Tim Benz: Robert Morris' men's, women's hockey teams practicing together for next year's return

Latrobe’s Serena Slusarczyk clearly remembers where she was when she got the news about Robert Morris University cutting its hockey programs.

“I was trying on my high school graduation gown,” Slusarczyk recalled. “I get a text message to get on this Zoom call. And they say the RMU hockey program is… over. I didn’t know what to do.”

After her graduation from Derry Area High School, the hockey recruit was planning to join Robert Morris’ team for the 2021-22 NCAA season. But in May 2021, both the men’s and women’s teams were surprisingly eliminated by the university.

However, after a wave of fundraising efforts, fan and media outcry and alumni pressure, RMU administrators reinstated the programs in December.

At that point, the ‘21-‘22 college hockey season was well underway, and the rosters for both RMU teams were deconstructed. The decision was made to wait until 2023-24 for a return in order to continue fundraising and to give both teams a chance to rebuild through recruiting and transfers.

That doesn’t mean the rosters are totally empty, though. Both the men’s and women’s teams have six players listed on their rosters. Both teams have three new recruits and three players who were on the squad before they were shut down.

And they are practicing.

Together.

Both rosters. Men and women. Eight hours a week. Never with the payoff of playing a game. All year.

Men’s head coach Derek Schooley and assistant Matt Nicholson partner up with women’s coach Logan Bittle to lead practices. They all run drills with both genders skating as one team to build the platform for a return of two programs.

The topic of gender equity is one that is frequently discussed in college sports. But, in a way, no school is personifying it quite as much as Robert Morris is with its hockey programs acting as one.

“We worked together to bring the programs back. Now we are working together to move them forward,” Schooley said. “I can’t say enough good things about how this has been a combined effort. … This is going to make the groups closer.”

Sure, there is the matter of practicality. Ice time can be consolidated. Not to mention it’s a heckuva lot easier to run legitimate, beneficial team drills with 12 total players instead of six each.

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But there’s a program-building quotient to all of this as well. These two teams were forged together at the same time, with the men’s team first hitting the ice in ‘04-‘05 and the women’s team debuting in ‘05-‘06.

Then they were cut together. Now they are coming back together.

“Now it’s a lot more structured,” RMU men’s player Gavin Gulash said last week. “It feels like you have more of a purpose now. More team-oriented activities. We are all looking forward to opening night. It’s something to work toward.”

As far as the long-term benefits of working as one, Bittle said there’s at least one very tangible benefit the female players are taking away from the experience.

“It’s all about the pace,” Bittle said. “They have to up their game to keep up. And our girls have done a really nice job of keeping up and pushing the boys as well.”

Gillian Thompson is one of the returning Colonials. In fact, she scored the CHA championship-winning goal for RMU in the spring of 2020, roughly three months before the programs were eliminated.

“It’s definitely a lot faster, So I’m hoping that when the women’s team comes back — even after two years off — this will help us be a lot faster and get back to NCAA (tournament),” Thompson said.

There’s only one goaltender on the ice between the teams. It’s Maggie Hatch, an incoming freshman on the women’s team.

“To come in and play with them at their speed, it’s kind of cool,” Hatch said. “It’s definitely made me better, and I think all the girls can attest to that too. It’s been fun to push yourself and say, ‘I can play with these guys.’”

When she was with the Pens elite program, Slusarczyk played against Hatch and said she was impossible to score against. Schooley raves about her skills, and his players agree.

“She’s amazing,” Colonials forward Cam Hebert said. “And her conditioning is going to be better than anyone’s in the NCAA. And she’s such a trooper about it. She’s awesome.”

There’s always been a bond between the Colonials men’s and women’s teams. Schooley’s office is directly across from the women’s head coach. Bittle got that job after being an assistant under Paul Colontino, who left a few months after the teams were cut.

Bittle was a player on Schooley’s first team. He’s now married to Brianne McLaughlin, a former Olympian and the most decorated Colonials hockey alum of all time.

“There have always been good relationships between the men’s and women’s teams. But having this year together, I think, is just going to make the hockey programs at RMU all the more close,” Bittle said.

The concept of men and women playing together isn’t foreign to Slusarczyk. In fact, she and fellow Colonials freshman Dominic Schimizzi of Greensburg played dek hockey together growing up.

“We look around at the commons at RMU, in the cafeteria, and we see all the other teams sit together. And then they all have their big teams take up the full table. And then there is our team. A mixture of men and women,” Schimizzi said. “We all sit there and talk about how we are one team right now. It may not always be sunshine and rainbows. You are looking at the men’s lacrosse team. The men’s football team. The women’s basketball team. They take up a whole table. And we just talk about how next year we are going to be like that. We are going to be two full teams. And we are going to be tighter than ever. It’s going to be one ‘ginormous’ team of men’s and women’s hockey.”

This time next year, both Colonials teams will be in the midst of their return seasons.

And those tables will be entirely full.