I know the UMD women kicked off their season last weekend, and we’ll talk a bit about the starting point Laura Schuler got from her team in this here column. But it’s fair to say the most anticipated UMD men’s hockey season in a long time starts Friday inside Amsoil Arena, and we’re going to start there, along with other thoughts on the starting point in men’s hockey.
This column will be here most every week that the UMD men are playing. It will cover college men’s and women’s hockey, with notes on both UMD teams, as well as things happening in the NCHC and WCHA.
It’s “10 Thoughts” because I stole the “32 Thoughts” format from Elliotte Friedman, basing it on the number of teams in the NCHC, which is now ten thanks to St. Thomas.
10 THOUGHTS
1. Scott Sandelin has been saying it for months: The Plantes will get to play together. He’s a man of his word. When you nestle into your seat Friday night — whether you decide to attend the game or you #ListenToTheRadio — you’re going to see Zam Plante at center, Max Plante on left wing, and Victor Plante on right wing.
But what Sandelin won’t say is that this is a season-long arrangement.
“We’re going to give them a chance to be together early,” he said. “You want each one of them be themselves. I think that’s the biggest thing. Zam and Max have a little more history together. For Victor, it’s just going in and being him. And playing and not worrying about trying to live up to anything and just, he’s a good hockey player. He’s getting better every week. But again, when the rubber hits the road here and we get into real games, we’ll find out. But I’m excited to see them play and hopefully the other lines can do some good things, too.”
Matt Wellens noted Sandelin saying he promised Victor Plante a chance to play with his brothers if he committed here. Victor confirmed that.
“I mean, it’s pretty cool that he had promised that, because he doesn’t promise much.”
2. What do we need to see? We know Max (he won the Hobey last year, in case you forgot) and Zam can play at this level. And the more we watch both of them, the more convinced we are that both will play in the NHL, despite the limitations that come from not being the biggest dudes on Earth.
I’ve seen a few practices since they were put together. And the chemistry is clear. The three of them know each other better than anyone, and they make plays that no one else can make because if that.
“I think it’s easy communication for us,” Max said, “because not a lot of is said out loud.”
“We all kind of think and play a little bit the same way,” said Zam, “or just try to make plays all the time. it’s fun to have people like that, because they’re trying to make a play to you, and you’re trying to make play to them all the time.”
Victor Plante needs to get stronger and show he’s ready to play at this level, but being around his brothers — who have already proven that and are exceptionally driven individuals — is going to help him in a lot of ways.
But how long they stay together might not just be up to their play as a line.
Jayson Shaugabay will, for now, center newcomer Barrett Hall and sophomore Hunter Anderson. On paper, this has a chance to be as dynamic a second line as UMD’s deployed in many years, possibly going back to Travis Oleksuk, Kyle Schmidt, and JT Brown back in 2010-11.
Sandelin talked in our preseason interview (listen below if you have missed that) about Shaugabay’s desire to take on more of a leadership role this season. Putting him in the middle of the rink (even if that’s not where he’s likely to play in the pros) helps him towards that goal.
The lines I speculated about in the summer have mostly come to fruition up to this point. Callum Arnott is on the third line, and Alaska transfer Peyton Platter is centering the fourth line. If UMD can keep this kind of lineup depth going, it will be a very dangerous team.
3. No matter how this goes on Friday, it’s going to be a special night. And not just for the three brothers in uniform.
Max and Zam surmised that they were able to arrange tickets for upwards of 18 family members, with help from their teammates, but they were also clear that others may be attending after securing their own tickets.
The brothers were raised by parents — Kristi and Derek, for those somehow unaware — who are both in the UMD Athletic Hall of Fame. Friday night is a moment they’ve been waiting for, and the vast extended family is clearly excited to see the three of them on the ice together.
“I think it’s a dream come true for everybody,” Zam said. “UMD has been such a big part of our lives since we were little, for our parents, and then having us be able to do it and then be able to do it together, it’s going to be surreal.”
4. We’ve spent so much time on the Plantes and all the returning skill on this team that we haven’t talked much about what’s back in the, well, back.
UMD lost a couple of important defensemen in Joey Pierce and Riley Bodnarchuk. Often overshadowed in their role on the penalty kill because of — you guessed it — the Plantes, Pierce and Bodnarchuk were willing shot blockers, something that is key to any successful PK.
Even describing them as “willing shot blockers” sells them a bit short. Their sticks and bodies were also getting in the way of passes, allowing the forwards to play more aggressively. Associate coach Adam Krause, who runs UMD’s kill, made clear last October that he expected to give up a few of the proverbial tap-in goals, but they were willing to do that as a cost of doing business.
The tap-in goals came very rarely, in part because of defensemen like Pierce and Bodnarchuk selling out to keep passes and shots from getting through.
Sandelin likes the mix of players he has for the penalty kill, but like everything else, he wants to see it in games.
“You know those two guys were warriors,” Sandelin said of Pierce and Bodnarchuk. “That’s how they were and certainly we’re going to miss them dearly. I hope some guys step up. I think (Adam Kleber) did a lot of that last year. I think we have guys that are willing to do that, because we’re going to need that, whether it’s killing or five on five. Those guys were important parts to our back end. They weren’t always the guys that maybe got the most accolades, but they were glue and they were everyday warriors. And hopefully we have some more of those guys.”
5. UMD returns six defensemen from last season, five of whom played a lot of minutes in a lot of situations.
Kleber and Ty Hanson remain UMD’s top pair, with Hanson running the top power play unit and both players getting plenty of work on the kill. Brady Cleveland returns alongside Grayden Siepmann, with Cleveland (PK) and Siepmann (PP) both logging plenty of special teams minutes of their own.
Freshmen Carter Murphy and Keith McInnis join the fray, and if they are at the bottom of the depth chart all season, that’s a very good thing, based on what I’ve seen in practice.
“That’s kind of why we practice the way we do,” Sandelin noted. “Everybody kills. We have three power play units. So everybody gets that opportunity.”
6. It’s the first two of at least 36 games this season, so we’re not going to get all the answers this weekend when the Bulldogs host Long Island.
There are very high expectations with this team, but it’s not something that’s new to Sandelin. Like everyone else this time of year, he likes his team, and he knows he has to see this in action before we can possibly know for sure.
“I think sometimes when you have guys that like even last year they were, it was a really good group and keeps talking about the group and certainly those expectations. think just kind of going out there and thinking things are going to happen just because of. maybe the past, right? You gotta go work. It’s a different year. It’s a different group in some ways. It’s nice to have a lot of returners, of guys that are key components to our team, that are back and are certainly hungry. I think the whole group was disappointed the way the year ended. felt we were playing good hockey. But it’s a new year and you gotta have that same… mentality of going out and really working for what you get.
“We’re not going to be perfect, but hopefully we’re good and we’re getting to kind of the things that we need to do to, to make it better moving forward. I think that’s part of this early stuff, but you got to go and work. Nothing’s going to be handed to you in college hockey, our league, (there are) some really damn good teams right now. I’m just excited that we have a group that’s being considered in that mix, but we gotta go prove it.”
That proving ground begins with a big LIU team. The Sharks, coached by Brendan Riley (the Riley family is basically hockey royalty out east; Brendan is the grandson of Jack Riley, who coached Army for 36 years and led the U.S. to gold at Squaw Valley in 1960, and he’s the son of Brett Riley, who spent 21 years as coach at Army), have a degree of continuity going into this season after a slew of portal departures in the spring of 2025. Long Island is an independent, but Sandelin remains a strong advocate for programs like this one.
“I think it’s really important (to play these teams),” he said. “I think it’s really hard for those teams later in the year. I think they can put together probably. 60 to 70 percent of a great schedule because of non-conference and being an independent. I think the latter part of their schedule gets really hard. It would be nice if we had options and abilities to play them, all those teams later. To give them more of a full season. I think we gotta help those guys out. I still think they all need a conference. I think it’s difficult. Sometimes we gotta put the conference glasses off and look at college hockey as a whole and what’s best for college hockey. These teams need somehow to find a league. How that’s going to happen, I don’t know. I hope it does because it gives them something to play for.”
Sandelin also referenced the United Collegiate Hockey Cup, which the independents started last season as an end-of-year tournament. The five of them — LIU, Stonehill, Lindenwood, Alaska, and Alaska-Anchorage — convened at Lindenwood for a three-day event that crowned a “champion”. The event will return in 2027, again hosted by Lindenwood.
7. Around the NCHC, it’s a pretty busy opening weekend, with five other teams playing games that count while three play exhibitions.
Miami opens with two games at Northern Michigan. The RedHawks were picked to finish fifth in the NCHC by the assembled media, the last of the home-ice spots now that the league has expanded to ten teams. Northern Michigan, out of the CCHA, has needed some time to recover from the mass exodus caused by Grant Potulny’s departure as head coach. The Wildcats, coached by former St. Cloud and Western Michigan assistant Dave Shyiak, have won just eight games over his first two seasons on the job.
Big series in Colorado Springs this weekend, as Colorado College hosts UMass. Tigers coach Kris Mayotte has talked about some stylistic changes, designed to unlock more offense in a team that really struggled to finish around the net the last couple years. We’ll get a first peek at how that will look against a strong UMass team that should be an NCAA Tournament contender.
Defending national champion Denver heads up north to kick off the year in Anchorage, the hometown of head coach David Carle. The Pioneers have a young group of defensemen who get their first taste of Division I hockey.
St. Cloud State debuts new coach Nick Oliver with a single game Saturday night in Bemidji. BSU coach Tom Serratore recently announced this would be his final season, before older brother Frank said this week that this is his last year at Air Force. The departures will leave college hockey much less interesting, and they will make Sandelin the second longest-tenured coach in the nation behind Quinnipiac head man Rand Pecknold.
Arizona State heads to Missouri for two games against Lindenwood this weekend.
In exhibition games, Omaha visits Air Force Friday, Western Michigan hosts Western Ontario Saturday, and North Dakota gets Augustana Saturday, then Manitoba Sunday.
8. Speaking of Arizona State, news (finally) arrived Wednesday of head coach Greg Powers being placed on administrative leave. By now, you’re all aware of the Aug. 20 incident involving sophomore defenseman Matthew Mayich, who remains in a coma after collapsing near the end of an outdoor workout.
The school says an interim coach will be named later, but assistant coach Mike Corbett will coach the team this weekend at Lindenwood. The way this was announced would lead you to believe that the interim coach will be someone not with the program right now, but we shall see what the university decides.
The fact this took basically six weeks to happen is something I’ve struggled to wrap my head around. The most recent reporting from The Athletic is something I’d recommend if you missed it earlier this week. Players speaking out anonymously seems to have been what finally created some semblance of action in Arizona, so we salute those players for having the courage to stand up for a fallen teammate, and for what they believe to be the truth about that day.
9. I’m going to be somewhat blunt here: The university should be ashamed of itself. A 21-year-old kid has been in a coma for six weeks (and is not likely to recover), because of a series of events that were mostly preventable. And it’s felt for the majority of these six weeks that the school would have preferred the story went away, rather than deal head-on with what went wrong. The motivations for such inaction are unknown, but also in my opinion irrelevant.
“Do nothing and say less” is rarely a good PR strategy, especially in a crisis. Trying to make that pass as a strategy over 40-plus days is inexplicable. No matter what the lawyers were afraid of, this was a bad decision that only adds to the series of bad decisions that led to Mayich collapsing that morning.
Fair or not, Powers’ job was always going to be on the line here. Based on the reporting that’s been done (and the lack of any serious pushback to that reporting, to be fair), he and his staff were present that morning, and The Athletic story (linked above) paints Powers in a pretty poor light. It also doesn’t reflect well on the staff, but ASU left itself no choice but to send Corbett with the team to Missouri because it waited so long to take this action, an action that seemed like an obvious move from the second word of Mayich’s situation and condition was out there. The fact the entire coaching staff was present for this workout, and no one saw what was unfolding and intervened before it was too late, makes it increasingly likely that the Sun Devils will be coached by someone not currently on the staff when they play Holy Cross at home next weekend.
Our continued thoughts are with Mayich, his family, his girlfriend, his teammates, his friends, and everyone else who has been impacted by what happened.
10. Good start for the UMD women last weekend, as the Bulldogs conceded zero goals in a non-conference sweep of Mercyhurst at home.
Yes, Eve Gascon was great in goal, stopping all 44 shots she faced in the two games. Yes, Caitlin Kraemer started her junior season with a three-goal, four-point weekend.
But UMD needs more out of its other lines, not just Kraemer’s, and a couple of those lines got off to good starts. Molly Cole’s third line with Josie St. Martin and Zoey Krock was good all weekend, and they got a reward in the third period Saturday when they kept a puck alive below the faceoff dots, and Krock was able to put it home through some traffic.
“We had production coming from everybody,” head coach Laura Schuler said. “I thought our third line was one of our best lines. They were really good at getting pucks to the net, and really good at not allowing any chances against. They’re clicking and connecting.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was a quality start for the Bulldogs, and hopefully a quick shot of confidence for a team that needs to prove it can score goals to compete in the ever-tough WCHA.
UMD plays Friday and Saturday at Vermont. Friday’s game starts at 10am Central time, as Vermont hosts an annual event where schoolkids fill the stands at Gutterson Fieldhouse. Both games can be viewed on ESPN Plus.
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We hit the air at 6:30pm Friday, 5:30pm Saturday, on KDAL as always. Kraig Karakas joins me for his 17th season on the radio broadcast.
If you’re coming out to the games, arrive early and check out the UMD Tailgate Party behind the DECC by the Slip Bridge. They’ll have games, food, a bar, the band, a DJ, and I’ll stop by with members of the UMD coaching staff about an hour before each game. They’re doing these for every home game in October, so join us!
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