Re: BREAKING: Alabama Huntsville dropping men’s ice hockey effective immediately, cit
Re: BREAKING: Alabama Huntsville dropping men’s ice hockey effective immediately, cit
Which is exactly what happened last time UAH announced it was canning the program. A slew of players transferred out. Look at UAH's record the following year. They were hurt by it. Big time.
A slew? It was two guys on the active roster under NLIs. Now, were recruits lost over it? Absolutely.
The 2011-12 team (i.e., the team that had already started the season less than two weeks before the program was dropped) had just two seniors and four juniors. Between them, the five skaters scored 11 goals and the goalie played in six contests.
The next year's team fired the 2011-12 head coach less than two weeks before the season started and picked up a pro coach with a college background that was 30 years behind him to play out the last independent season[1]. That 2012-13 team won exactly one Division I game. The four seniors played their asses off, but they weren't enough. Four of the eight freshmen didn't finish four seasons in Huntsville: one left after a year and three were culled after the first WCHA season. The juniors were a bit of a mixed bag (including one who was effectively deported for sexual assault), with only two of them going on to play any sort of major contribution the next year. (They were the kids who stayed through independence, and I respect the hell out of them.)
So yeah: cancelled the program, brought it back to win just two D-I games, fired a coach two weeks before the season started, won just one D-I game, but
thank God they got into the WCHA. It took a couple more years and a guy like Max McHugh to prove to recruits that you might actually want to play here, but it happened.
But UAH only lost two guys in 2011.
[1] If UAH hadn't gotten into the WCHA, they were going to fold. The press release was written. I've read it.