(Photo: Gabrielle Mercer/WCSN)
Before he became ASU’s head coach, Greg Powers was a Sun Devil goaltender who took the ice each week for ASU’s club hockey team.
After graduating from ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1999, Powers returned to his alma mater to help lead the Sun Devil club hockey program, first as an assistant coach before becoming the head coach.
“I try to coach how I’d want to be coached,” Powers said. “That’s literally trying to genuinely get to know each of my players’ personalities and you can’t treat everyone the same every time.”
Current ASU goalie Joey Daccord said Powers aides in confidence on game days.
“He doesn’t overload me with stuff,” Daccord said. “We talk during practice for a couple minutes here and there and he just kind of talks to me about some of the stuff to keep my confidence up and keep me feeling good.”
Powers was a goaltender when ASU was a ACHA team. During his time at ASU, he was a three-time All-American, a two-time Team MVP, and helped lead the Sun Devils to three qualifying trips to the national championships. He was inducted into the ASU Hockey Player Hall of Fame in 2009, before becoming head coach the following year.
“When I came back as an assistant, the club program was really down,” he said. “Not ranked in the top-25, and then club hockey was losing to Division-II teams, the culture was really bad and it just takes time. It took really four cycles of getting the kind of kids in that you would want to coach that molds in with your vision and culture.”
Powers had a career record of 174-50-14. During his tenure as head coach, he coached eight ACHA All-Americans and 15 ACHA Academic All-Americans and even has a National Championship under his belt for the 2013-2014 season, won Coach of the Year for 2014 and was a finalist for National Coach of the Year multiple times.
New Traditions
Though the team hasn’t carried on any traditions from when he skated, Powers said, the team now has one tradition that his team carries out each week.
At the end of each shootout in practice, the loser has to drink or eat what is in Powers’ mystery jar. It’s a new treat every week, with contents such as pigs’ feet, Powers said.
“It’s just something to get the guys loose and not thinking about everything so uptight so it’s a lot of fun, they enjoy it,” he said.
And it’s traditions, such as the mystery jar and a team trip to Flagstaff at the beginning of year, that have brought the team closer.
“We could tell that we’re a lot closer today than we were on this day last year,” Powers said. “ I think we were 1-9 with a goal differential of 29, and today we’re 2-6-2 with a goal differential of 10. We’re right there.”
As he often does in the early years of ASU hockey, Powers stressed the importance of patience in the development of the program.
“We got a good group of kids that we need to get over the hump and we’ll stay patient with them until they do.”
