Columbia may be known for its heat, but that hasn’t deterred the University of South Carolina club ice hockey team from consistently drawing fans and maintaining a high level of play.
The club began its 2017 season with tryouts Monday and will continue with skills tryouts Wednesday. The Gamecocks will play two scrimmages against Coastal Carolina as part of their tryouts on Friday and Saturday. The final roster for the season will be announced on Sunday.
According to club president Duncan Hickman, 15-20 players from last year’s squad are returning to tryouts this season. The team lost several influential seniors, including defenseman and captain Kyle Ware. Hickman said head coach Allan Sirois will be picking members this season based on their scrimmage performances and how well they kept up during practice.
“[Sirois] had me run down a few things and he told me to stress to everyone there that just because you had a spot on the team last year doesn’t mean you have a spot on the team this year,” Hickman said. “He’s really about just picking the best team that he thinks is going to win.”
Sirois is an East Coast Hockey League Hall of Famer and has a history playing hockey in the Palmetto State. He spent nine years in the AHL and ECHL with teams in Pee Dee and Greenville. Sirois never made it to the NHL, but is the ECHL's ninth all-time career scorer with 594 points.
While some students may be surprised upon first hearing about USC’s club ice hockey team, the team’s players are no strangers to the sport. According to Hickman, the Gamecocks have players who attended Boston Prep schools, played in Prep Leagues and spent time on the Junior Flyers, a USA Hockey-sanctioned Tier III Junior A ice hockey team. The Gamecocks’ opponents are experienced too, with former NCAA-level players and players from U.S. Olympic Development teams as competitors.
“Even just in the last couple days of freshmen coming in, the average years of experience that they had is like 14 years,” Hickman said. “So they’ve all been playing growing up since they were 6 and 7 years old, like I have, and most of our team from last year had also.”
The USC ice hockey team plays its home games at the Plex Indoor Sports and Ice center in Irmo. Despite the center being a 20-minute drive from campus, the team regularly draws fans to its games -- from students to Columbia residents.
“We actually get a lot of locals, which I didn’t expect honestly,” Hickman said. “There are some fans who go to every single game. Just like a 50-year-old guy, who’s a hockey fan and brings out his grandson or his son or whoever and they show up to every game. It depends on the game, too. Like Clemson this past year, we had a lot of people.”
Hickman added, “I do think we get a decent amount of people just for being a club sport. I know we have a lot of northerners here and a lot of hockey fans and everything. Most people are surprised we even have a hockey team.”
During the season, the Gamecocks routinely play matches twice each weekend. Some notable opponents for this season include Clemson, Florida, Vanderbilt, Kennesaw State, Georgia Tech, Life University, Tennessee, Georgia, UNC Charlotte and UNC Wilmington. The team practices every Monday and Wednesday night and bases its travel schedule around the football season, Hickman said.
“One of the cool things we like to do is we try to follow the football team so when they play at Tennessee, we'll go to Tennessee and we play their hockey team on Friday night,” Hickman said. “Then we’ll all go to the football game the next day and then we’ll play Tennessee on Sunday. So we do that with Tennessee and UGA also. Those are the fun ones.”
The same goes for home games: “If we have a home football game, then we won’t play on Saturday. We’ll play like Friday night and Sunday morning. Some weeks in the past we’ve done like a Thursday night game and a Friday night game,” Hickman said.