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,…
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