ALLENTOWN, Pa. – In the gloom of the locker room, that cauldron of swirling pride and pain that fills these spaces when a season suddenly stops, UConn men’s hockey coach Mike Cavanaugh asked each of his players to go thank their captains.
The freshmen, sophomore, the senior transfers, they each paid their respects to Hudson Schandor and John Spetz.
“Our captains set a culture here that we’re going to keep going with,” said sophomore Joey Muldowney, who scored on goal, and twice narrowly missed the game-winner in overtime Sunday night. “And I couldn’t thank those guys enough. They’re true warriors and what UConn hockey is all about.”
The Huskies got as close to the NCAA’s Frozen Four as a team could get without getting there. After Muldowney hit a post with one shot, as had another deflected at the last second, Penn State scored the game winner at the Allentown Regional, Matt DiMarsico’s goal ending 77:46 of tension-filled, elimination hockey.
UConn falls short in bid for Frozen Four, Penn State prevails, 3-2, in OT
It was a crushing end for a UConn team that made the NCAA Tournament for the first time, that had come to believe, and to prove, it had a legitimate chance to contribute its own national championship to the campus collection.
But the indications are, this was only the end of a beginning. Schandor, the forward from Vancourver, and Spetz, defenseman from New Jersey, wanted to make UConn hockey all about something, and they succeeded.
“It was best year of my life, so many life lessons,” said Schandor, who became the program’s career scoring leader. “It takes an army to get here, it really does, and the whole staff bought into this crazy idea we had last summer.”
The crazy idea was to create a set of guidelines, standards, expectations, whatever you want to call it, to be a part of the team. It was bringing old ideas to the new era of name-image-likeness, pay for play and easy transferring. All in, or all out.
Several players had transferred out after the sub-.500 season in 2024, including Matthew Wood, a first-round NHL draft pick and high scoring forward who went to hockey blue blood Minnesota, and goalie Arsenii Sergeev, who went to Penn State. Schandor and Spetz graduated, but chose to return for a fifth season to help Cavanaugh hold together the program he’s been building for a decade.
“I can’t thank these two enough,” Cavanaugh said. “They single-handedly changed and set the expectations for this program. When everybody was jumping ship, they didn’t. And not only did they not jump ship, they mentored a big freshman class and everybody else in the program and showed them what it was like to be a UConn hockey player.”
In the early spring workouts, as coaches were still trying to fill out the roster, only about eight were on hand. Maureen “Moe” Butler, associate AD for sports performance, backed up the captain’s message.
“Moe, she was like ‘these are the guys who want to be here,'” said
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