Meet the Coach: Penn State Hockey Gets Its “Guy”
On Sunday, Penn State announced that its search for their first men’s hockey coach came to an end with the hiring of Guy Gadowsky to take over the Division I program that begins play in 2012-2013.
Penn State interviewed the likes of Olympic champion and Wisconsin women’s head coach Mark Johnson and also Scott Sandelin, who led the University of Minnesota-Duluth to their first-ever national championship last month, but ended up signing Gadowsky after seven years of coaching the Princeton Tigers.
During his tenure at Princeton, Gadowsky complied a 105-109-15 record and reached the NCAA Tournament twice, most recently in the 2008-2009 season when he was named Inside College Hockey Coach of the Year. Before coming to the Tigers, he headed the rise to prominence of Alaska-Fairbanks, taking them from a team who won 15 games combined in his first two years to winning 22 games in his third and putting the team in the top-15 of the nation.
Gadowsky has coached nine different players to the NHL in his fifteen years as coach including Darrell Powe of the Philadelphia Flyers, but what may have been a bigger selling point to Curley and president Graham Spanier was his athletes’ success in the classroom which started at Alaska-Fairbanks when graduation rates rose from 49 percent to 66 percent during his tenure.
This was definitely Penn State settling for their third out of three choices for a head coach, but Gadowsky has a lot to work with and the talent to make Penn State competitive from the beginning when Division I play starts in 2012.
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