Palsgroves Points
For the last few editions of this column, we’ve been focusing on football. In all honesty, the sport of football is currently on my bad side after locking me in Williams Stadium for an ungodly amount of time during Saturday’s rain delay.
So, let’s talk hockey. This weekend, we got to witness something rather strange at the LaHaye Ice Center. We watched the Liberty University Men’s Division I and Division II teams go up against the same flock of Florida Gulf Coast Eagles players. This wasn’t in a scrimmage or exhibition game; all three games, one for D1 and two for D2, counted for their overall record.
D1 lost 4-3 to the Eagles Friday night, and within the next 48 hours, D2 beat the Eagles twice, 4-2 and 6-5. We’ll get to the ramifications, if there are any, of those results, but first, let’s talk about how the heck that’s possible.
The first thing to realize is there are two main buckets of college hockey: club hockey and NCAA hockey. Technically, every collegiate sport could fall into those two buckets, with teams like the Liberty baseball, softball and football teams being official NCAA programs, and Flames men’s lacrosse, men’s volleyball and all five hockey programs being club teams.
In club hockey, there are also two buckets: the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Four of the Flames programs, Men’s D1 and D2 and Women’s D1 and D2, are in the ACHA, while the men’s D3 team plays in the AAU. Again, this is a massive oversimplification, but I’m on a word limit, so bear with me.
The Liberty D3 hockey program is technically not a D3 program; they’re an AAU D2 program that plays in the ACCHL. And because it would be even more confusing if we had three different D2 programs, we call this team a D3 team.
So let’s bring this back to the FGCU series. How did both men’s D1 and D2 play the same team? Well, because they could. Being a club sport allows the hockey programs some flexibility with scheduling events and other games that allows hockey to schedule out-of-conference and even out-of-league games. That same flexibility also allows hockey to host “Star Wars” nights, put out new jerseys at will and play games at midnight.
I can hear you thinking, “OK, cool, I get how both the men’s D1 and D2 teams played the same team in the same weekend, but isn’t it a big deal that D1 lost and D2 won?” Well, yes and no.
In professional baseball, there’s something called a farm system. That system is a team’s ability to have minor league teams underneath the main MLB roster that are meant for development, injury rehab or just seeing what a team has in a player. Because of the farm system, players can move up and down rosters easily if the teams want them to, and it’s something we see quite a bit in pro ball.
The Liberty hockey teams, in particular the men’s teams, don’t work like that. Players move teams in the offseason, like D3’s senior forward Eric Abbate, who played for D2 last season, and the inverse is true for D2’s junior defenseman Connor Diem. But once tryouts are over in the summer, it’s very rare to see a player change rosters, and it gets even rarer the longer they play on that team.
The teams and their coaching staff may have the intention of having that farm-system type of program — I can’t speak to the motivations of the coaches. But I can speak to the results, which is that guys don’t change teams once they’re placed in one of the three.
It’s because of this that we’ve found ourselves where we are — with a D1 program and D2 team that are on very different competitive timelines, especially this early in the season. The D2 team brought back the vast majority of its major players, including starting senior goaltender Lane Skon and its top six point leaders from last season. The D2 Flames have their ears pinned back and their eyes set on the ACHA crown, which they fell just two wins shy of last spring (FGCU lost the D2 chip to Lindenwood, which had beaten Liberty the round prior in overtime).
The D1 team isn’t quite in that same place. The team has lost many of its superstars (goaltender Hunter Virostek, forward Jason Foltz, defenseman Colten Kovich and captain Matt Bartel being the biggest losses) and came into this season with the youngest roster in the team’s recent history due to its nine freshman skaters. There are still going to be growing pains as the freshmen and veterans on this Flames team get used to each other and develop as a team, not just a group of guys in sharp shoes.
Palsgrove is the sports editor for the Liberty Champion. Follow him on X.
