A long way from ‘Win-nipiac’

The lights go out at Hemenway Rink at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. Beads of sweat drip onto frayed jerseys as players leave the ice. They emerge from the locker room with gear slung over their shoulders and walk out into a dimly lit parking lot.

Engines hum and cars slowly trickle onto the main road, driving toward Quinnipiac’s newly built Mount Carmel Campus.

Quinnipiac men’s hockey didn’t have its own rink to practice in — Choate just happened to be available that night. It also wasn’t called Quinnipiac men’s hockey in 1967. The word “club” came first. The team played home games at Hamden High School.

The university — a college at the time — had around 3,000 students. Nobody cared about hockey, mostly because nobody knew about it.

But Charles Brophy did.

Brophy was coaching youth skating lessons in New Haven, Connecticut, when he caught wind of a men’s club hockey team forming at his alma mater. Several students petitioned the sport to former athletic director Burt Kahn, but it was no secret that he wasn’t interested in supporting a hockey team.

Brophy was, and when the head coaching position opened, he took it.

To Kahn’s dismay, Quinnipiac was going to have men’s hockey.

“We were just looking for people to play,” said Kent Allyn, one of the team’s goaltenders from 1967-71. “So Brophy said ‘you guys want to give it a try?’ and we said ‘sure.’”

Eighteen players survived tryouts. The Braves — now known as Bobcats — played in the Worcester Valley League and won two games in the 1968-69 season. The program went dormant from 1971-72 and was reinstated in 1973.

“These guys here, all of a sudden, out of the blue, ‘we’ve got itches, let’s scratch them,’” said Mark Farber, former student government president and co-editor in chief of The Quinnipiac Chronicle. “They find this little pond (Clark’s Pond) over there and they start. They had the gumption.”

There was no glory, no real contention against opponents.

“It was just a bunch of guys that liked to skate,” Allyn said.

Unfortunately, those guys barely had anything other than skates. Allyn requested for the club team to become a campus sport. Kahn handed him $500 instead.

“I was in charge of the money and I ordered uniforms through the athletic department and they came through as youth uniforms,” Allyn said. “I have my old high school lacrosse jersey on, because none of the uniforms are big…