The University of Arizona Wildcats celebrate their 2024 NCRHA Division II National Championship win after defeating Michigan State University 7-2. This season, they return to Division I for the first time since their winless 2011-12 season. (Photo courtesy of BC Photo)
PHOENIX – In just its second year as a program, Grand Canyon University’s roller hockey team won the National Collegiate Roller Hockey Association Division I National Championship this past season with a 2-1 win over Lindenwood University in triple overtime.
Even though three Arizona schools compete at the Division I level in collegiate roller hockey, the teams share one rink, after two other facilities closed in the past two years. In addition to the lack of facilities, there are challenges to restore the sport’s success to its height before COVID-19, but also opportunities to expand the reach and online social media presence.
“I played two seasons of collegiate roller hockey at Lindenwood University,” said Aydin Schwetz, the director of operations for the program at GCU. “I was incredibly underwhelmed and disappointed in the program and how it was run despite winning an AA Division National Championship. So I left and started the GCU Division I program.”
GCU’s success and growth
The Lopes, which began their first season playing at the Division I level in the NCRHA, dropped the puck for the first time in 2022. Since its inception, Schwetz has built the Lopes on two key pillars.
“The first pillar is creating as much opportunity to play roller hockey as humanly possible and the other pillar is ‘Give a S—’,” Schwetz said. “Under the umbrella of the latter, that shows all of the extra things that we do to not only provide opportunity to ourselves but provide opportunity for others and grow the game.
“For example, last year we went down to Yuma. There’s an outdoor rink out there and we played a bowl game. They do have youth programs down there, but I’d say 90 percent of the people in Yuma had never seen high-level roller before.”
One aspect of the GCU program that sets itself apart from many of its collegiate roller hockey counterparts is its online presence. Schwetz and the Lopes are firm believers in creating a social media presence that will increase the awareness of the game and their brand to top-level recruits.
“As far as an individual team goes, we really pioneered the concept of putting a lot of time and effort into a roller hockey team’s social media presence,” Schwetz said. “Because of that, we’ve impacted a lot of other programs and a lot of other leagues’ decisions into also creating social media and really caring about how they look online.”
This strategy has worked for GCU on the recruiting trail. The current Lopes roster is composed of eight transfers and players from all over the world, and this global reach that GCU is experiencing is not a one-year plan. The Lopes expect to continue to bring in top international players next year and beyond.
“We’ve gone from not existing two years ago to now having 30 kids who would’ve never normally lived in Arizona playing in our program, playing in men’s leagues, and promoting the sport both on-campus and online,” Schwetz said. “Our players are from all over. Canada, all across the United States, Great Britain and Colombia.
“Next year we have people from Slovakia, Poland, Mexico, China and Taiwan – all over the world coming to play for our program that would never live in Phoenix otherwise.”
Arizona’s rink challenges
The Grand Canyon University Lopes display their championship banner after defeating Lindenwood University 2-1 in triple overtime to capture the 2024 NCRHA Division I National Championship. (Photo courtesy of BC Photo)
For the other two Division I programs in the state, the main priority is finding new homes. GCU plays its home games at Peoria Sportsplex, the Valley’s lone remaining roller hockey-specific rink. With the closing of Barney Sports Complex in Queen Creek and Tucson Indoor Sports Complex, the former home rinks of Arizona State and Arizona respectively, the three Division I programs are currently all sharing time in Peoria.
“It’s new. This is the first season that the college landscape has only had one rink in Arizona,” said Kevin Smith, co-head coach of University of Arizona roller hockey. “We fortunately have an outdoor rink five minutes from campus that we can practice at, but we can’t have league-sanctioned games there.”
Smith also mentions that the lack of rinks in the area isn’t reflective of a low participation numbers. In the case of Barney Sports Complex, the rink was purchased by the city of Queen Creek to be used as a future public safety building for the city. For Tucson Indoor Sports Center, the reason for closing was out of the University of Arizona’s control.
“Our rink closed because there’s a new casino opening up and our rink was on tribal land,” Smith said. “The tribe opening the casino is moving their tribal offices basically to where our rink was, so we were essentially kicked out. But from a numbers standpoint, the numbers are there to have more facilities that could be successful.”
As for ASU, there are discussions among members of the program to build an outdoor rink on campus, similar to the setup of GCU.
“Right now, the only rink is in Peoria, we share the same facility as GCU,” said Lexi Tillemans, a player and club president for Arizona State roller hockey. “I’m also in the process of trying to get a rink on campus but we’ll see how that goes. It’s not as common to play roller hockey as it is to play ice hockey in Arizona so it’s harder to keep facilities like that open.”
Impact of COVID-19 on NCRHA
One of the other struggles surrounding the Sun Devils and Wildcats, as well as many programs across the country, is the negative effect that COVID-19 had on the number of teams in the NCRHA at the Division I level. The NCRHA is broken up into four divisions. Division I, Division II, Division III, and AA Division, which is reserved for a school’s secondary teams.
However, despite a lack of Division I programs, steady growth is clear across all four divisions in the past few years.
“In 2016, there were around 30 Division I programs. And now in 2024, we have five and three of those are in Arizona,” Schwetz said. “The number of teams through all divisions has grown over the past few years, we’re around 77 I think … The league used to be top heavy, where most of the teams were in D1 and just a few were in D2 and D3. Now 60% of the league is in Division III, and the rest are sprinkled throughout the other divisions.
“That’s the unfortunate reality we’ve seen recently, but we’re hoping to change that. The positive is that it has slowly grown over the last few years. It’s slowly getting back to where the league once was in 2016 and 2017 because it was COVID that really killed it, but we’re slowly recovering since then.”
Future outlook for roller hockey in Arizona
While there is still a way to go to restore the Division I level back to the 29-team benchmark it had for the 2016-17 season, the NCRHA as a whole has been seeing the number of teams grow slowly back to where it was during its height before the COVID-19 pandemic.
All three Arizona teams are looking to make noise in the NCRHA this season in Division I, a place that Arizona has not been since its first season of operation back in 2011-12.
“That first year we jumped the gun maybe a little too early and entered as a Division One team. We were essentially playing in the SEC of roller hockey. Our division was five teams and the other four teams made the Elite Eight at nationals that year. We went 0 and 24 that year, we didn’t win a single game,” Smith said. “After that first year, we dropped down to Division Two and we’ve been competitive ever since.”
All these events lead up to the NCRHA National Championship tournament next April in Fort Myers, Florida, where the Lopes will look to make it back-to-back titles, while the Wildcats and Sun Devils look to raise the championship trophy for the first time in their Division I history.