Strange times we live in. In a collegiate athletic year that has already seen major conferences opt out of competition, opt back in, and just about everything in between, there is an intriguing development in Arizona.
According to the athletics website, Arizona State’s NCAA hockey team will temporarily join the Big-10 conference, and in order to minimize travel for participating schools, ASU will be on the road the entire season.
This comes at a time when it seemed as though everything was going right for ASU hockey. They had quickly propelled themselves from a club hockey powerhouse, to a force to be reckoned with at the NCAA Division-1 level.
Professional talent has already been through the ranks at ASU. Players like Brinson Pasichnuk, Josh Maniscalco, and Joey Daccord have already signed NHL contracts coming out of school. In addition, Demetrios Koumontzis was selected by the Calgary Flames in the 2018 NHL Draft, and he is still competing in Tempe.
They are currently one of only two D1 teams in the Sun-Belt, along with Alabama-Huntsville. They’ve been able to leverage this, along with the fact that they are one of the larger schools with an NCAA D1 team, in order to start attracting highly ranked recruits. They reached the national tournament in 2019, and would’ve attended again had it not been for the cancellation of the season. All of this being said, it has made for a shockingly successful start to their tenure at the pinnacle of college hockey.
They have now hit their first road block. Playing a full season on the road is a daunting task for any hockey team. With a home rink as uniquely advantageous as Oceanside, the team is going to need to adapt to what is being asked of them on the fly.
I had the chance to speak with a media member named Ed Trefzger from RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) and USCHO. He made it apparent that opposing teams find it perplexingly difficult to play at Oceanside due to a variety of factors. First, the time spent traveling contributes to fatigue. The rink itself, being small in stature, is also not the typical college hockey arena that these athletes are accustomed to. Because of this, there is a notably shallower ceiling at the rink, which doesn’t allow for teams to chip pucks out as easily as they presumably would be able to at home.
This just goes to show that the team is already at a disadvantage heading into the season. However, there have been some recent examples of teams being successful almost purely on the road.
Throwing it back to 2012 when the upstart Los Angeles Kings snuck into the playoffs as an eight-seed, they knew the road ahead of them was going to be mostly on the road (as is the case for lower-seeded teams). They showed unmatched team chemistry that postseason, and it can be attributed to their success on the road. Their record in the playoffs on the road was a combined 10-1, with their one loss being followed up by the Stanley Cup-clinching victory.
Darryl Sutter went as far as to try to replicate the feeling of being on the road, even when they were in Los Angeles. There are stories of him mandating that his players stay in hotels, away from their families and day-to-day worries.
Arash Markazi, who has worked with ESPN and the Los Angeles Times, was stated as saying, “He made the team stay in a hotel the night before Thursday’s game. He held the morning skate at Staples Center, which is the first time the Kings have done so in years after usually holding them at the training facility in nearby El Segundo. He held team meetings at the hotel and paired players with the same roommates they have on the road.”
Clearly, this method worked for them. It extends even further; to this year even, with the NHL bubble.
Although it was different because every team was “on the road”, many teams were echoing the same sentiment. Being forced to put other worries on the back-burner (disregarding how hard it must’ve been) allowed for players to focus their efforts solely on the task at hand. And it made for an incredible display of hockey.
Seeing as ASU has no other option but to be on the road for the whole season, they should take it as an opportunity rather than a hindrance. And based on their current trajectory, they should have no problem dealing with another roadblock. Temporarily from afar, give ‘em hell Devils!
