Sports

A little school from Alabama makes it all the way to the NCAA hockey tournament as the longtime coach prepares to skate off into the sunset. We’re probably the talk of college hockey right now because of what we did,” said coach Doug Ross, who is retiring after 25 years. “People didn’t think we could do that.” What they did was come from behind in all three games to win the College Hockey America tournament, overcoming a 4-0 deficit in the championship game against Robert Morris on Sunday, to claim an automatic NCAA berth.

It doesn’t matter that they enter next week’s tournament with a losing record. The Chargers (13-19-3), who won Division 2 championships in 1996 and 1998, mostly go unnoticed outside Huntsville, skating away in a state where most kids grow up flinging footballs instead of chasing pucks and icing is a way to cool down in the summer. In fact, UAH is the only university-sponsored college hockey program south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Chargers endure long bus rides, such as the 15-hour trek to Des Moines, Iowa, for the conference tournament. They play hockey in a region where only a handful of schools, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia Tech among them, even have club-level teams. Huntsville defenseman Troy Maney is the only player from the state on the UAH roster. The others hail from places like Ontario and British Columbia. The Chargers are used to the skeptical responses from Northern teams and fans. Hockey in Alabama? Come on, y’all.

“A lot of people don’t think we’re Division 1 when they hear about hockey down south,” said center David Nimmo, who scored the winning goal in the championship game against Robert Morris. “They seem to respect us a little bit, anyway. I can’t say they come in there with full respect for us. They think they’re going to beat us.” Robert Morris likely thought so, too, with that 4-0 lead after one period. “We just felt like we were not going to lose,” said Nimmo, who came to Huntsville from St. Albert, Alberta. “It’s hard to grasp what my players have done for this university with their great three-game comeback,” Ross said. “What they did was something very few teams can do.”

Ross, who played on the U.S. team in the 1976 Olympics, reached 500 career wins this season. He announced in January this would be his last season as coach. But he’d rather talk about his players than what all this means to him. “I haven’t really thought about that,” Ross said. “They’re the ones that pulled it off. It’s just a blessing that it all worked out the way it did for the team and for me.” UAH is hardly a fly-by-night success story. The team won four national championships at the club level before joining the NCAA’s Division 2 in 1985. The school was so successful the governor at the time declared Huntsville the “Hockey Capital of the South”, a dubious distinction even in the amateur ranks.

But tucked into the northeast corner of the state, Huntsville is not your ordinary Southern city. As German rocket scientists arrived after World War II, it became home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal and is now a draw for high-tech industry talent from across the country. Joe Ritch helped start the club team in 1979. He wound up going 85-5-2 before handing over the reins to Ross after three years. “It caught on fire in terms of crowds the first year,” said Ritch, now a Huntsville lawyer and University of Alabama trustee. “It got to be the thing to do in late ’70s and early ’80s.”

It’s still popular. The team averaged 1,864 fans to home games this season at a school with an enrollment of less than 7,000. The Chargers moved up to Division 1 in 1999, and started the transition seamlessly with a 21-5-1 season. Now they’re on to the NCAA tournament. “It’s one of those things where you just cannot imagine it going this far,” Ritch said. “Where we started is so far from where it is now, you just don’t see it getting this far.”  But Ross doesn’t want to stop here. The Chargers were the lowest seed at the league tournament, and he figures they will be again next week. “Hopefully, we can get on a roll,” Ross said. “We can win two games and get to the Frozen Four. Those are my plans.”