On Tuesday, Oct. 17 Keene State announced the hiring of the new women’s ice hockey Coach Rob Morgan. Thirteen days later they made another announcement that Bobby Rodrique would also come on as the men’s varsity head coach. Keene State announced earlier this year they were adding three new sports, varsity men’s and women’s ice hockey and Esports.
Marty Testo, Keene State’s Athletic Director said, “We had good applicant pools and we feel like we hit two home runs, we are really excited about the two people who are going to be leading our men’s and women’s ice hockey teams.”
Keene State has not had an ice hockey team since 1985, where they had a team for three seasons, and ended with a record of 47-6-41-0-0-0, according to the internet hockey database. “I think the challenging piece about the situation is that these are brand new programs, there’s no student athletes here for them to really inherit. So they are inheriting a program that’s starting from ground zero, so that kind of made our search get specific,” Testo said.
Keene’s plan for the hockey programs is that both the club and the varsity teams will continue. Bobby Rodrique is an alum of KSC and started up the Owl’s club team, where he has been the head coach for 17 years according to the Keene State website. “Truthfully I love coaching hockey, I love the college, and I love the athletes that I’ve coached, as an alum and a donor and a volunteer, here for so long it seemed like a natural progression, in our minds the idea of varsity hockey was probably always a pipedream, and as the idea was becoming a reality I got more excited about being involved in this next step,” he said.
Marty Testo explained, “Our plan going forward, from when this first came into fruition was that both teams would stay,” he said, talking about both the men’s and women’s club teams as well as men’s and women’s varsity teams.
Last year the women’s club ice hockey team was canceled due to the lack of participants, according to an article from The Equinox in Nov. 2022.
Morgan said he thought the challenge for recruitment is better looked at as an opportunity. “We’ve created another opportunity for female student athletes specifically in women’s ice hockey to continue the game that they love. In the game of girls ice hockey has grown significantly over the years and it got another boost after the most recent Olympics,” he said. “It’s really more about getting the word out and finding those who can compete and represent us well.”
Rodrique talked about the difference of competing against the hockey schools; in club season they would just be competing with them on the rink, now they’re also recruiting against them. “So we’ve moved up to the highest tier of DII club hockey in the Northeast, so we basically play the club teams of all the hockey schools,” he said. “We’ll be competing basically head to head with the teams we’re going to be competing with on the ice, we’re going to be competing with them head to head with students also. We’re going to be recruiting directly against them.”
Since both programs are starting from the ground up, the goals are going to be more about establishing roots rather than winning right away. “To get a team here, and to establish an identity and culture of what it’s going to look like and progress, and to not get too far ahead and to understand that this is a process,” Testo said. “We want to make sure we provide a tremendous student experience for the students athletes right away but we aren’t going to measure success necessarily on wins and losses right away.”
Keene is collaborating with the community to use Keene ice, “Keene’s a great location for this to happen,” Rodrique said. “I’m really excited to get it going, and really proud as an alum and as someone who’s been involved with hockey at the college for so long. I am really proud and excited to get going and I think coach Morgan and I are both going to work pretty hard to put both teams on the ice that the campus is really proud of.”
All the main aspects of recruitment, identity, schedule and longevity were touched upon by Morgan, Rodrique and Testo. “Once we do eventually get all our student athletes on campus and we’re able to work with them, that’s when we’ll begin building our culture and our identity and working towards a unified team that can go out there and perform well and win hockey games,” Morgan said. “Little Johnny and Susie will grow up from the time they put skates on, they’ll grow up with Keene State Owls being idols for them.”
Molly Lu McKellar can be contacted
at mmckellar@kscequinox.com
COURTESY OF KSC ATHLETICS
