Robert Morris hockey looks to move from back on the ice to back in contention

Robert Morris hockey players took the ice last week to begin practices for the second season of the rebooted program. The sense of being a newly constructed team has faded a bit after 2023-24’s return to the ice.

And that’s exactly how the players want it.

“Expectations will be a lot higher this year,” forward Tanner Klimpke said Tuesday. “We don’t have ‘the first year back’ excuse to kind of get going. We all have a year under our belts now. The bar is raised.”

As exhilarating as the program’s reincarnation was for the athletic department a year ago, this year’s RMU squad is attempting to take the next step from “Welcome back” to “Now we’re back.”

Back to winning lots of games and contending for the Atlantic Hockey championship, which Robert Morris had done on a regular basis prior to the team being shut down for two years in 2022-23.

“You can just see the difference in the pace of practice. How they handle themselves,” head coach Derek Schooley said Tuesday. “You talk about last year’s team a little bit and what happened in the past every once in a while. But you move on. We’re here to be better than what we were last year. We’ve got some second-year guys that were really good as freshmen, and we’re looking for them to take even a bigger step this year.”

Last year’s team was a mix of brand-new freshmen and lots of older graduate student transfers. An encouraging sign for Schooley was that it was the freshman class that emerged as the most steady scorers. Three of the top four point producers — Klimpke (with a team-leading 26 points), Walter Zacher (22) and Jackson Reineke (21) — were first-year players.

GOAL! ????

P3 (5:59): Stonehill 1 RMU 7

TOUCHDOWN COLONIALS!! Tanner Klimpke puts home his second of the night! ????#BobbyMo#AHA20pic.twitter.com/jKDeVdVjqI

— RMU Men’s Hockey (@RMUMHockey) January 6, 2024

As some of the grad student veterans struggled through early scoring slumps, it was the freshmen that kept the Colonials afloat. In the back half of the schedule, veterans such as Rylee St. Onge and Dallas Tulik began to heat up. RMU found its stride, winning four of six games at one point in January and February and eventually pulling off a first round playoff upset against Bentley.

Now, it’s up to the freshmen to mature quickly and take on a leadership role as sophomores.

“It’s easier for the new guys,” Reineke said. “They have guys to look to for questions. The more comfortable you are, the better you are on the ice. That makes it easier for (the returning sophomores) too.”

On Schooley’s end, the goal is to move from team creation to team building.

“It’s going to be hard to play here. We are really deep,” Schooley said. “A lot of that is guys got a lot of ice time and experience last year. But they are going to be pushed this year. They are going to be pushed by the freshmen. We’ve got some transfers that have come in that are going to be good players for us.”

One of those new players is Montour’s Michael Felsing. He put up 58 points in 53 games with the Merritt Centennials of the BCHL last year.

“The circumstances they had, it’s not easy just getting back in the swing of things. They held their own and played pretty well,” Felsing said of last year’s Colonials. “The group looks good. We all like each other a lot.”

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Schooley was also able to find some veteran experience in the transfer portal with the addition of six new players, including Stonehill defenseman Greg Japchen. He spent time in the San Jose Sharks’ development camp.

“They are a team with a lot of pace,” Japchen said of RMU. “They are definitely super driven. Everyone is very well-connected. It showed in their play. They play with a lot of intensity, and they play a very sound game overall.”

Two other transfers are in net — goalies Dylan Meilun (Stonehill) and Dawson Smith (Western Michigan). They’ll battle with freshman Croix Kochendorfer to replace Chad Veltri. The Fox Chapel native ended up with 1,054 saves last year, fourth in the NCAA.

“It’s great competition,” Meilun said. “We’re excited. We are all fighting for that spot. We know it’s up for grabs here. We’ll see how camp goes, and it’ll be decided eventually.”

One thing the Colonials have regained is normalcy. All the “firsts” have been experienced after the rebirth of the program 11 months ago. Now, for Schooley and company, it’s about growth and development of the team they worked so hard to get back on the ice over the past three years.

“It’s all up from here,” Felsing said. “I have high hopes for us.”

For a while around Colonial hockey, the hope was just to skate again. Now it’s to be a winner again.

LISTEN: Tim Benz and Derek Schooley discuss Robert Morris’ upcoming hockey season.