The situation is straightforward: Penn State women’s hockey will face Mercyhurst on Saturday afternoon in the CHA Tournament Championship with a trip the NCAA Tournament on the line. For the Nittany Lions a win would send the program to the postseason for the first time in its history, a moment of no small consequence for head coach Jeff Kampersal and Penn State.
“This year I’ve tried to stay out of the way with our team and we’re very fortunate to have a group that really enjoys one another – they set the standards back in the spring,” Kampersal said on Thursday. “And they’ve followed those standards. They’ve kept people to them. As coaches, we try to guide them hockey wise but try to stay out of the way as well. Even on a week like this, it just it’s a regular week. We try to get one or two things done that were focusing on for the weekend. [It’s a] monumental game for the program but we’re not really thinking like that. We’re just sort of thinking it like it’s another week for us.”
Of course it’s one thing for Kampersal to say that and another thing for the Nittany Lions to totally ignore the moment in front of them. Penn State women’s hockey has long felt like a program not quite hitting its potential given the facilities it has to work with, a fact the result in no small part the outcome of ineffective coaching and scandal. Under Kampersal’s watchful eye Penn State’s success has culminated in his sixth year with a 26-8-2 record this season, the Nittany Lions entering Saturday’s contest on a 10-game winning streak.
Nearing 30 wins, it’s hard to imagine a team like Penn State not making the tournament even if it were to lose on Saturday, nevertheless the relative weakness of the CHA has often rendered Penn State’s record less meaningful than its counterparts in other conferences, especially in a tournament just 11 teams deep. In 2020-21, Penn State went 16-3-2 and was left out of the postseason partially as a result of its CHA schedule. The perception of any conference is a challenge for any team in any sport, but as Penn State manages to navigate an entire season about as deftly as one can reasonably expect, it begs the question if the CHA is the longterm home for Penn State women’s hockey.
Winning on Saturday is a step in the right direction, but perhaps also a gradual step towards change, both with how Penn State supports women’s hockey and the landscape of the sport at-large.
“I would like the landscape to change,” Kampersal said. “But that requires like a lot of a lot of things. It’d be nice to have two other Big Ten programs start. But beyond that, like to answer your original question, [New Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft] has come in and has a lot of energy with him. You can tell that he wants to win. And he wants to support the student athletes and give them the best experience but also the best sort of prep items to prepare them to win. We’ve seen improvements, like on our end and just in terms of like women’s hockey, which have helped our athletes along their their process this year.”
“Travel and things like that will help us like if the school makes a decision to support travel a little bit better, which I think they will that’ll help us in the future … We have a new commissioner in the CHA which will add some energy to our league as an overall perspective. The whole landscape – I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s up in the air but there’s a lot of things that could happen from our point of view – we have to take care of our own business but winning on Saturday is huge for many reasons, but it also gives us leverage to talk about the future.”
But one thing at a time, the Nittany Lions have to win Saturday. The puck drops at 2 p.m. at Pegula Ice Arena.
