As Brett Riley paced the streets of his girlfriend's Vermont neighborhood in early June, cell phone to ear, stretching the definition of what an unlimited minutes plan is supposed to look like, he was selling a dream. It was a dream of which he had no inkling just months prior, and one that only actually existed at the time in the abstract.
Riley was trying to convince junior players from around the world that their Division I college hockey aspirations were draped in the unique blue-and-gold color scheme of the Long Island University Sharks. The LIU athletic department had announced in late April that men's hockey would be added to its roster of sport offerings. And the bold plan was to begin play the following season, in 2020-21.
With no coach, no players and no schedule, the college hockey world snickered at the thought of building a program on that timeline even in the best of circumstances. But during a pandemic? Forget about it. When the program was announced, the state of New York was still in the throes of a seemingly dire battle with the rapidly spreading coronavirus. And just a month earlier, the college hockey season had shut down before completion.
But sure enough, the Sharks are set to debut this Saturday on the road against Army (4 p.m. ET).
With uncertainty about whether there would even be a 2020-21 season, how could a school think it had the wherewithal to build a program to compete in that time frame? And how did it ultimately pull it off?
Finding the right coach
The timeline, to understate it substantially, was aggressive. But athletic director Dr. William E. Martinov Jr. was undeterred. This was all part of the plan, and if not for COVID-19, it probably would have been announced sooner than the school was ultimately able to.
"For everyone else, it was a surprise, but LIU over the last few years has been adding sports to our university programs," Martinov said. "We've added about eight to 10 sports in the last four or five years. We also had women's hockey already, and so it made sense to bring in that brother program."
The LIU women's team, led by head coach Rob Morgan, set a pretty solid precedent too. In their first season of competition, the women went 14-18, including an 11-9 mark in the New England Women's Hockey Alliance. The Sharks then won the conference playoffs, holding off Saint Anselm in the final.
But despite the instant success of the women's program, skepticism about LIU's ability to build the 61st Division I men's college hockey program remained palpable.
"The rest of the public doesn't know that the six months leading up to [the announcement], we were having those conversations, and we did quite a bit of research and planning," Martinov said. "Having a coach that could get us there quickly was a key piece."
After a nationwide search, LIU hired the 29-year-old Riley, a former Division III player who had already built a Division III program from scratch as the first head coach at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
"It's been a whirlwind," Riley said. "Learning about the program and the opportunity to build in a great location was naturally appealing to me. I had done it at the D-III level and was just obsessed with building something from the ground up and cultivating a culture. I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. There has not been a minute off."
While Riley's coaching career -- which also included a stop in 2019-20 as an assistant coach at Division I Colgate University -- is still relatively young, he came to LIU with remarkable pedigree. He is a third-generation college hockey coach. His grandfather Jack is a member of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame after spending 36 years as the head coach of West Point's hockey team and leading the U.S. Olympic hockey team to the country's first gold medal in the sport in 1960. Brett's father, Rob, also was a longtime head coach at West Point, succeeding Jack and spending 19 years there. The Black Knights are still helmed by a Riley, as Brett's uncle Brian took over the program and is about to enter his 17th season as the bench boss.
Hired by LIU in May, Brett Riley didn't have a lot of time. With students due to resume classes in August, he had less than four months to build a staff, identify and recruit players, create a schedule and maybe find a place to live at some point.
Putting together a roster
The recruitment process started immediately, with Riley scouring the NCAA transfer portal and circling back to players he had identified for recruitment while he as an assistant at Colgate. Spending the summer at the home of his girlfriend's parents in Vermont, Riley often would walk outside to take calls from players, parents and advisors. It became so frequent, he wondered what the neighbors were thinking about the random guy pacing the streets.
Even before Riley was hired, the LIU athletic department had posted a questionnaire on its website for prospective players to express interest in the program. A lot did. Riley estimates the school had "thousands of inquiries" from kids who were intrigued by the thought of playing for the Sharks.
"[That list] was sifted through for guys with character that believed in me, believed in the build and saw coming to a new program as an opportunity versus maybe just their last chance to play Division I," Riley said.
The coach's recruiting pitch couldn't lean on a rich tradition or program track record. He couldn't even offer an on-campus visit or face-to-face meeting. He couldn't show pictures of NHL alumni hanging on the walls of the arena. What Riley could offer, however, was the opportunity for players to set a standard and be on the front end of something special.
"One of the challenges -- and one of the joys -- of building a new program is that there's no preestablished culture," Riley explained. "Everything you do sets a precedent."
He knew the kind of players he needed to have, focusing on character first. He noted that most of the players he recruited wore a letter on their jerseys as captains at the junior level. He also focused on balancing out the classes, making sure it wasn't simply an entire team of freshmen from both practical and competitive standpoints.
In the end, 26 players signed on to be LIU Sharks. Eleven of those players are transfers from other programs, while the other 15 are freshmen. The roster includes athletes from across the country and Canada, as well as one each from Sweden, Russia and Japan.
All three goaltenders on the roster have NCAA Division I experience, including graduate transfer Garrett Metcalf, who was a sixth-round draft choice of the Anaheim Ducks in 2015. He had spent the previous two seasons at Mercyhurst, where he played with Riley's younger cousins Brendan and Jack. Metcalf knew what the Riley family was all about, which made it an easier buy-in.
"I've never played for [Brett Riley] personally, but the way that he handles himself and carries himself, it's pretty obvious that the Riley family is a coaching legacy, and the apple usually doesn't fall from the tree," Metcalf said. "That was a legacy I wanted to be a part of."
Riley also managed to add a player with upstart program experience: Max Balinson, a junior defenseman who transferred from Arizona State, the most recent school to add a new men's Division I team before LIU came along. Balinson was injured almost all of last season and felt he needed a chance to restart his college career elsewhere.
"I talked to Coach Riley on a number of occasions, and each occasion the excitement kind of built within me because I had experienced a brand-new build [at Arizona State]. I've watched it happen and seen the keys to success, the positives and negatives, and the things that could be improved," Balinson said.
Riley sought out a robust freshman class to be part of the longer-term future of the program. He found players from far and wide who were more than excited to receive his call.
"It was a huge honor being one of the first and to have the ability to kind of carve our own path," said Jordan Di Cicco, a freshman from London, Ontario, who played his junior hockey for the Brooks Bandits, the same junior club that developed reigning NHL Rookie of the Year Cale Makar. "To be able to say that we started something here is pretty special, and I hope it's going to be around for a long time."
Many of the freshman at least had some interest from other schools, but COVID-19 created a lot of uncertainty about their futures. Madoka Suzuki, who moved to Canada from Japan to pursue a hockey career, had heard from other schools but was planning to head back to play for the Kemptville 73's of the Central Canada Hockey League in Ontario for his final year of junior hockey eligibility. That was until his phone rang in June.
"Coach Riley called and everything happened so quick," said Suzuki, who is studying psychology with hopes of becoming a sports psychologist. "It was pretty surprising -- and pretty exciting, as well. To know what LIU is trying to build from the ground up and having guys with a chip on their shoulder coming in, I know it's a very unique scenario. I just wanted to be a part of it."
Through a partnership with the New York Islanders, the Sharks will be playing out of the Northwell Health Ice Center. It serves as the Isles' practice facility and is roughly seven miles from the LIU Post campus in Brookville, New York.
Figuring out who to play against
Building a schedule might have been one of the bigger challenges the new program faced, given all of the uncertainty with COVID-19. Riley leaned on his father, now an amateur scout with the Buffalo Sabres, to work some of his old contacts in the college game and see who could find some room for the Sharks. According to Riley, the pandemic essentially wiped out almost all of the tentative schedule they had built, as most collegiate conferences were forced to stay regional and only play league schedules amid a shortened season.
LIU ultimately managed to secure a scheduling agreement with Atlantic Hockey, which is about as good a geographical match as the school could ask for. Though they will not be full-fledged members of Atlantic Hockey and not eligible for the conference playoffs, the Sharks will play as many as two games against each team, three against Army and four against Air Force. The Sharks also scheduled early-season matchups with Quinnipiac and Union of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, making for a 24-game inaugural slate.
Martinov said it's a credit to Riley, who has done just about everything to get the program off the ground, from being involved in the jersey-design process to ordering tape to helping retrofit an arcade at the arena into a temporary but comfortable locker room for the team.
"Brett is truly exceptional," Martinov said. "His energy and passion for this game, it just overflows. That's where the recruiting was key; he did a great job with that. He's very clear, very direct and consistent. His messaging to the student-athletes is exceptional. That's the sign of a great leader. I'm very excited that we were able to bring him on board. He's a difference-maker in my opinion."
What's next for the Sharks?
For the past several weeks, players have been able to practice while still navigating the stops and starts COVID-19 has placed on all athletic departments. Now that the group is together, Riley is finally able to actually coach the team, realizing a lifelong dream of being a Division I coach.
"I spent the whole summer building it from Vermont; then I got down here, and you're working on class scheduling, housing, visas, NCAA eligibility ..." Riley said. "So it didn't really hit me until about two weeks ago when we sat down as a staff and started to map out practices and structure. I said, 'Wow, you know, we're actually doing it now.'"
Despite the brief timeline Riley had to work with, the Sharks have a roster, a schedule, a place to play and uniforms to wear -- even though there was one minor hiccup on that front, requiring a last-minute fix to the design of the game jersey. You'd be hard-pressed to find a whole lot of people who believed it could all be done.
"If you think about everything that they were able to accomplish in such a short period of time, it's very impressive," said Metcalf, who will be playing his final season of college hockey in 2020-21. "The older guys that have been around college hockey are taking charge a little bit and showing the younger guys what it's like day in and day out, and the younger guys are following along and making a statement about who they are and what kind of players they're going to be. It's been a great experience."
For freshmen such as Di Cicco, enjoying his first taste of Division I hockey, the experience is living up to the hype he built up while playing junior hockey.
"We didn't really know what to expect coming here, but I mean it's everything I could have asked for in terms of the school, campus life and obviously the hockey," Di Cicco said. "It's been great so far."
And now it's finally time for the games to begin. In a poetic twist, Riley will be going head-to-head with the program synonymous with his family's name in his first game as a Division I head coach, as the Sharks will play their inaugural game at West Point on Saturday.
"It'll be pretty surreal," Riley said. "A lot of people didn't think this could happen, and it has. To achieve a lifelong dream of being a head coach, with a group of guys that I love and truly believe in, will really be surreal."
In fact, it's pretty surreal for anyone who knows how hard it is to expand college hockey. Only three new men's DI hockey programs have launched in the past 15 years, as Long Island University joins Penn State and Arizona State. Yet just six months after that initial announcement, the LIU Sharks are very real, and they're ready to play.