A special dynamic intertwines the Air Force and Minnesota hockey teams – like red, white and blue – making Saturday’s first-round NCAA Tournament game an all-American affair.
Both rosters are 100 percent American. No Canadians. No Europeans. That wouldn’t be unusual if you were putting together a football or basketball team, but many of the NCAA’s best hockey teams are built around foreign players.
“Being all-American is something that goes unnoticed around here, because it’s a given at this school,” Falcons junior Josh Print said. “We take pride in our school, and to represent our country all the way in the NCAA Tournament is certainly a bonus.”
The difference between Air Force and Minnesota is that the Golden Gophers aren’t restricted from signing foreign players, and have done so recently. They get the pick of the litter within their hockey-rich state, which has the country’s best youth hockey and produces professional-bound hockey players as Texas does football players.
Air Force, as well as rival Army, can sign only U.S. citizens, and every player must be willing to sign a five-year, postgraduate commitment to serve in the military, leaving little or no chance to play professionally.
“Because we’re a military academy, our recruiting pool is smaller than everyone else’s, but when you take the Canadian athletes out of the mix, we can’t even talk to a half or two-thirds of the available pool,” Air Force coach Frank Serratore said. “We compete with all the other schools for the Americans, and can’t compete with them for the Canadians.
“To be honest, when we see teams signing Canadians, we love it. We’re like, ‘Take them all.’ That leaves more Americans for us.”
American breakdown
Air Force’s 28 players come from 11 states, including Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia. Minnesota’s 24-man roster is made up from two states: 23 from Minnesota and one from Colorado (senior goalie Kellen Briggs).
“It is pretty rare, seeing another all-American team besides Army these days,” Air Force senior Theo Zacour said. “A lot of our guys are from Minnesota, so we know what kind of talent is there. Being all-American is not something we think about too much. Unlike them, we’re used to it, because we’ve overachieved all our lives.”
Air Force typically signs American players nobody else wants. The 165-pound Zacour, 24, said he wanted to go to “any Division I school that would take me.”
Born in Hawaii, Zacour settled on Air Force partly because his father was a 1978 academy graduate and his family lived in Colorado Springs before moving to Oslo, Norway. Zacour didn’t mind signing the five-year military commitment, because he was familiar with the program and he wasn’t deemed good enough to play in the pros.
“The big schools get the big-time American players, and we get the decent players that are here to work hard,” Zacour said. “We’re lucky to have a gem like Eric Ehn.”
Ehn is the NCAA’s second-leading scorer with 64 points and the Falcons’ first Hobey Baker Award finalist for national player of the year.
“We’re proud to be American or we wouldn’t be at this school, but you shouldn’t discount the other teams that have the ability to recruit Canadians,” said Ehn, a late-bloomer from Dexter, Mich. “Maybe it should just be a little asterisk by our name. But we don’t want special treatment. We’re proud of American youth hockey all over the country.”
The military life
This weekend, the Falcons are playing hockey, becoming the first service academy to qualify for the national tournament. This summer, some of them might be at war.
Senior defenseman Billy Devoney already has tasted that. He was deployed to Qatar in the Middle East last summer.
“I was more than a stone throw away from (Iraq) but it was an interesting deal,” Devoney said. “I’m not too worried about the Gophers in that sense.”
The only difference Devoney sees between his team and Minnesota are the playoff beards. The Gophers have them and the Falcons are forbidden because of military appearance standards.
He’s not complaining.
“It’s pretty cool to have a place where only Americans can go,” Devoney said. “All the other schools can draw from Canada and Europe, and sometimes that takes away spots from kids you grew up playing with.”
Recruiting an Air Force hockey player is difficult, particularly when two-thirds of the coaching staff did not experience the cadet life.
Lt. Andy Berg, who played for Serratore from 2000-03, makes first contact with recruits. If prospects seem capable of dealing with military life, assistant coach Mike Corbett, who played for Serratore at DU in the early 1990s, is called in to talk hockey.
Serratore then goes in to seal the deal.
“There are those kinds of players that are the right fit for our program, but we have to work hard to find them,” Serratore said. “They have to be the right kind of citizens, they have to be good academically, they have to be good hockey players, they have to be healthy with no problems like asthma, and maybe the biggest thing is, they have to be willing to accept a five-year (postgraduate) commitment.
“Other than that, my job is a breeze.”
Staff writer Mike Chambers can be reached at 303-954-1357 or mchambers@denverpost.com.
