Inside Penn State hockey's improbable rise and first trip to the Frozen Four

New York Times

10-04-2025

ST. LOUIS — When Matthew DiMarsico scored the overtime winner to lift Penn State to its first Frozen Four, it sent shockwaves throughout the college hockey world, from Allentown to Anchorage.
And in a living room in Bluffton, South Carolina, the emotion was overflowing.
There was Joe Battista, 64, the former long-time coach of the school's club hockey team, who had helped spearhead the decades-long quest for their first varsity team. Battista jumped off his couch after the biggest goal in school history, hugged his wife of 35 years, Heidi, and picked her up. The two met when he played for the club team in the early 1980s and she sold programs.
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'I just started crying — it was euphoric,' Battista recalled this week. 'It's been an amazing journey, and it's just neat to be able to watch that. It was a dream to so many of us. I don't think these kids will realize the impact this is going to have — for years to come.'
Hockey at Penn State was defunded in 1909 and suspended during World War II. It took 3,000 signatures on a petition in the early 1970s to revive the club program, which won six ACHA national titles and 512 victories with Battista as coach. An $88 million commitment by Buffalo Sabres and Bills owner Terry Pegula in 2010 helped spark the birth of a Nittany Lions team that is now two wins from a national title.
The fact Penn State lost its first nine Big Ten games en route to this improbable season makes it even more fitting.
'Nothing has ever come easy,' Battista said.
The Nittany Lions are led by Guy Gadowsky, the former Alaska-Fairbanks and Princeton coach, who has been with Penn State for its entire history in varsity. They're backstopped by Russian goaltender Arsenii Sergeev, a transfer from UConn and a 2021 Calgary Flames draft pick. They're carried by a blend of youth, like sophomore star scorer Aiden Fink, and seniors like Carson Dyck, who helped save their season by using the school's title-winning volleyball team for inspiration.
'I don't think anyone gave us a chance,' Gadowsky said.
But they're here, and the NCAA tournament's biggest underdog faces one of the top blue bloods, Boston University, on Thursday night.
Pegula's oldest son, Michael, attended hockey camps at Penn State, so his family was familiar with the program and the club hockey schedule.
In the fall of 2005, Pegula called Battista at home.
'Why aren't we playing Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Boston Universities of the world?' Pegula asked.
Battista brought up the cost of scholarships. The travel. Title IX.
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'Well, I'm in town,' Pegula replied. 'You know where Kelly's steakhouse is? How about you meet me there in 15 minutes? I'll buy you dinner.'
They had dinner and Pegula asked what it was going to take to get Penn State hockey into varsity status. Battista's eyes lit up, sensing the opportunity.
'Fifty million,' Battista said.
This wasn't a made-up number. Battista and the team had done their research. A committee had completed a feasibility study in the early 2000s. With Pegula on board, they started to sketch out what a new arena and practice rink would look like and cost. But the recession in 2008 hit everyone hard and affected whether the Sabres/Bills owner could sell a portion of his natural gas business; he eventually would to Shell in 2010 for $4.7 billion.
Battista was on the Boston University campus in the summer of 2010 when he got the big news. He and Pegula's group had toured different arenas at schools like Miami (Ohio), Notre Dame and Minnesota to try to get a feel of what they could mimic with Penn State's new facility. Battista then went to Boston University and met with Mike Eruzione, the captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic gold-medal-winning team.
'We're hoping for our own Miracle on Ice,' Battista told him.
As Battista walked across Commonwealth Avenue, he got a text from Pegula: 'Just signed agreement. Great day for Hockey in Happy Valley.'
The funding was secure.
Penn State had the soon-to-be Division I status. They had the facilities and the soon-to-be-built state-of-the-art Pegula Ice Arena.
They just needed a coach.
Battista felt Gadowsky was the right guy for this type of challenge after success at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and Princeton University. In the spring of 2011, Battista invited Gadowsky to Happy Valley for an interview. They took a tour of campus, including Beaver Stadium. Their hockey facilities, at that time, weren't nearly as impressive: the beat-up Greenberg Arena seated 1,110. It had small locker rooms. None of the bells and whistles.
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'He didn't balk,' Battista said.
Battista called Terry Pegula and told him, 'You've got to meet this guy.' Pegula was in Philadelphia at the time for a Sabres-Flyers playoff game. He told Battista to bring Gadowsky to the game and they'd talk in his suite. So Gadowsky and Battista got in their cars and made the three-hour drive to the Wells Fargo Center.
Gadowsky said he was struck by Pegula's passion for the university — how much support he had already given and would continue to provide. Pegula laid out his vision: not just to build great facilities, but to enhance hockey in the state.
''My dream would be to have hockey players grow up in Pennsylvania, play for Penn State and go on to play in the NHL,'' Gadowsky recalled Pegula telling him. 'When you hear that, you automatically want to be part of that if you can be.'
During the Pegula-Gadowksky conversation, Battista stood nervously in the back of the suite. About a half hour into it, Kim Pegula came back to Battista and said, 'Guy is our guy.'
Battista said Penn State gave Gadowsky the option of spending his entire first year recruiting or coaching the club team that was awaiting its spot in Division I. Gadowsky told them he wanted to keep coaching, stay sharp. Some of those players would be part of their first Division I team, he insisted — seven of them, it turned out.
Gadowsky said it was one of his favorite seasons, noting the impact the club program had on the team's history. 'It was almost like a cult following,' he said. 'They were there for the university, and we never wanted to lose that.'
Battista pointed out that the first varsity team in 2012-13 ended up having a signature win, beating Wisconsin in overtime to knock the Badgers out of NCAA Tournament contention.
Finding top players wasn't easy in the beginning. The idea of losing eight straight Big Ten games (like this year) wasn't so outlandish when Penn State first went to Division I in 2013. Gadowsky said being a newbie in a conference full of blue-blood programs made it challenging on the recruiting trail, which forced them to make some adjustments.
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'We found out very quickly that a lot of people love Penn State University, not a lot of guys are going to be willing to lose for what people thought were going to be a lot of years in the Big Ten,' Gadowsky said. 'We had to sort of change, pivot what we were looking for. What we looked for were guys, they wanted to welcome the challenge of starting a program where many people said, 'You're going to get killed.' 'You're not going to win a game for three years in the league.' It takes a special competitor to welcome that.'
Just a few months ago, the thought of the Nittany Lions making the Frozen Four seemed unimaginable.
On Jan. 5, Penn State was staring at an 8-9-1 record. It had lost its first nine Big Ten games. In the Pairwise rankings, the Nittany Lions were in the 40s.
'You look up the mountain, and it can seem insurmountable,' Gadowsky said.
Dyck wasn't ready to give up. He and the seniors helped organize individual meetings with every player, with the leadership group trying to keep things positive and effectively communicate each guy's role in turning it around.
'We didn't really have a choice,' graduate forward Tyler Paquette said. 'We were going through a big skid, and we just committed to staying positive no matter what.'
'It takes a really strong person to look at teammate in the eye and say, 'We need more,'' senior forward Dylan Lugris added. 'And every guy responded.'
They had a unique source of inspiration, and it was close to home.
Dyck brought up how the Nittany Lions volleyball team — just one month earlier — had pulled off an epic comeback in their national semifinal against Nebraska en route to a national title. Penn State lost the first two sets to the Cornhuskers and was down 22-16 in the third before rallying.
Gadowsky asked volleyball coach Katie Schumacher-Cawley to speak to his hockey team in January, the week of their series with No. 1 Michigan State. Schumacher-Cawley, whose battle with breast cancer inspired the entire school, stood in the middle of the Nittany Lions dressing room and fielded questions from the players.
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In the semifinal, Schumacher-Cawley had called timeout late in the third set, allowing the team to catch their breath and refocus. She didn't scream or pull off some crazy speech. But Schumacher-Cawley told the hockey team the same message she had given to her girls: stay patient.
'Trust your skills, trust your teammates,' she said. 'Stick together. Be positive.'
The hockey team lost 6-4 to Michigan State in its next game but beat the Spartans in a shootout in the second game of the series. Lugris had the winner. It started a stretch of 17 victories in their next 20 games, including NCAA regional wins over Maine and UConn.
Schumacher-Cawley, who had a successful double mastectomy in March, can't be at the Frozen Four but said her coaching staff all planned on wearing hockey jerseys for Wednesday's volleyball match against Pittsburgh. There's a lot of believers now on campus, many of whom will pack the Pegula Arena for a watch party for Thursday's game against Boston University. The student section, 'The Roar Zone,' should make a strong appearance in St. Louis, with senior defenseman Simon Mack calling the campus excitement 'absolutely electric.'
'They absolutely refused to let anybody be negative,' Gadowsky said of his players. 'Everybody talks a good game. But to actually do it and then come out right now going forward, it's just remarkable.'
Before the players headed to the airport and flew to St. Louis, Gadowsky had a special presentation for them.
Early in the afternoon on Tuesday, he pulled up a screen in the team's dressing room. There was a video montage with around 30 former Nittany Lions all congratulating the current group and giving them advice.
The players spanned the last decade-plus of the program, from Ricky DeRosa and Jim Robinson to Chris Funkey to Casey Bailey, the first Penn State player to play in an NHL game.
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'They built the foundation so we could be here,' Dyck said.
'It gives us that much more motivation to take this thing home,' Mack said.
DeRosa was one of many former junior captains on those first few teams, with Gadowsky and his staff targeting a certain character of kid who could usher the program into what could be a rocky beginning.
'You know you're going get beat up for four years and it takes a certain type of individual,' said DeRosa, an Aston, Penn. native. 'It comes with a price, but it's not really a risk unless you lose, right? We were fortunate enough to have the right people there, right staff in place to ramp things up quicker than what a lot of people thought, which was almost like a springboard to where you see them today.'
DeRosa and his wife, Calon, drove from their southern Connecticut home to Allentown for the regional final between Penn State and UConn. They got to be there in the stands for DiMarsico's historic goal.
'I looked at my heart rate monitor afterward. If I were looking at it as like just a normal person, it would have looked like I was having a heart attack,' DeRosa said. 'You don't know how long it's going to take to get there and then you see those guys win in overtime in the fashion that they did … Not to say it's the arrival mark, but it's what we are all pulling toward the entire time.'
And he got to see another Pennsylvania-born kid deliver the heroics. DiMarsico said growing up in Pittsburgh, once Penn State established a Division I program, it was always his dream to play there. He played in the Brick Tournament for Team Pennsylvania, who had their practices at Pegula Ice Arena. That's where he wanted to be.
DiMarsico said he's watched his OT winner a few times. It's the one that had Battista crying and jumping off his couch. It had DeRosa's heart beating seemingly out of his chest. And perhaps, as Pegula envisioned, the goal can inspire another Pennsylvania kid to choose Penn State.
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'It's probably the coolest goal I've ever scored,' he said. 'That feeling, to bring that to everybody, especially the alumni, that feeling I went through was unbelievable.
'To see all the teammates jump over the boards, congratulate you, to get to hold the banner, coming here, it's all been great.'