The plan: On the ice in five years

When the lacrosse team arrived in Hartford in the autumn of 1993, Jones and Holberton presented Director of Athletics Rick Hazelton with a formal plan for development of an ice hockey program. “It included a roster of twenty-nine women who wanted to skate,” remembers Sheppard. “They were prepared to raise the money to make it work.”

Hazelton was impressed and determined to help the young women turn their dream into a reality. For starters there had to be a club program.

And as it turned out, Sheppard had one of the things they needed most right on her staff.

Chantal Lacroix, daughter of former men’s hockey pro André Lacroix, was a graduate student and Sheppard’s assistant. She agreed to work with the students, and for the next couple of years she was the nascent team’s informal coach.

Hazelton worked with John Dunham, coach of the men’s ice hockey team, to work out a schedule for equitably sharing ice time at West Hartford’s Kingswood-Oxford School, where the men’s team was already accepting odd hours to accommodate the school. And Hazelton contacted other colleges to develop a schedule for the team.

“Those young women hung in there and kept that club together,” he says, smiling at the memory. “If not for their perseverance, Trinity probably wouldn’t have made women’s ice hockey an official sport in 1999.”

From cellar to summit

“We debuted in the basement of NESCAC,” says Sheppard, bluntly. And with three coaches in its first three years, progress was incremental, at best.

Then, in 2003, McPhee came to the rescue. Recruited as an assistant football coach in 2001, he came to Trinity with experience coaching not only football and baseball, but also women’s ice hockey at his alma mater, Middlebury College. In 2000 he had helped guide the Middlebury Women to their first national championship.

At last the team had coaching continuity, and an astute judge of talent who could manage the recruitment process. “Andy turned out to be the coach we were looking for,” says Hazelton.

McPhee set about systematically building the program, one game and one season at a time. That process got a big shot in the arm when Trinity finally got its own rink with the opening of the Koeppel Community Sports Center in the fall of 2006.

That year, McPhee’s team won nine games. A year later, the benefits of being able to practice at a top-notch facility paid off. Playing over .500 for the first time ever, the Bantams went 18-5-3. Ranked in the top ten by U. S. College Hockey Online through most of the season, they earned the program’s first berth in the NESCAC Final Four, and McPhee was named NESCAC Coach of the Year.

“The thing we look for, when we’re recruiting, is character,” says McPhee. “I want student athletes who excel on and off the ice. That’s the standard this team represents. They work very hard to be successful.”