7 minute read
Skating for Long-Term Success
BY JUSTIN A. COHN
New Warriors women’s hockey team led by experienced coach, grad student, 18 freshmen
Brooklynn Moore
Team Captain
Jaclyn Van Schubert
Defense / Alternate Captain
Dakota Bowler
Forward / Alternate Captain
Izzy Pettem-Shand
High scorer
Megan Yakiwchuk
High scorer
Finding talented hockey players is one thing. Getting a team to jell together—on and off the ice—to build a foundation for years of success, that’s quite a bigger task altogether.
The Indiana Tech women’s hockey team, early in its inaugural season, has so far found the balance of winning games and creating a culture that could make it a national power.
“I think it’s been us spending a lot of time together,” said Brooklynn Moore, the captain and eldest player on an exceptionally young squad. “A lot of the girls not only live together in the dorms, but they also just genuinely get along. So I think a lot of the time we put into hanging out with each other and getting to know one another, it’s really helped us both on and off the ice.”
The Warriors were 12-4-1 through Dec. 11, a sterling start for a roster of 19 players that includes—wait for it—18 freshmen.
“‘Surprising’ may not be the right word to describe (our start). ‘Satisfying’ would be a better word,” head coach Scott Hicks said. “You put in all the work during the last 18 months to recruit, build from scratch and put everything together. To see it come together like this with these kids, and to see the effort that they’re putting in, it’s really satisfying and rewarding to see all that hard work starting to pay off even as early as it has been.” Hicks, 37, had been in the position of building a new hockey program before, having led Miami (Ohio) from 2010 to 2020 with a 155-66-19 record that included national championships in the American Collegiate Athletic Association in 2014, 2016 and 2017. He was ACHA’s Coach of the Year twice.
In 2020, Indiana Tech’s men’s hockey coach, Frank DiCristofaro, phoned Hicks, a longtime friend from their days playing against one another, to ask if Hicks had any suggestions for potential coaches for a soon-to-be announced women’s team at Tech. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting funding at Miami, Hicks expressed his interest in the job, to the surprise of the folks at Indiana Tech.
“Sometimes things work themselves out in a way you don’t expect,” Hicks said. “The more I learned from conversations with (DiCristofaro, former athletics director Debbie Warren and current AD Jessie Biggs), and through my own research, Indiana Tech just checked all the boxes that I would need to move on, in terms of the support from the university, the facilities, the budgeting. I saw it as an opportunity to move on and advance my career, rather than be stagnant, and I think it was a good move for me.”
Hicks’ plan included bringing in talented young players so the Warriors could grow their roster and excel in the future. Freshman recruits were tantalized by the knowledge that they could immediately play, and Hicks has left some open slots so he can recruit to “fill in the gaps” without having to cut anyone in the coming years.
“My word means a lot and I don’t want to bring a kid from Calgary, Alberta, and cut her after a year. I don’t think that’s right,” said Hicks, who graduated from Northern Kentucky in 2008 with a degree in liberal arts. “So I had my plan, ‘This is what we’re going to stick with.’ And it gives us the flexibility to keep these kids and continue to work with them, grow, build and move our program forward.”
But Hicks, whose assistant coaches are Jessie Rushing and Nicole Cato, knew he needed a veteran in the locker room to hold it all together. Enter Moore, who had played for him at Miami and thought her playing days were over after the pandemic ended the 2019-20 season prematurely and led to no 2020-21 campaign for the RedHawks.
Moore was completing her sports management degree at Miami, with designs on getting into coaching, when Hicks convinced her to check out the facilities and graduate programs at Indiana Tech with the hope she’d be willing to play for the Warriors.
“I knew she was somebody I could count on and could trust,” Hicks said. “She’s somebody who has been through a lot in her life, in terms of playing in a bunch of different places and being away from home, more importantly. I knew the value that experience would have on these 18 freshmen would be huge… She was hesitant until she got up here and saw everything that we had and were able to do.” Moore, a stay-at-home defenseman from Valencia, California, came to Indiana Tech as a graduate student in business management with two years of remaining athletics eligibility.
“I think our biggest thing is just really putting Indiana Tech on the map in the ACHA in the female side of things. The men’s program has done a great job of building theirs over the last couple of years, so we just really wanted to carry that into the women’s side of things,” she said. “We really just talked about making sure that we’re known out there in the league and making a good rep for ourselves, a good name for ourselves.”
The Warriors’ alternate captains are defenseman Jaclyn Van Schubert from Barrie, Ontario, and forward Dakota Bowler of Weyburn, Saskatchewan. The early leading scorers were Megan Yakiwchuk, from Airdrie, Alberta, who had four goals and eight points in seven games, and Isobel Pettem-Shand from Calgary, who had three goals and eight points. Goaltender Izzy Varner, who hails from Montrose, Minnesota, had played all seven games and owned a 1.43 goals-against average with a .932 save percentage.
With such a young team, there have been some growing pains and moments when Hicks and Moore, 21, have looked at one another, as if to say, “What have we gotten ourselves into here?” Some of the freshmen hadn’t experienced highlevel instruction before and the learning curve in women’s college hockey—which, unlike the men’s game, doesn’t have checking—can be steep.
Occasionally, Moore admitted, she must take a breath and recall what it was like for her when she was 17 or 18 years old and finding her way in college hockey, then use those memories to guide the young Warriors. “The hockey knowledge is there,” Moore said. “The challenge has been breaking habits. Maturity is definitely our biggest challenge, however, I think they’re starting to realize real quick that they all have to come together to make this happen, myself included. So I think it’s just making them take a step back and think, ‘OK, this is probably not how we should go about things on and off the ice.’ It’s breaking old habits, that’s probably my biggest challenge with them.”
The Warriors’ early success has the team hoping for things it didn’t think possible when practice first started Sept. 1—a trip to the national tournament now seems attainable—but wins and losses won’t change the ultimate goal: Setting up Indiana Tech for long-term success.
“I’ve tried to keep (the players) humble,” Hicks said. “I’ve been telling them, ‘Listen, wins and losses don’t matter. It’s about establishing our culture. It’s about putting all the foundation pieces in place, so that in Years 2, 3 and 4, we take those leaps.’ And they’ve bought into that and I think our culture and the chemistry they’ve all had together is part of the reason we’ve been successful.”
The early season feats included victories over Miami, 4-1 at the SportONE/Parkview Icehouse on Oct. 8 and 2-1 at Oxford, Ohio, on Oct. 9, which Hicks termed “bittersweet.”
The Warriors, whose regular season runs through Feb. 19, stress team play over individual success. Considering their first 25 goals were scored by 12 different players, it seems to be paying off.
“I think we’re working on being a really fluid team,” Moore said. “We like to move the puck a lot, so instead of being a lot of individuals, we try to get everyone involved.”
