Putting a Charge In the Future

Alabama-Huntsville Hopes Proposed New Arena, Continued Stability, Boosts Program

by Christopher Boulay/CHN Writer (@chrismboulay)

In an era where fans of smaller schools are concerned about their hockey programs being properly funded, their coaching staffs having the resources to recruit properly, and finding it more difficult to compete against some of the larger teams with significantly more resources, public statements of commitment by the powers that be can really raise morale. It’s even better when those plans get put into action.

For Alabama-Huntsville and head coach Mike Corbett, things could be on the verge of getting a lot better.

There are plans in place for a new, on-campus arena coming to Huntsville, on a plot of land purchased by the University of Alabama in 2017. The initial announcement, reported by AL.com, occurred April 12, during the UA board meetings. The building would provide a university-controlled replacement option for the city-owned Von Braun Center, the team’s current home.

“As everybody wants to say when they get a new building, it’s a ‘game-changer,’” Corbett said. “I think that’s the standard answer, and I won’t disagree with it. It’s a way of putting us on the map, and what I love about it is that it shows the commitment of our university.”

The details of the arena are still being worked out, but Corbett mentioned that this could be a 3,500-seat joint facility for basketball and hockey, or even a building similar to Quinnipiac’s People’s United Center, which has a basketball arena on one side and a hockey arena on the other. The school will have a town hall to discuss the additions to the new campus area, while allowing input about multiple aspects including the athletics facility.

“I think it’s just gotten to the initial stages (and the school says), ‘This is gonna happen people, and we’re going to need your support and we want your ideas on it,’” Corbett said.

At the moment, the school is working to secure funding, both private and public, for the entire project. It’s something that has been in the works for years. Now, the school is in position to make a real impact on the campus, which directly benefits athletics, and hockey specifically.

Alabama-Huntsville president Robert Altenkirch proved invaluable for the university in the past several years. Taking over as the school’s lead in 2011, his support of the hockey team can’t be understated. A hockey fan himself, Altenkirch has a history with the game, especially in the realm of arena construction. While president of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Altenkirch chaired the Newark Downtown Core Redevelopment Corporation, where he was in charge of public investment for the construction of the Prudential Center, the home of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils.

“We’ve had conversations about this thing for about two years behind closed doors,” Corbett said. “He was always ‘Hold on, don’t get too excited,’ and I get excited when he tells me some things.”

The school itself is expanding rapidly, with approximately 4,000 more students in the past three years, and a goal of surpassing 10,000 students by the Fall 2019 semester. Currently, the figure is slightly more than 9,700 enrolled. With this expansion, there’s a larger need for more amenities on campus, which fuels the new growth, and could theoretically help the chances to create an on-campus arena.

There isn’t a date for groundbreaking yet, but more will come into view as funding is secured.

Recruiting Challenges Exist

Of course, Huntsville still faces challenges. The program nearly ceased to exist a decade ago. Now, the Chargers are typically in the conversation for getting into the WCHA Tournament, and could be in line to pull off an upset. That’s OK, and that’s successful. Every once in a while, they can make a push for more. But considering what happened a decade ago, it takes time to work back from the brink.

Because of this, recruiting has been a bit of an issue.

“Since I’ve been there, that’s what we’ve done,” Corbett said. “You don’t make excuses on things. We spent a lot of time building a program, but maybe not as much time building a team.”

While not a perfect comparison, look at what happened at Bowling Green. A program nearly left for dead, it took Chris Bergeron and his staff nine years to get to the NCAAs, ending a nearly 30-year drought. Keep in mind, Bowling Green is a much bigger school than Huntsville, and has more finances at its disposal, being the only fully Division I school in the WCHA.

For Huntsville, a new arena has the potential to be a significant boon for recruiting, which in turn, will help the program increase its yearly win total.

“It’s a facilities arms race,” Corbett said. “These kids want to walk into your facilities and into your program and believe ‘This program can catapult me to the highest level and help me to develop to get to the highest level.’ That’s the biggest thing recruits are looking at right now. For us to be able to have those things and get on par, with not only our league, but nationally, we’re playing catch-up. We know we are. We’re playing catch-up and now this is a way for us to catch-up very quickly.”

Not only because of the program’s past uncertainty, but like other small hockey schools, recruiting can be a challenge. Huntsville, located in Northern Alabama, is a non-traditional hockey market. Though the city being just a couple hours away from newer hockey hotbed Nashville makes it an easier sell to recruits.

The hurdles Huntsville has are well-known to the program’s fans, but they’re something that Corbett and his staff face head on.

“We’re still a school that people are wondering, ‘Hey you guys have hockey there?’” Corbett said. “We’re always going to fight that. I laugh at them and I don’t take it personally by any means. It’s funny. I just base it on the emails I get. On our roster, we have kids from all over, and we like it that way. But (it’s always important) to just get our name out there even more. There’s probably 10 to 15 Division I school that people don’t think about. … You never know who is going to email you. That kid might end up being a heck of a hockey player, and we want to make sure they know who we are.”

While overall recruiting remains a challenge, the program made positive steps to ensure that there is solid footing, which could make Corbett’s and his staff’s lives easier. The hockey alumni continues to make a positive impact on the program, just like when they created "Save UAH Hockey" and worked with Altenkirch to save the program in 2011. The latest addition was the school’s new state-of-the-art weight room facility, funded completely by alumni. The coaching staff also have new offices as of the beginning of last season, also paid for by past players.

Those same alumni will play a critical role in continued on-campus developments for the Chargers.

“We’ve been able to get those people in the fold, and get some very prominent alumni with some deep pockets into our program, and who love (our program),” Corbett said. “A lot of them have talked to our president about this new building and said ‘Hey, let’s do this.’ They have those deep pockets to be able to help on this. It’s been great. I really love the foundation of where we’re at.”

“We’re continuing to improve hockey wise. Now, we can turn the page and let the business people do the business stuff, and say ‘Here’s all the people we’ve been able to gather. You continue to take care of them and let us grab some more new people and then we could focus a little more on the hockey side.'”

Corbett led the school to the WCHA Tournament three times in his six years at the helm, and each of the past two seasons. In 2017-18, the Chargers had 12 victories, the most since 2009-10, Danton Cole’s final season in charge, and the final season as a part of College Hockey America. That year, Cole got the team to the NCAA Tournament, the last time the school made it.

“Our alumni is a group of guys that want to see the program be where it’s at,” Corbett said. “We have two Division II national championships. We have 40 years of history, from a club team all the way to Division I. To get those guys in the fold (is important). They want to see their alma mater playing well. Hockey is a unique sport where alumni love is there. It always is. You see it at places like this.”

Corbett further explained that the program has between 125 and 150 hockey alumni living and working in Huntsville, with two of them actually having grown up in northern Alabama.

“They married southern girls and came back for work and do very well in our town,” Corbett said. “They want to see our program continue to prosper.”

Conference and Scheduling Quirks Make Huntsville’s Situation Unique

The WCHA itself has been an interesting fit for Huntsville the past several years. The conference is spread across a great area, stretching north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and west to the Alaska schools, but the patchwork conference thrown together during the last major realignment held strong in recent years. Competitively, both inside and outside of conference play, things improved since 2013.

For Corbett, he sees a positive present and a good fit for the Chargers.

“I’m excited where we’re at in the WCHA, and I’m excited about our league,” Corbett said. “Our league is going to continue to get better. The first few years, we were a one-bid league. Now, we’ve become a two-bid league.”

The conference manages to be competitive, but in a tiered system. There’s no doubt that schools like Minnesota State and Bowling Green are in a different class than some of the teams that finished toward the bottom of the conference, but there’s still room to improve within those tiers, as with Lake Superior this year.

“We have a separation of the top five and the bottom five, but the parity in our league is fantastic,” Corbett said. “For us, we just need to keep moving up, moving up and moving up.”

Another hurdle for the Chargers is the distances from any other Division I school. Clearly, Corbett and his staff make it work, and the willingness of big-name nonconference opponents help significantly, but it would be a much easier time to have someone else in the deep south, or just below the Mason-Dixon line that isn’t as far as Arizona State.

“I think it would be great,” Corbett said. “It would give us a travel partner.”

Corbett has received many calls from schools in the Southeast that want to pick his brain about starting and sustaining a Division I college hockey team. While many of these calls are extremely preliminary, and the schools don’t want to go public, preferring to ask questions and speak with those at College Hockey Inc. about potential future options, he did mention that Florida Gulf Coast University was one institution that showed some interest.

“Part of it, I think, is that college hockey is becoming a revenue generator,” Corbett said. “For us, the facility is the biggest thing. For us to be able to build a facility to fit us right (is important). Everybody (who calls us) wants to know the price tag.”

Scheduling can have its difficulties for any WCHA team. There’s a limited nonconference schedule due to the 28 conference games, the Chargers do their best to stack the nonconference schedule. This coming season will see Huntsville open with Massachusetts-Lowell in Tsongas Arena, and then two games at Nebraska-Omaha. After Christmas, the team will face North Dakota for two games to round out the schedule.

“We don’t slouch when it comes to nonconference,” Corbett said. “We go after it. We go for it.”

Huntsville is making a point to do home-and-home series with these teams, which will be a theme in their future schedules. Both Lowell and Omaha will travel to Huntsville during the 2020-21 season. Boston University is also confirmed for a home-and-home in the next few years, with the Chargers heading to Agganis Arena first.

“We’re that close to the Eastern time zone, so I like to get our guys a chance to go out and experience that,” Corbett said. “We go for it. We just have to do better. We gotta get some of those wins. We’re finally going to get some of those (prestigious Northeast schools) in our building, so it’s going to be good.”

Corbett explained that the roster he has is in the right mindset to help strengthen the program’s on-ice product. The team will be younger this year, with a large freshman class entering. But there’s going to be experience down the middle that will help bring the younger players up to speed.

“I like the group coming in,” Corbett said. “We got the guys who truly want to be here, that truly want to bleed blue for us, and that’s what we want.”

One important returning player will be goaltender Mark Sinclair. In his sophomore season, he was a bright spot, posting a .915 in 28 games. Following the 2018-19 season, Sinclair had minor knee surgery to clean up an injury, but it shouldn’t affect his readiness for the season this fall.

“Goaltending is going to be fantastic,” Corbett said. “I think (Sinclair) is going to be back (to form). Our goaltending is always huge, and it’s key. We feel very good about that position.

Assistant Lance West, formerly the head coach at Alaska, returned for his second stint as an assistant at the school before last season, and provides much of the program’s recruiting in Western Canada. Corbett’s other assistant, Gavin Morgan, who has been on the Chargers staff since 2011, played with Corbett at Denver, and focuses on skills development for his team.

“We have a really good staff,” Corbett said. “More than anything, we know what we’re up against. We know what the challenges of what it is to be at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and we’re open to those. There’s no days off. There’s no days off for anybody, but especially for us. We’re fighting a little bit harder than most.”

