‘A huge step’: ASU Hockey beginning to cash in during program-best season

(Photo: Travis Whittaker/WCSN)

ROCHESTER, N.Y., – After roofing his shot into the top corner of the net, Tyler Busch raised his arms and threw his maroon and gold-clad body against the boards, banging his custom gray CCM gloves against the clear glass separating him from thousands of hostile Rochester Institute of Technology spectators.

The Arizona State junior co-captain egged them on, pounding his fists as he whooped in triumph during the Sun Devils’ win at RIT last Friday, his tally helping ASU to a two-game sweep that kept it on track for a program-first NCAA Tournament berth. But his celebration was about more than just a goal – he was letting another fanbase know what the rest of the college hockey world is finding out this year.

The Sun Devils have arrived. And they might not be going anywhere, either.

“We’re not surprising ourselves anymore,” sophomore forward and Arizona native Johnny Walker said. “I think we just keep surprising others.”

Since plans were announced in November 2014 – on the back of $32 million in private donations – to bump the sport from club level to Division I, those associated with ASU hockey had to wear a sharp poker face. From Vice President for University Athletics Ray Anderson to coach Greg Powers and the dozens of players who suffered through the program’s lean first three years, the Sun Devils kept their cool while the rest of sport raised a collective eyebrow, wondering what cards they had to play.

This year, against the odds, ASU’s big bet on hockey is beginning to pay off.

Back when these games at RIT were booked before the season, ASU was supposed to be an easy filler on RIT’s schedule, a couple of contests against a young, far-flung program that has no arena, no conference, and had yet to crack .500.

But the Sun Devils’ fourth D-I season has yielded a new reality. At 19-10-1, ASU hasn’t just surpassed its previous program-record for wins (10, set in 2016-17) but is close to doubling it. A little more than a month before Selection Sunday, the Sun Devils are contenders for an NCAA Tournament at-large berth, a feat no independent program has achieved since 1992.

For now, all their success is still met with some surprise around the country, an underdog team that has shattered expectations. But this year’s change of fortune might just be the start. If it stays on its current path, ASU won’t be considered a longshot for much longer.

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The top lights of television cameras shone brightly in Greg Powers’ face last month, reflecting off his glasses and back into the clump of reporters surrounding him.

With his program toppling records almost every weekend, a bloated contingent of local media had shown up at his weekly press conference, all wanting to know the same thing:

How has ASU sprouted a winning college hockey team in the middle of the desert?

“We’ve, up until this point, been an urban-legend program,” Powers said. “‘Oh my god, there’s a Division I program at Arizona State. They don’t have an arena; they don’t have a conference. Man, one day they might be pretty good.’ And now, I think we’ve got everybody’s attention. We’re legitimate. We’re real. And we’re not going to be able to sneak up on anybody.”

ASU has only improved its stock since, moving up to No. 12 in the USCHO poll and No. 9 in the PairWise rankings, a comparative analytical metric that wholly decides the tournament at-large bids.

“We knew we were going to take a big step this year,” Powers said. “We didn’t know how big of a step. It’s been a huge step.”

There may be no one who better understands the program’s progress than Powers. The Indiana-native played goalie for ASU’s club team in the ‘90s, and first joined its coaching staff a decade ago. In 2014, he was the head coach of the team that won a national championship at the ACHA club level. And when it came time for the Sun Devils to hire a D-I coach, Anderson stuck with the guy who had compiled a 129-23-8 club record.

“Don’t hire me if I’m just the right guy,” Powers told Anderson, as he recalled in a 2016 Players’ Tribune article. “Hire me if you think I’m the only guy.”

The decision made many in the hockey world roll their eyes. Powers had never been part of a D-I program before. His professional background was in selling medical software, not recruits. Plenty wondered, What did he know about big-time college hockey?

Those questions are starting to go away now

“I can’t imagine myself anywhere else,” Powers said, before joking, “I don’t think I’d be a very good coach if I were anywhere else.”

In the four years since the transition, Powers has turned ASU’s weaknesses into strengths.

Despite being situated thousands of miles from the hockey hotbeds of the Northeast, and outside the footprint of all major junior hockey leagues, Powers has inked top-20 recruiting classes two of the last three years.

 

“I think we’ve got everybody’s attention. We’re legitimate. We’re real. And we’re not going to be able to sneak up on anybody.”
– Greg Powers

 

While the Sun Devils have been able to take advantage of homegrown talent – ASU has four Arizona natives on the roster, including Walker, who is leading the nation with 22 goals this season – as well as some East Coast defects, such as junior goalie Joey Daccord (the country’s leader in wins, shutouts and saves), it has tapped into a Western Canada pipeline too.

This season, eight Sun Devils are from either Alberta or British Columbia, including Busch and his fellow co-captain, junior defenseman Brinson Pasichnuk, who is third in the country among defensemen with 12 goals.

“He’s completely revamped the culture of our program as the captain,” Powers said of Pasichnuk, who played lower-tier junior A hockey before emerging as one of college hockey’s best blue-liners at ASU. “He embodies everything we want a Sun Devil hockey player to be. It just so happens that he’s a really, really good player.”

Scheduling has been another puzzle solved by ASU, which has annually booked games against some of the country’s best programs – an extra burden for during the young program’s early season, but an important factor boosting ASU’s resume this year. The Sun Devils’ 22nd-ranked strength of schedule has bolstered their lofty spot in PairWise and RPI, where there are also No. 9.

“Now it’s expected,” Walker said of winning on the road, following last weekend’s sweep over RIT. “We expect to have two wins coming out here and we did. We’re not surprising ourselves anymore. I think we just keep surprising others.”

Perhaps the biggest roadblock though has been the Sun Devils’ home arena. Built in 1974, off-campus Oceanside Ice Arena is anything but a Division-I facility. The 45-year-old rink is cramped, has a low-hanging ceiling that often catches the puck to stop play, and includes extremely limited seating (less than 1,000), especially for students.

However, the intimate setting has been hostile to visitors this year. ASU is 9-2-0 in the venue this season and owns the fourth-best home record in the country. Boston College, Michigan State, Colorado College and Alaska-Fairbanks have all left Tempe empty-handed this year.

“We’ve eliminated every excuse here at Arizona State,” Powers said. “We do not have the best facility yet. We are independent. We’re in our third full year. None of that matters. We show up to play every day, take it one game at a time. I know it’s cliche, but the guys have truly bought into that mantra.”

It has helped that Powers and his staff have adopted near-sighted perspective, like card players focusing on one hand at a time. But elsewhere in the program, ASU brass is keeping a long-view too. To cash in on the future of the program, school administrators understand there are still plenty of areas to improve, facilities being chief among them.

“We know that our arena situation right now is not the best,” senior associate athletic director Frank Ferrara said. “That will be the next step.”

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For most of Frank Ferrara’s life, hockey wasn’t his primary sport.

The ASU senior associate athletic director grew up on Long Island but never took to the ice (“dek hockey” was as close as he got to playing the game). Before coming to ASU, he spent two decades working for the NFL as a financial operative and lead negotiator. And after arriving at the school in October 2015, most of his attention the first couple of years was focused on other sports, away from Powers’ team.

But in the last 2 ½ years, he’s taken a leading role behind the scenes with the upstart hockey program, becoming the team’s traveling administrator and getting actively involved in efforts to build an on-campus arena.

From his perch, Ferrara sees ASU’s encouraging run of results this season as one of many stepping stones for the team. He has big ideas for the future.

“There’s tremendous amount of progress,” he said. “I understood pretty quickly, especially after meeting coach Powers, that this is about far more than just hockey. I think we both knew that this was going to be a process, that the hockey was going to get better, something we didn’t have any doubt. But I think we both understood – and I think this is what makes him very special – that it’s more than that.”

Indeed, ASU’s initial dilemmas have been different than other schools that have recently made the jump to D-I. Penn State, which was bumped from club status in 2012, had a league waiting for it (the Big 10) with open arms and a brand new arena ready by its second season of play after its move. Even RIT, a D-III school that moved its hockey team to D-I in 2005, was immediately able to find its footing in the Atlantic Hockey conference.

“They don’t have a league, so that’s a tough sell maybe,” RIT coach Wayne Wilson, who coached his school through its transition more than a decade ago, said of ASU last week. “They’ve got obstacles too … (but) what they’ve done is outstanding.”

Unlike those other schools, the Sun Devils aren’t situated in a hockey hotbed. Attracting players was one thing. But embedding themselves into the Phoenix sports culture has been a completely different undertaking.

“It’s about building the sport,” Ferrara said. “It’s the best-kept secret in the Northeast and the Michigans and the Minnesotas and obviously in New York, for a long time. Now we’re trying to build this in the Valley. To do that, we have to do things differently.”

Connecting with the youth hockey community was an early objective for ASU. After the D-I move was announced, one local club program re-branded as the “Jr. Sun Devils” (though it has no official affiliation with the school). Powers has been a speaker at local coaching conventions organized by the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes. And just the presence of top-level college hockey in the city has allowed some local kids in the sport to dream big about their own careers.

“When they went D-I, there was quite a bit of buzz that was going through youth hockey,” said Sean Whyte, a longtime youth coach in the state who is now the NHL’s Youth Hockey Regional Director for the western U.S. “I think it helped create a clearer path for some of these players, where you have players that say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go play college hockey.’”

ASU’s Division-I status has it positioned to take advantage of a larger trend too: the growing number of young athletes in the west gravitating to hockey.

According to research provided by USA Hockey Assistant Executive Director Kevin Erlenbach, USA Hockey memberships – a base requirement to participate in virtually all organized youth leagues in the country – are on the rise in Arizona and California. In the last five seasons, there has been a 118 percent increase in participation at the 8 and under age group in the Golden State, while Arizona’s under-8 numbers have spiked by 224 percent in that same span.

As the lone southwestern Division-I program, ASU might find itself in prime position to recruit an entire generation of young players in the region coming into the sport now.

“I think there are a lot of kids that realize the same thing,” Whyte said. “Growing up in California, [they] can go to Arizona. It’s an hour flight, as opposed to somewhere back east.”

The next phase will be the new on-campus arena ASU has in the works. The building, set to begin construction sometime later this year for a planned opening in fall 2021, could become something of a hockey mecca in the state. School administrators want two sheets of ice, one surrounded by thousands of seats for the Sun Devils’ team, and another smaller rink for youth players – many of whom could be aspiring to join the program one day.

Ferrara was in Rochester last weekend, checking out RIT’s recently built, 4,300-seat Gene Polisseni Center – one of the newer and nicer venues in the country – for arena ideas to take back to Tempe. During ASU’s Friday night game last weekend, RIT students filled all the seats behind one net, creating a frenzied environment until the Sun Devils began to pull away in a 6-1 win.

Ferrara sees potential for ASU’s future home to create the same energy.

“Once we make it easy for [fans] to get to, I think there will be thousands,” he said. “No reason to think there won’t be crowds as special as what we have for our football or basketball games.”

Ferrara also thinks ASU’s planned hockey arena – expected to cost around $80 million, according to the Arizona Republic – could help the program finally get admittance to a conference. Since the Sun Devils moved to the top division, they have reportedly had discussions about joining the WCHA and NCHC, but nothing came of it.

“That’s something we’re obviously progressing towards fixing,” Ferrara said. “There were some teams that want to make sure that, before they admit a member into their conference, that they’re admitting someone who is committed to the sport. We’ve proven that.”

But even before the first shovel has gone in the ground on that front, the Sun Devils are already ahead of schedule. Many expected the program’s trajectory to be: create a culture, build an arena, become an NCAA Tournament contender.

This year’s team is skipping a step.

“The awareness certainly has come,” Ferrara said. “If you read the stories, a lot of teams are saying, ‘Hey, they’re not that bad.’ That’s all well and good, and there has been a lot of progress, but I think if you listen to the boys in this locker and the coaching staff, there’s an understanding. It’s not good enough. We’re not done yet. We know that the most important game in our history is the next one. Let’s keep progressing all the way through.”

For his part, Powers has kept his players’ attention on the short-term, not letting the weight of the program’s potential drag them down. He had a “countdown clock” installed in the locker room this year. After every game, it resets and begins counting down until the team’s next contest.

The message: ASU can’t get caught thinking about the future; it has to take it one step at a time first.

“A lot of club programs have asked, ‘What was the blueprint to make ASU a Division-I program?’” Powers said. “There wasn’t one. It was literally doing what we’re doing this year, focusing on what’s right in front of us, handling what we can control. And good things happen.”

After all, the Sun Devils’ current successes didn’t happen all at once. They didn’t go all-in on the first hand and become instant winners. Instead, they’ve slowly built the stack of chips they’ve got banked now.

“In my three years here, this is the biggest buzz we’ve ever created,” Daccord said last month. “That was the goal when we started this whole thing, was to bring attention to our program, what we were doing, and growing the game of college hockey. It’s really exciting.”

This year, it might seem like they’re playing with house money – that a potential at-large bid would just be an added bonus to the progress already made. But the program once questioned by so many now appears to belong at college hockey’s high-rollers’ table. After some painful early seasons, ASU might finally be set up to hit the jackpot.

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