The compressor is off and the ice will not be ready at Bronco Arena for over two months, but new Rainy River Community College Voyageurs women’s hockey coach Evan Amdahl is busy preparing for the season.
Amdahl is a health and physical education teacher at RRCC and will be the fourth head coach in the program’s three year history and takes over a Voyageurs team that finished last season as National Champions.
“I’m taking over a National Championship team, it’s pretty exciting,” Amdahl said. “We have a good core of girls coming back from last year.”
Amdahl has never coached hockey before, but is open to the challenge and has experience coaching seven different sports at various levels of competition on his coaching resume.
“Coaching is coaching,” Amdahl said. “It doesn’t mater what you coach, you can learns the X’s and the O’s of it. If you can relate to the kids and connect with them, that’s the intangible part that people don’t necessarily see on the ice or on the court.
“It’s the relationships that you have with the kids and being able to get them to be better community members and better people in life. Everyone can think of the best coach that they ever had and it’s not because of how fun the sport was, it’s because that they connected with that coach the most in a personal relationship.”
With a lack of a women’s hockey program in the National Junior College Athletic Association, the Voyageurs compete in the American Collegiate Hockey Association and play club teams from many four-year schools including the University of Minnesota Duluth, Saint Scholastica and South Dakota State University.
Teams in the ACHA cannot recruit players and no scholarships are available to players in the ACHA leveling the talent pool and the chances that a marquee player will pick one school over another.
“We need girls to come in and play,” Amdahl said. “It’s the same way with softball, football and volleyball. All of those sports are under the NJCAA rules and they are still successful programs.”
The lack of scholarships and being a junior college has not deterred players from choosing RRCC. Last season’s ACHA Player of the Year and National Tournament Most Valuable Player Sarah O’Sullivan played for the Voyageurs.
The 2008-2009 team has several good players returning including the Nation’s top goaltender, Mellissa Calder.
Playing at RRCC gives the girls an opportunity to start their education and play hockey in hopes of landing a scholarship at a bigger school or in the case of Jen Falk, move on to one the of ACHA four-year schools and come back and play against RRCC.
Falk will be attending Saint Scholastica in the fall and will play on its ACHA hockey team and pitch for the Saints softball team in the spring.
“It’s going to be really weird for the girls that were on the team last year to play against her,” Amdahl said. “It’s an opportunity for her to move on and play at a four-year school. It’s a good recruiting tool because the girls have a chance to move on and continue to play.”
Assisting Amdahl this season will be volunteer assistant Dave Amundson. Amundson is a graduate of Indus High School and played men’s hockey for the Voyageurs.
“I’m looking forward to the season,” Amundson said. “We share a lot of the same thoughts and philosophies as far as coaching goes. I’m here to help Evan do what he has to do.”
Staying on with the program will be program founder Jeff Wickstrom. Wickstrom started the program back in 2005 and has coached the team twice and he will stay on to do administrative work for the team. Amdahl will also continue to run the team in the style that Wickstrom started including running the same practices.
“Jeff got the program started and he is still the voice of Rainy River inside the ACHA,” Amdahl said. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Obviously he was doing something right and was very successful. We are going to use some of that and what Dave can bring to the table.”
The team will start dry-land practice after Labor Day in preparation for the opening games of the season in the RRCC-ACHA Can/Am Showcase Hockey Tournament that will be held at Bronco Arena in October.