The USC hockey club put the "labor" in Labor Day this year, pushing themselves through an hour of laps, drills and sprints at Plex HiWire’s Irmo ice rink Monday night.
Head coach Allan Sirois made it clear that the best 25 players trying out for the team will lead Carolina into battle starting next week – whether they made last fall’s roster or not. With two workouts and two scrimmages against Coastal Carolina still to come, the 40-some players on the ice are pacing themselves but still skating hard. The rookies are eager to prove themselves. The returning players, 15 to 20 of whom team president Duncan Hickman expects to make the team, know how much it means to wear the garnet and black, even at the club level.
“I started out, it was just something, a way to keep in the game, stay in shape, do something active, but I met a lot of great guys on the team,” said forward Sean Davis, a second-year civic engineering student. “It’s actually much more competitive than I thought it would be. Lot of intensity.”
This fall’s team could face the highest expectations in the club’s 16-year history. The Gamecocks are coming off a 15-12-1 campaign that saw them come up just short of the Southeastern Collegiate Hockey Conference championship game. Goaltender Bobby Lombardi stopped 60 of 65 shots in a semifinal against Georgia Feb. 11, but a go-ahead goal from the Ice Dawgs’ Carter Penzien with 2:29 left in the game made the difference in a 5-4 decision. Georgia defeated Ole Miss 9-2 the next day for their second consecutive conference championship.
Despite a dramatic ending, Carolina’s season was not without its highlights. The Gamecocks won each of their final eight regular season games between Dec. 3 and Feb. 18, finishing with a 5-2 home win over Clemson. The streak helped earn the team a spot in the American Collegiate Hockey Association’s South Regional Tournament, where they took South Florida into overtime on Feb. 24 before falling 1-0.
The Gamecocks will see much of their 2016-17 squad return but lost a key player in defenseman Kyle Ware, who graduated in the spring. The Michigan native led the Gamecocks with 21 goals in 2016-17, including four in an 11-2 road win over UNC Wilmington on Jan. 20.
After the first drill of Monday’s session, Sirois tweeted his whistle from the bench and sent everyone sprinting around the rink for two laps. Some took a knee before Sirois and his clipboard to catch their breath after finishing, while the rest went straight for the water bottles.
“You’re tired already? What’d you guys do this summer?” Sirois joked before adding, “Don’t answer that.”
This got a laugh, but some might not have touched the ice since February. Some, even longer.
Third-year hospitality and retail management student Preston Durocher is attempting land his first roster spot on an ice hockey team in nearly a decade. A Detroit native, Durocher grew up playing ice hockey until he moved to Myrtle Beach at age 12. With the nearest ice rink 75 miles away in Wilmington, North Carolina, Durocher switched to inline hockey. He began playing in a house league in Myrtle Beach before eventually spending two seasons with the Charlotte Jr. Checkers inline program.
“I wanted something fun to do, something to get some stress off,” Durocher said of his decision to try out. “I’m just excited to play this year.”
Evan Hoey, a first-year business student, was also in his first college tryout Monday. Hoey last skated with the Raleigh Youth Hockey Association’s Jr. Hurricanes this spring. In April, Hoey’s Jr. Hurricanes captured USA Hockey’s Tier II Under-18 championship with a 3-1 victory over the Delaware Ducks.
The Jr. Hurricanes’ title represented the RYHA’s first national championship and the fifth USA Hockey championship ever won by a North Carolina-based team. By contrast, Michigan youth teams have led the nation with 160 USA Hockey national titles across all ages and skill levels since 1940. South Carolina is one of 12 states yet to produce one.
“It was hard to walk away from hockey after winning that,” Hoey said. In his first season, he hopes to catch on as one of Carolina’s top four defensemen.
As is the case with most SEC states, the game still has plenty of room for growth in South Carolina. But the Gamecocks are far from short on talent, suiting up prep school and junior players from the Northeast and Midwest.
Davis saw action in the Tier 1 Elite Hockey League, which counts current NHL players Patrick Kane and Ryan Kesler among its alumni. He registered 14 points in 32 games with the Boston Advantage Under-18s in 2015-16, his final season before attending USC. Davis was second only to Ware with 12 goals last season.
Forward Jake Tengi, a third-year global strategic communications student, exited the T1EHL a year before Davis arrived. Tengi’s former team, the New Jersey Rockets, is directed by the same program that groomed nine-time NHL All-Star Jeremy Roenick in the mid-1980s.
Asked about Carolina’s chances in 2017-18, Tengi said he “definitely” sees another deep SECHC tournament run in the near future.
“We got a lot of strong young guys coming in, as well as a lot of strong returners,” he said. “The team this year, I only see it being as good or better than last year.”
The Gamecocks open the season Sept. 15 at home against UNC Charlotte, and the roster will be set on Sunday.