have even started doing dryland training, which mostly consists of just running and jumping. "It's more just to play with your buddies, they love that," Matt said.
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After a few hours at the ball park, we met the Cullen men back at the house that Matt and Bridget recently built in Moorhead, Minnesota and are still in the process of moving into. It's located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a sprawling suburban neighborhood, so the boys have plenty of friends to run around with, but they still have plenty of land.
The Red River, which forms most of the border between Minnesota and North Dakota, is just on the other side of the trees that line their expansive lot.
"It's awesome having a farm field back here," Cullen said. "Last year, we had corn out here. It looked like Field of Dreams."
We entered the house through the garage, which led into a big recreational space with everyone's hockey equipment strewn about and lined with different exercise equipment, including a plyo box, kettlebells, medicine balls and a few difference machines.
"This is my potential gym," Cullen said. "This summer I started getting a few things in here so I could do some stuff."
However, at that particular moment, it was being occupied by Brooks and Wyatt as they whacked tennis balls off the wall in the midst of one of their many competitions. But they took a break to start a tour of the rest of the house.

The highlight was the basement area, which is sectioned off for numerous activities. The family watches movies on a big couch lined up in front of the TV, most recently watching Black Panther,which is Wyatt's new favorite movie.
They also watch The Sandlotand D2: The Mighty Ducks. Joey loves to quote that movie, especially this line from Lester Averman: "Nice haircut, did you lose a bet?"
"He says that to everyone now. Adults, whoever," Cullen laughed. "He said that to me, and I was like, what? Where'd you get that?"
"You do have a bad haircut, though," Joey retorted.
"Yeah, no, I know," Cullen grinned. "I haven't had a good haircut since 1995, I think. Nope, that was a bad one, too."
There may be times that the boys are quiet and calm sitting on the couch, but not at this moment as they immediately began wrestling each other and just burying each other in the cushions. At one point you just heard Joey, completely hidden from sight as Brooks tackled him, cry out, "Why do I have to be the youngest?"

"I had two brothers, so this is kind of what it was like when I was growing up," Cullen said. "I was the oldest boy and I had two younger brothers and a younger sister. So the three of us boys had quite a few of these wrestling matches."
After a while, Cullen intervened and had the boys show us the shooting room that he set up on the other side of the wall. "We had this extra space when we were building the house and we thought it would be a good spot to just come down here on a rainy day and have their buddies come over and play," Cullen said. "They can skate on this too, if they want, because it's fake ice."

There's plenty of space in another part of the room to play mini sticks, where the boys convinced their dad to join in for a game. Brooks tended goal at one end with Wyatt as his teammate, while Matt tended goal at the other end with Joey as his teammate. It was a close game filled with lots of physicality, less passing and a couple of penalty shots, but Matt and Joey ultimately prevailed, 4-2.

The boys love chirping their dad whenever they can, and didn't hold back when it came to the other NHLers that have taken part in a game.
The boys didn't seem very impressed with Phil Kessel, who spent Christmas Eve 2016 with the family, saying that his sister Amanda was a lot better than him. "They were super impressed with how good Amanda was. And they were like yeah, Phil was okay," Cullen laughed.

They also thought Carl Hagelin was "slow," with Cullen shaking his head and saying, "I don't think that's ever been said about Carl Hagelin."
"Just in mini sticks," Joey clarified.
They were, however, complimentary of Sidney Crosby, saying he was the best goalie to ever play - he even earned a shutout - and Patric Hornqvist, saying he was the best player. "Yeah, I think so too," Cullen said. "Horny worked as hard as you guys. He was the only one that matched your work ethic. He was working, he was sweating."

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Hornqvist is perhaps the one person who has the energy level to keep up with the boys, who are an absolute tornado of activity. They didn't stop moving for a second while we were there.
With them, everything is a competition. "Pick a room and play a game," Cullen said. That includes tennis in the gym, mini sticks, foosball and wrestling downstairs, and their neighborhood wiffle ball and street hockey leagues. They get that from both their parents, as Matt said Bridget, who played basketball through college, is also incredibly competitive.
For the wiffle ball league, Cullen said that for a while, one of the kids would send out a group email with the weekly schedule and standings. "It was pretty funny," he said. When they play street hockey, the boys get on their bikes, round up all their friends and bring them back to the house.
"It'll be 8-on-8 just packed into the driveway. It's awesome," Cullen said. "Then there's just water bottles everywhere in the yard and hockey sticks, because as soon as the game's over they just drop everything and leave, so it's like a yard sale."

When it's just the boys, they like to play "shootout" and work on their moves. When asked about the best move they've seen Dad make, Brooks replied with, "the breakaway where he got tripped and it was an empty net and it was an automatic goal."
It's the same goal they chirped their dad about on an episode of In the Room.

That got the boys reflecting about some of the other goals Matt scored in Pittsburgh. But after the reminiscing, things got competitive again when Joey brought up backhand bar-down goals.
"Dad, you scored a backhand bar-down one with Minnesota, because that was the night after I scored backhand bar down," Joey said. "Because I said I bet you can't score backhand bar down and you did."
Matt laughed and said he and his boys had bets throughout the season whenever they had games on the same nights about who could score the most.
Even when they head to the lake most weekends, the hockey-crazed Cullen kids still find a way to play. They do love their water sports, with Matt driving the boat as they tube and wakeboard. They actually bought a new boat this summer, which the boys got to pick out. They had three options to choose from, and Matt said it was unanimous - they went with one that was black and yellow.
But when they're not on the water, there's a bunkhouse by their cottage where Matt has set up another gym area and there's room to play street hockey.
Hockey-crazed might be an understatement when it comes to the boys. Their bedrooms are a prime example of that, as each of their bedspreads and all of their decorations are hockey-themed. Brooks' room is particularly Penguins-friendly, as one wall is covered with Penguins Fatheads, including the iconic image of Crosby lifting the Stanley Cup in 2009.

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The Cullens have a crazy, hectic, chaotic life, and Matt wouldn't have it any other way. The way his boys are growing up reminds him of his own childhood, where he was into pretty much any sport you could think of, and it really brings him back. He's savoring every second that he gets to just be, well, Dad, as he's affectionately known in the Penguins locker room.
"We try to squeeze every ounce of fun out of summer that you can with the kids because it's so busy in the winter," Cullen said. "So we do (baseball) and then we go get ice cream or something after the game and then we go to the lake on the weekends and summer flies by, but it's fun."
Minnesota is home for Matt and Bridget, who are high school sweethearts, and their boys. They really thought Matt would finish his career there, which is why he joined the Wild for the 2017-18 campaign.
But the season didn't go the way they had hoped on a number of levels, and when they had a chance to return to Pittsburgh - which has become a second home for the family - it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up. And they're all thrilled to be going back.
"It's funny, this time of year you start getting excited about going back for the season," Cullen said. "You've been training for a while. I'm excited, I know these guys are really excited. I love it there. It's been so fun, the two years we had there were so fun for all of us. I'm really excited to get out there."