Written By Alan O'Connor

THE WVU HOCKEY CLUB is pleased to announce that Brian Boehm, current GM and Head Coach of the club, will relinquish his role behind the bench to focus all of his attention on being General Manager. Cole Warner, a Michigan hockey product, former WVU Div II hockey player and the current Assistant Coach of the team, is promoted by the team to Head Coach. According to team Captain Sean Meyer, “This is the next and hopefully final stage in a major rebuilding program the players initiated four years ago. Our goal of securing a very high national ranking this year in the ACHA Div III league that will lead to a national title in the next few years to come is now much closer to a reality.” The American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) is the national governing body of college, club ice hockey, in the USA. The ACHA currently has three men's and two women's divisions and includes approximately 450 university and college teams from across the country.    

“Before Coach Brian arrived, I felt that playing for this club was like playing for a glorified men's recreational hockey team. There wasn't much accountability from players as they did whatever they wanted and whenever they wanted. This was frustrating for me and for the other players on our team, who wanted to compete at much higher levels of play,” recalled four year veteran player Captain Meyer. “I was here to take my studies and my hockey seriously. I wasn’t alone in this approach and I knew that together we could become a part of something great. The missing ingredient was leadership and at all levels. We started at the top and hired a professional hockey coach to direct and guide us.” The team hired Pittsburgh native and professional hockey coach Brian Boehm.

“I was tasked with building a sense of pride in a Division II hockey team that had not had a winning season in two decades,” Coach Boehm explained. “I left a position as the leader of one of the most successful and storied Catholic high school hockey programs in Western Pennsylvania, the Serra Catholic High School Hockey Program. I knew that I was inheriting a neglected and mismanaged WVU Div II Hockey Team. This team was the ugly step child of a two team program at WVU. Their jerseys were old hand-me-downs from the WVU Div I team and their locker room doubled as a utility closet. Both WVU teams at that time were part of the same WVU sports club and living under one budget and one management structure. But it was clear to the players that one of the teams, the Div I team, was living much, much better than the other.”   

“When the players hired Coach Brian three years ago, he stressed to me that this team was going to take time to rebuild. It wasn't necessarily something I wanted to hear because I only had 3 years left in my WVU Sports Management undergrad program and I wanted to "win now" so to speak,” said Captain Meyer. However, he and the more mature players realized that if they were to ever be successful at what they wanted to do on the ice, first there were a few things necessary to accomplish off the ice.  

The players researched, discussed and then decided to vote on becoming their own club. The new club then left the ACHA Div II league and joined the ACHA Div III league where the competition level and the shorter travel distances to away games was a better match to their skills and budget. “The Div III teams we were playing in our non-league schedule as a Div II team at the time were better than us. This was a team set up for failure. The decision was taken by the players to accept who we were and what we were capable of and so we joined a very strong ACHA Div III league in our region,” explained Captain Meyer.  

The next step was to establish consistency and continuity in the program so the players extended Coach Boehm’s first year Head Coach’s contract, to a multi-year position as Head Coach and GM. The leadership of the team knew that this was a three to five year overhaul and having the right person in charge was the first order of business. GM Boehm immediately went to work on the team’s all important ACHA Div III league and non-league schedule and in parallel, started to proactively recruit elite players from across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states.  

“After 3 well managed years flushing out the old culture and replacing it with the core values and norms more supportive of a championship franchise, we are elated to see how much the team has improved on so many levels. With Brian's leadership and drive to succeed, along with recruiting the right people for this team, we have the talent, the character and the will to compete of true champions. We are ready to explode on to the national scene this coming season,” says Captain Meyer.

New Head Coach Cole Warner agrees. “This has been an amazing life experience for me and for all of the players. Those of us who have put so much into this success are rejoicing in the see-change that has taken place. In the end we’re all young adults who want to make a difference in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us. We have been involved in all kinds of activities as community volunteers to deliver our value outside the rink which has come back to us a hundred fold in people supporting our program. We want to share our success with everyone and we want them to come see us play. We still have lots of work to do but we are all very excited about the upcoming year. We are going to reap the rewards that only hard work brings.”

“To be perfectly honest,” confessed GM Brian Boehm, “I wasn’t sure when I took this job over three years ago that I hadn’t taken a huge step backward in my professional hockey career. I wasn't 100 percent certain that I, or anyone else, could turn this ship around. But in the end, we succeeded in creating a group of young leaders who wanted to build a winning, sustainable and accountable hockey program. Of course now I know that we’ll look back on this shared adventure and consider it to be among the top highlights in our hockey lives.” The team is a model in participation management and a showcase for what can be accomplished with a powerful vision and a vision community in support of its realization.