Seniors built foundation for Penn State hockey

There is a special moment in Pegula Ice Arena, before each Penn State hockey game, that Tommy Olczyk is going to miss perhaps more than any other.

As players from both teams skate a few turns around the ice, with the lights in the building turned down and the music cranked up, the “Roar Zone” student section shouts “We are …” and the rest of the arena responds, “Penn State!”

“That still gives me chills,” Olczyk said. “I think those chills will multiply this weekend knowing it’s my last time doing it.”

Saturday afternoon will be the final time Olczyk, and seven other seniors, get to experience that while in uniform.

The No. 15 Nittany Lions (18-8-4, 8-5-1-1 Big Ten) host Ohio State (8-16-2, 3-7-2-1) at 6:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday for the last home games of the season.

Senior Days are always meaningful, special and emotional, no matter the school, but this octet of men hold special significance. Penn State has been a Division I program for just four years. They were on the ground floor in creating the program.

“They’ve been everything to this program,” assistant coach Matt Lindsay said Monday. “They’re the guys that came here when this arena didn’t exist and we weren’t in the Big Ten, and there were a lot of question marks about what Penn State hockey was going to be, how long it was going to take to get there. These are all guys that really believed in what the university was doing and what the hockey program was going to be.”

Not only has Olczyk been here for all four seasons, he even spent a year with the Icers club program before the transition.

But all of them — including captain David Glen, Kenny Brooks, Luke Juha, Curtis Loik, Connor Varley and Matthew Skoff — stepped into a program that played its first season under the orange lights, and on the choppy ice, of Greenberg Ice Pavilion. Pegula Ice Arena was a concept on paper and a stack of blocks and steel when the puck dropped on the first season.

“When I came in, I don’t even know if they showed me the Greenberg Ice Pavilion,” Olczyk said. “Heck, I wouldn’t have shown it if I was trying to get people to come here.”

A year later, Eric Scheid transferred in to join the seniors.

They all committed more to a dream than to a program.

“It’s come a long way since the Day 1 when I walked into Greenberg,” Glen said. “I was a little nervous, I guess. I didn’t really know what we were in for.”

Olczyk was sure to mention earlier this week how many on the outside thought it might take until this season for the Lions even to earn their first Big Ten win, how they would get eaten up by the conference’s long-established powers.

These men helped establish an identity, and were less concerned with how the program would take them places and more with how they could take the program places.

Lindsay said he was asked often on the recruiting trail in the early years about how long it would take to be successful, but these seniors were not asking that question. Lindsay admitted there is some satisfaction that in four years this team is a contender despite those concerns, but he doesn’t have an “I told you so” for those who chose to go elsewhere.

“We’re happy with the guys we got,” he said.

The guys they got have had Penn State ranked in the top 20 most of the season with one of the nation’s top-scoring offenses. With just six games left in the regular season — three weekends — the team is still in the hunt in the Big Ten, and it’s No. 14 in the Pairwise Rankings, a strong indicator of standing for the 16-team NCAA tournament.

Being in the hunt is good, but the Nittany Lions can’t forget it starts Friday night.

“If you start paying too much attention to the Pairwise and the rankings, sometimes you can get a little bit lost,” Lindsay said. “Sometimes it’s really just important to focus on the game at hand, and if you keep winning, keep having success, the rankings are going to be where you want them to be at the end of the day.”

It’s a nice reward for a collection of young men who took a leap of faith with an unknown program.

“If I would have decided to go somewhere else, and know what I know about this place now, I would have been kicking myself in the behind,” Olczyk said, referring more to the university than to the team’s success. “Getting past that barrier of deciding to come play club hockey for a year, but knowing I was going to be on the D1 team, wasn’t the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make, but it was the best decision I’ve ever made to come here and be a part of so many firsts for this program.”

This story was originally published February 18, 2016 at 5:25 PM with the headline "Seniors built foundation for Penn State hockey."