How Quinnipiac became college hockey royalty

The small private school in Connecticut won its first national championship in thrilling fashion last Saturday, only 25 years after it became a Division I program

There was still time on the clock, but with each passing second, Quinnipiac’s hopes of achieving a program-defining milestone slowly eroded.

With about 3:30 remaining in the Frozen Four title game last Saturday in Tampa, the Bobcats’ men’s ice hockey team trailed Minnesota, 2-1. They were more than one minute into a frenetic power play to try to even the score, but had thus far failed to do so. 

With a golden opportunity dwindling and his team still within striking distance of its first-ever national championship, Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold made a bold decision befitting the weighty moment. With 36 seconds remaining on the power play, Pecknold called a timeout and pulled his goalie, giving the Bobcats a 6-on-4 advantage, but leaving them much more susceptible to surrendering a goal that would effectively end the game and dash their dreams.

Five seconds after the power play ended and it appeared as though Minnesota had weathered the onslaught, forward Collin Graf snuck in the game-tying goal and sent the game into overtime. Just 10 seconds into the extra period, sophomore forward Jacob Quillan hammered home a deft pass from teammate Sam Lipkin to end the game, secure the title and send the Bobcats into unconstrained euphoria.

“You can't put a value on what we just did for Quinnipiac University,” Pecknold said after the game.

Ultimately, they’ll be able to do just that. 

The run to the Frozen Four and the program’s eventual championship heroics brought a level of attention to the private school of about 6,000 in Hamden, Conn. that it likely wouldn’t have received otherwise. A university with an interesting-looking name that is still perhaps best known for its political polls is now a champion, a designation that will earn many of the measurable perks and spoils for which it could ask. Donations will pour in. Applications for admission will jump. Earlier this week, university president Judy Olian described it as a “halo effect.”

For most universities, the success of even a single athletic program can be an entry point to the institution as a whole. It’s the same metaphor from which this newsletter takes its name.

At Quinnipiac, the men’s hockey program has become that lavish front porch. What it did at the Frozen Four, where it defeated two of the sport’s most storied and decorated programs in Michigan and Minnesota, was the culmination of decades of work, all done with the hope that a moment like last Saturday’s just might one day be possible.

Surviving the grind

At the Frozen Four, the Bobcats were reasonably cast as the plucky upstart, particularly when compared to the other three teams that made it to college hockey’s preeminent event.

Entering this year’s tournament, Minnesota, Michigan and Boston University had combined for 19 national championships and 70 Frozen Fours, a collection of feats that made the trio of programs among the most storied in the sport. Quinnipiac, by contrast, had two Frozen Fours and had as many NCAA Tournament appearances (nine) as Michigan has national championships.

Merely getting to that point, though, was a monumental, difficult-to-replicate task for Quinnipiac.

After it began sponsoring men’s ice hockey as a varsity sport in 1975, none of the university’s first three coaches finished their tenure with wins in more than 43% of their games. When a 27-year-old Pecknold was hired in May 1994, the ingredients for future success weren’t exactly in place. 

For one, the program was still competing at the Division III level and even there, it wasn’t doing particularly well, with a 26-82 record in the four seasons before Pecknold took over. At the time of Pecknold’s hiring, the head-coaching position was only part-time and paid $6,700 in his first season. The following year, he was given a raise – of $131. To help keep himself and his family financially afloat, Pecknold worked as a history teacher at a local high school in his first five seasons coaching the Bobcats.

That arrangement presented complications. Initially, Quinnipiac would practice at a local Hamden rink at midnight because it was the only time slot available at the time. By his second year, they were able to secure a 9:40 p.m. booking at another facility, giving Pecknold and his players slightly more normalcy in a lifestyle that offered little of it.

“It was a grind,” Pecknold said in a moment of reflection after winning the championship last weekend. “I worked. My life was 12-hour increments. We practiced at midnight. I had a teaching job. I’d get home from school, my job, I’d sleep 3 to 6. I’d get up. I had to go recruit because we weren’t very good. I didn’t have enough players. I was just in survival mode. That was it — we were D3. We were a bad D3 team.”

That began to change quickly enough. 

By Pecknold’s fourth season, they finished 19-3-1. The ensuing year, they moved up to the Division I level and the university made the head coach a full-time role. In 2002, Quinnipiac made its first NCAA Tournament and in 2007, it finally moved into a brand-new, on-campus venue.

After years of steady, if unremarkable, success, the Bobcats’ path to a championship began in earnest with the 2012-13 season, when it won a school-record 30 games and made its first Frozen Four. Three years later, it was back on college hockey’s biggest stage. In both instances, it lost in the title game – first to archrival Yale in 2013, then in lopsided fashion against North Dakota in 2016 – but beginning with that 2012-13 run, Quinnipiac has made the NCAA Tournament in eight of the past 10 seasons it has been held.

That stretch was bookended in fitting fashion last week. 

A program that spent years and decades building itself up and defying expectations did so one final time. In a four-team event, three of the four winningest programs in the sport’s history were toppled by the school that started fielding a team after the three others had already been doing so for at least a half-century. Michigan, which Quinnipiac came from behind to beat in the semifinals, had four NHL first-round draft picks on its roster. The Bobcats have just three draft picks period, none of whom were selected earlier than the sixth round.

“I'm not going to say we're perfect on that,” Pecknold said at a press conference the day before the championship game. “We make a mistake once in a while. But we win because we have high-character, high-hockey–IQ kids. Those two things, those two ingredients are what we have to have. And that's why we have success against the teams with 18 draft picks.”

In reality, there’s a little more to it.

A calculated gamble

On more than one occasion, Quinnipiac athletic director Greg Amodio has compared his school’s hockey program to Gonzaga’s men’s basketball program.

Generally speaking, linking the two makes some sense. Both are smaller private schools that, without football teams, prioritized a sport and seemingly out of nowhere turned it into a national power (though the Bobcats may now take exception to such a juxtaposition, as they, unlike the Zags, now have a national title to their name).

In many ways, though, Quinnipiac’s quest was more perilous, more likely to fail.

Even beyond its single-elimination tournament that’s constantly subject to chaos – look no further than what happened this year – men’s basketball offers a more feasible path to success. While massive financial commitments are ultimately needed to be more than a comet streaking through the sky, a smaller roster means an unexpected recruiting win or a carefully developed player who morphs into a star has an outsized impact. As much as a major-revenue sport can be, it’s an ostensibly democratic endeavor.

Hockey’s not exactly that. Outside of football, it’s maybe the most expensive sport to field and operate. Minnesota, for example, spent more on men’s hockey in 2021 than four Power Five and Big East schools did on men’s basketball. There are fewer obstacles to clear, with only 62 men’s programs competing at the Division I level, but becoming even a consistently successful college hockey program is gaining admittance into a club with a hefty cover charge. There’s a large, up-front cost with no guarantee of success to follow. You get inside and do your best to make sure you don’t leave.

It’s a gamble Quinnipiac took. Three decades ago, with its move up to Division I, it prioritized hockey with no assurance it would pay off. Ultimately, it did.

The most obvious symbol of the school’s commitment to hockey – and athletics in general – is what is now known as M&T Bank Arena, a 185,000-square-foot facility that houses the Bobcats’ hockey and basketball programs. It was a $52 million venue that was part of a larger $360 million construction project to enhance and expand the university’s campus. It gave them not only a long-elusive home rink, but quite a nice one. In 2012, it was hailed by legendary Boston Globe sports writer Bob Ryan as the best of the 21 Division I venues in New England that he traveled to that year for men’s basketball games.

“If the question is ‘What’s the showcase sports facility in New England?’ then I must instruct the operators to hold all calls because we have a clear winner,” Ryan wrote. “It sits on a hill in Hamden, Conn.”

The push for hockey went beyond its home ice. Over a span of 10 years – from 2003 until 2013, when it made its first Frozen Four – Quinnipiac saw its men’s hockey budget swell from $762,673 to $2.58 million, more than triple what it had been. According to the most recent U.S. Department of Education figures, the Bobcats shelled out $3.03 million on the program in 2021. 

While the program has yet to turn a profit since 2004, a national championship may very well change that math – and quickly. If it does so, it wouldn’t be the first time Quinnipiac has taken a significant step.

“I think there’s a lot of people that kind of look at who we are and they just sit there and say, ‘How do those guys keep doing it every year?’” Amodio told Forbes earlier this month.

If the past 30 years have shown anything, it’s that it’s not some complex, deeply-guarded secret.

(Photo: Getty Images)