Stanford club ice hockey (5–7, American Collegiate Hockey Association), a team revived this year, closed their season this month with five wins across their last six games. The Feb. 3 season finale — a 5-3 Cardinal victory over U.C. Davis — was won before enthusiastic fans on the team’s home rink, Sharks Ice in San Jose.
Captain Joshua Kim ’24, a New York City native, was instrumental in rejuvenating a team that played only an abbreviated schedule last year. Kim worked extensively with Stanford’s director of sports and youth programs, Winston Adams, on the logistics of building a hockey program — including developing a game schedule, purchasing equipment, getting practice ice time and budgeting for the cost of all these activities.
Adams, who played on the San Jose State University club hockey team and ran the SJSU club sports program before coming to the Farm, brings a wealth of experience to club hockey. “If anyone knows a playbook at Stanford for how to run a hockey program, it’s him,” Kim said. To Adams, “it was pretty much starting from scratch.”
Kim, with Adams’s assistance, recruited head coach Alex Hult, who played professional hockey overseas for 10 years. Hult arrived with reasonable expectations: “My goal is not only to build a competitive program but also to give back to these athletes and to try and make them good leaders,” he said.
It was also Kim’s responsibility to recruit players — undergraduate and graduate, men and women. While adding the hockey team to a student’s academic and social priorities can be challenging, Kim found a group of players united by their love of the sport.
“All the players are super-committed to practice,” Kim said, which took place at 8:15 a.m. in San Jose twice a week.
The fledgling team has a core of young players, including freshmen Taden Horse, Thomas Sitzmann, Luke Woodworth and Joshua Shunk; sophomore Mia Garvey; juniors Charles Joyner, Ethan Kato and Andrew Yang and, in addition to Kim, seniors Cameron Pennington and Simba Xu. Several graduate students, including Andrew Murtland and Brennan Simon, are also on the team.
Despite a rough start, with the team losing all six of their fall games, the players gelled in the winter to win five of six matches — highlighted by a 7-5 victory over Cal Lutheran (CLU). In that game, both Sitzmann and Horse had three goal hat-tricks. Pennington was also stellar in goal, shutting out CLU in the first period and, because of a broken goalie stick, having to play most of the third period with a player stick.
The team’s winning streak continued into their season finale against the University of California, Davis.
The Cardinal scored the first two goals of the game: Horse put the puck past the U.C. Davis goalie at 15:30 of the first period and, at 8:11 with Stanford on a power play, Murtland scored immediately after a face-off deep in the Aggies zone. U.C. Davis cut the margin to one when, with a man advantage, the Aggies beat Pennington with 2:09 left in the period.
U.C. Davis kept its momentum, evening the score at 18:39 of the second period. But Stanford scored the next three in the period — Horse from close range on the power play at 15:26, Kim at 6:53 and Horse again 20 seconds later. The Aggies closed the gap to 5-3 with a goal midway through the third period but the Cardinal held firm, featuring some beautiful saves by Pennington, who stopped 37 Aggie shots in the game. The Cardinal had 31 shots on goal.
Horse, who hails from Saskatchewan where he played AAA and junior hockey, said he was proud of his hat-trick — his fifth of the season. “Tommy Sitzmann helped me all the way into the [Aggies] zone and I was able to put it in the back of the net,” he said.
The team is already looking forward to building on what it accomplished this season. Kim said he was proud that the players stuck together through adversity in the fall and coalesced into a winning team in January.
“As I think about the mark I want to leave at Stanford,” Kim said, “it goes without saying that the hockey team is incredibly important to me and that’s reflected in how I prioritize it among the various other things I have on my plate as a Stanford student.”
As for now, the team will get a respite from its grinding schedule. “To be honest, some of the team, probably myself included, will enjoy the first Tuesday and Thursday we get to sleep in, just a little bit,” Kim said.