Auburn University student Elliott Chenger has been an ice hockey player ever since he can remember. But when he moved to Auburn to attend college a few years ago, his years of playing hockey came to a hault.

Auburn University didn’t have a hockey team and Chenger attempted to change that. He went through the necessary steps to create a team, but was unsuccessful. The school was worried about insurance issues and Chenger was denied his hope of creating an Auburn ice hockey team.

In February, Chenger’s hopes were brought back to life when he met fellow hockey enthusiasts James Florkiewicz and Zach Koehler. Florkiewicz and Koehler had also been working to form a team. The guys had petitioned on the university concourse and had received several hundred signatures. So, the three guys joined forces.

“We tried to find the people that would help the most and use those people the best way we could to kinda spread the word,” Chenger said.

The guys found two university employees to get behind their cause. Auburn IT specialist Mike Robinson and Tim Bottenfield from the Forestry and Wildlife Sciences Department agreed to be the team’s advisors. Robinson, who had a background in coaching hockey, also agreed to coach.

Next, the guys met with Dianne Harper, the director of club sports for the university. Harper helped the guys get their proposal together.

“She was very, very helpful to us and helped us with a lot of the insurance issues that we had in the past,” Chenger said.

The next step was to propose the team’s creation to the Auburn University SGA Senate. This time around, Chenger said that the university was more open to the idea of creating an Auburn hockey team.

“The process this time around was a lot easier,” Chenger said. “We didn’t really know what we were going up against the first time we did it, but this time when we met up with them we pretty much had answers to all of their questions. That, on top of having two staff members from the school who are going to be our advisors, that really helped.”

Chenger said that they also explained to the SGA that hockey is a safe sport and that the team would be covered under USA Hockey’s insurance point.

“The thing that I stressed to them was that I’ve been playing for 19 years,” Chenger said. “It’s an extremely safe sport. Accidents happen, just like they could in any sport, but I don’t think that we’re any more prone to accidents then say football or basketball.”

Last Monday, the SGA Senate approved Auburn Ice Hockey as a university club sport. Being a club sport means that the sport is not immediately funded by the university. Students usually pay a fee to participate.

Auburn is the last SEC school to form a team, and it seems many students are also behind the sport. The guys created a Facebook page for Auburn Ice Hockey and after only a week the page had more than 900 members. And other local hockey players have also shown interest. Chenger said that more than 75students have shown an interest in participating in the sport.

Ryan Proctor, a 22-year-old Auburn student, plans to try out for the team.

Proctor played hockey for 10 years in Nashville and often wondered why Auburn didn’t have a team.

“I would go up to Birmingham sometimes and watch Bama play,” Proctor said. “It was a little frustrating to watch a university like Alabama have a hockey team and not us.”

Proctor said that he often practiced with the Vanderbilt University hockey team in high school and felt ready for college hockey when he came to Auburn.
“It was frustrating to not have that dream realized, especially when every other school in the SEC has one,” Proctor said.

The next step for the team was finding a venue to play. Chenger knew that with the substantial costs of converting the university’s coliseum to a rink or especially building a hockey venue - that these options were out of the question. So, the guys contacted the closest ice rink - the Columbus Civic Center.

The guys were invited to the rink to conduct an hour-long workshop to decide if that is where they’d like to play. Chenger said the workshop was put together at the last minute, but around 30 students participated.

“We have some really good talent out there and once we all become a team and are able to mesh well and get some chemistry together, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t have a very successful team,” Chenger said.

The Auburn Ice Hockey team will begin playing in the fall. Now, the guys are going through the steps of filling out the proper paperwork and will soon meet with the director of the Columbus Civic Center to work out their schedule. The guys have already been contacted by Alabama, Louisiana State, Mississippi and Mississippi State for future games.

“We’re planning on having kind of an Iron Bowl on ice type thing with Bama at the end of our season,” Chenger said.

The team plans to hold tryouts during the first few weeks of fall semester. Any male student may try out (the American Collegiate Hockey Association is strictly male).

“We’re probably going to hold a skills week where we let people come back to being on the ice,” Chenger said. “After that we’ll have a week of tryouts and then make cuts. We are encouraging everyone to join rec. leagues when they go home for the summer to basically get back on the ice.”

The team can have 20 players and several goalies.

“There’s been some talk of a practice squad of five or six guys in case someone gets injured or can’t make a game,” Chenger said. “We’ll probably have 35 people rostered and 30 will play.”

This is actually the second ice hockey team Auburn has seen. There was a team in the ‘80s. It’s unclear why the team no longer exists, but former member Bob Benedetti said he thinks the new team will have a better shot at being successful. Back then the team played mostly out of Birmingham and Benedetti said that the fact that the team is playing in Columbus should help the sport’s popularity in Auburn.

“I think it will be more popular this time around for a few reasons,” Benedetti said. “One of them is the proximity of the facility; secondly, these fellas seem to have a little bit more of an all around look at it. They’re already talking about the fact that they have to coordinate jersey sales and goods. They’re already talking about generating income from goods potentially. They’re thinking about the business aspect. They’re also already getting the idea out there.”

Chenger said that he also plans to teach Auburn a little about the sport in the process.

“Beginning in the fall we’ll probably have some hockey 101 seminars so that people can learn more about hockey and realize that it’s not just WWF on ice,” he said. “We’ll kinda get some of the stigma out of the air about what hockey is about and what it’s like.”