TROUT CREEK, Mont. — There are several ways to get to Trout Creek. Roy Sommer, a hockey coach who knows the back ways of the professional game as well as anyone, likes the dirt road.

He left Moose’s Saloon in Kalispell, his Toyota Sequoia filled with family, supplies and leftover pizza. He had a month until training camp started for the San Jose Barracuda, the top minor league affiliate of the Sharks, which Sommer coaches. He had three hours until he arrived at his summer cabin.

He began to list the two dozen places he has played and coached in the minor leagues. As with life, he kept getting sidetracked.

He turned off the paved highway and onto a narrow road of jagged gravel and dust. It squiggled through the mountains and connected with another paved road 40 miles away. About midway, the road forked. The last two times Sommer went right, he ended up with a flat tire.

He went left.

“I don’t think this way is any better, Roy,” his wife, Melissa, said.

“No, it’s worse,” Sommer said. “But that side’s got bad karma.”

Miles later, Sommer reached Wichita, Kan., in his conversation and Highway 200 in his car. He stopped for ice and last-minute supplies. An old man ambled over to the car window.

“Looks like you have a flat tire,” the man said, nodding to the rear.

“Man, third time in a row!” Sommer said. He shrugged, got out, changed the tire and moved on, happy to have another story to tell.

Sommer, a 58-year-old Californian, played 662 games in the minor leagues (and three in the N.H.L.). He has been a minor league head coach for 1,678 more.

In March, he broke the record for most games coached in the American Hockey League. (He now has 1,344, all with the Sharks’ top affiliate.) He is 20 victories from becoming the A.H.L.’s career leader, passing the Hockey Hall of Famer Fred Cook, known as Bun, who had 636 from 1940 to 1956.

That many victories in the N.H.L. would put Sommer in the career top 10, ahead of the likes of Jacques Lemaire, Darryl Sutter and Toe Blake. But over nearly 20 years, Sommer has been passed by each time the Sharks have changed head coaches. This year, when Todd McLellan left and Peter DeBoer was hired, Sommer was not interviewed.

Sommer does not complain, but he does wonder. N.H.L. coaches are increasingly buttoned up, standing sternly behind the bench in their stylish suits, imparting clichés and misdirection to the cameras.

Sommer, son of a tugboat operator, raised in Oakland by a single mother, is a blue-collar teacher most comfortable in flip-flops and straight talk. He is a loose Californian in a Canadian game. “Oh, man,” and “I was like, seriously?” are two phrases that pepper his speech.

On a bus trip each season, Sommer has players watch “Lonesome Dove,” the six-hour mini-series about an epic cattle drive. (“They’re kind of a team, these cattle ranchers,” Sommer said.) He takes his team on overnight camping trips, discerning who leads and who follows. To keep things light, Sommer dresses up extravagantly on Halloween and holds ugly sweater contests. He once instructed players to wear suits they could find at secondhand stores for under $10.

His 24-year-old son, Marley, who has Down syndrome, is Sommer’s sidekick at the arena, helping in the dressing room, even singing the national anthem, and is hugely popular with players.

“What we’re doing is a game,” Sommer said. “And if your team’s having fun, you’re probably winning.”

He dispenses personal history through colorful anecdotes, a life revealed as sketch comedy, neither slick nor scripted.

“I wonder if that’s hurt me,” Sommer said. “I’ve seen good coaches get to the N.H.L., and then they’re different. And they don’t last long. I think you have to be yourself.”

Gratefully Stable

Sommer has not won an A.H.L. championship, but he has shepherded roughly 130 players to the N.H.L. The Sharks, long a model for developing talent and winning games but starved for a Stanley Cup, have kept him employed for 20 years. Sommer is grateful for the rare stability.

“Who stays in a job that long?” he said.

He considered an offer this off-season to coach a pro team in Switzerland, but he signed a three-year contract to keep coaching San Jose’s top minor league team. He started with the team in Lexington, Ky. (coyly named the Thoroughblades), then Cleveland, then Worcester, Mass.

Starting this season, it is based in San Jose, sharing the arena with the Sharks, part of a new A.H.L. Pacific Division that includes five California teams.

The Sharks have Sommer right where they want him.

“He’s so valuable in what he does for us,” General Manager Doug Wilson said. “It’s as important as any role we have in this organization. And he’s so good at it. I don’t think you’ll find a player that will say Roy wasn’t honest or didn’t want him to succeed. That’s the kind of person we want in that position.”

His job may be less sexy and less lucrative than what Sommer still hopes to have, but it fits him well.

“This is kind of me,” he said at the cabin he built, beyond reach of cellphone signals and electricity, on a low meadow between forks in the creek where he used to spend summers in a tepee. “I’m pretty simple, really.”

The next morning, the cutthroat trout were biting and Sommer was up early.

“I always figure it could be my last day,” he said, wearing shorts and a teal San Jose Sharks hoodie splattered in red paint. He had not shaved in a couple of weeks.

Sommer steered his all-terrain vehicle for 45 minutes along a narrow trail with a steep drop to one side. He parked, hid the A.T.V. key under one rock and his Colt revolver under another. Fishing pole in hand, he hiked 45 more minutes, scrambling the final few yards into a series of pools connected by waterfalls.

Sixth-Round Draft Pick

Sommer learned hockey at a rink in Berkeley, Calif., and was discovered during a hockey camp in British Columbia. His first juniors team, the Spruce Grove (Alberta) Mets, was coached by Doug Messier, whose son Mark was a stick boy.

A scrapper with a scoring touch, Sommer was a sixth-round draft choice of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1977. They sent him to Dallas of the Central Hockey League, which then demoted him to the Saginaw Gears of the International Hockey League, where he played 12 games before being traded to the Grand Rapids Owls.

“That was my first year as a pro,” Sommer said. “Now when I send someone down, they’re just going one place. So I don’t feel too sorry for them.”

During a season in Spokane, Wash., Sommer found a 20-acre plot several miles outside Trout Creek. At the time, the town had two bars and one store.

“It was like the Wild West back then, man,” Sommer said. “It’s soft now.”

The population remains about 200. When Sommer began coaching, he recruited players from a phone booth along the highway. This year, the cabin began to occasionally pick up a cellular signal. His phone randomly chimed every few hours.

“We may have to move farther into the bush,” Sommer said.

Sommer played for eight minor league teams in four leagues over 10 years. In 1981, while he was playing in Wichita, the N.H.L.’s Edmonton Oilers called up Sommer for a home game against Montreal.

“My first shift, I got in a fight with Rod Langway — who ended up playing for me in Richmond however many years later,” Sommer said. (It was 14.)

Until nudged, Sommer did not mention that he scored a third-period goal, 43 seconds after Wayne Gretzky, in a 9-1 rout.

He played two more games and was sent back to the minors, unaware that his N.H.L. statistics would be forever frozen: three games, one goal, seven penalty minutes.

“But now I know what it’s like when my guys get called up,” he said. “The anticipation. You can’t sleep. I couldn’t even lace my skates before the game. But I remember Gretzky. He was sitting there eating a hot dog and drinking Coke.”

When Sommer turned 30, he had played 147 games in the American Hockey League, 275 in the Central Hockey League, 195 in the International Hockey League and 45 in the Pacific Hockey League. He had 165 goals, 229 assists, 1,901 penalty minutes and no real plan for what to do next. Maybe be an electrician back in California.

Muskegon Coach Rick Ley offered Sommer a job as an assistant coach. Sommer accepted. A year later, they were both out of work.

Sommer found coaching in hockey as unsettled as playing. He took an assistant’s job in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and got his first head-coaching job in Minot, N.D. He was fired just before Christmas of his second season.

A friend hired Sommer to be an assistant with the Albany Choppers, a first-year franchise in the International Hockey League. Within weeks that team folded.

Foothold in E.C.H.L.

Sommer found a foothold in the fast-expanding East Coast Hockey League. He spent a season as head coach of the Roanoke Valley Rebels (the logo featured the Confederate battle flag on a maple leaf), then four with the Richmond Renegades, under three owners.

His memories of overnight bus rides and crazy characters unspool in stories of low budgets and low comedy. Players were instructed, during on-ice fights, to steal the other team’s dropped sticks, and equipment managers regularly lifted supplies in road arenas, from tape to the small diamonds used in skate sharpeners.

“Here’s a good story,” Sommer said, as he often does.

After a sleeping player’s face froze to the window of a broken-down bus one night, Sommer led his team to Denny’s, where morning customers found one section of booths filled with slumbering hockey players. Another time, robbers broke into a motel room, tied up a couple of players with phone cords and robbed them.

The Renegades won the E.C.H.L. championship in 1995 and had the league’s best record in 1996. By then, Sommer had met Wilson, an owner of a Roller Hockey International team in San Jose and the future general manager of the Sharks. Sommer coached the team in the summers, and he coached a national team to a pair of world championships.

The Sharks offered Sommer a job as an assistant coach. He did it for two years, the first under Al Sims, the second under Darryl Sutter. In 1998, the Sharks had an opening for their minor league affiliate in Kentucky. Sommer has held the job since.

“If you’re an assistant coach, you’re working for the head guy, doing what he wants you to do,” Sommer said. “You can’t control your own fate, how you want your room to act. As an assistant in the N.H.L., I bet a lot of those guys bite their lips, like, ‘I don’t know why this guy is doing this, but he’s the boss.’ ”

Sommer likes the autonomy, and he has never minded the bus rides and relative lack of luxury in the minors. For the Sharks, he is a trusted gatekeeper of talent that flows, both directions, between the N.H.L. and the A.H.L.

For the first time, Sommer’s team will not be across the country from the Sharks, but in the same arena in San Jose.

“It’ll be interesting,” Sommer said. “We’ll see the Sharks board the bus in their suits, to catch the jet, and we’ll be boarding our bus for Bakersfield.”

House on a Lake

But for now it was still summer, and Sommer drove his car back toward Kalispell, toward a house that he and Melissa are building on Ashley Lake, with improbably blue-green water filled with kokanee salmon. They bought the property 12 years ago and built a garage with a couple of rooms above it. This summer, thanks to Sommer’s new deal with the Sharks, construction began on an addition. It will have three bedrooms, a large kitchen and power.

“She said that if we retire here, she needed electricity,” Sommer said.

Melissa said: “I said I’m all for living in Montana. But I’m not going outside for a cord of wood every time I’m cold.”

With Marley and their 19-year-old daughter, Kira, they left Trout Creek. (A third child, Castan, 23, is a hockey player at Holy Cross.) Melissa wondered aloud if there was enough gas to reach the next station.

That reminded Sommer of the time he broke down in the middle of a winter’s night in remote Saskatchewan, having no jacket and flagging down a startled couple in a Winnebago. He told another story about running out of gas and waking up a farmer at 2 a.m.

Thirty minutes later, he filled the car with gas and got back in with a smile.

“This thing holds 22 gallons, and it just took 21.88,” he said. “Yeah, man.”

Marley laughed in the back seat. The family turned onto the dirt road, the short cut with the menacing streak of puncturing tires, and came to another fork.

“Left or right, Mo?” Sommer asked Marley.

Left, Marley said.

“O.K.,” Sommer said. “Left it is.”