Marist College ice hockey began in 1960 with a student-run pick-up game on a frozen swimming pool. It developed into an organized club in the following years, was noted in student media in 1975 and formally joined an intercollegiate league in 1981.
Fast forward to 2026, and the team is still thriving and standing out among Marist’s 21 club sports teams because of the immense effort that goes into team operations.
“We’re almost getting to a point where club hockey is almost becoming its own division of hockey, because it has evolved so much,” said Marist assistant athletic director for club sports Stephen D’Alessandro.
Club sports operate differently than Marist’s Division I teams. With a student board, general manager, head coach and D’Allesandro, there are a lot of voices in the room for every major decision, allowing the team to get several different perspectives at all times. This combination makes sure that the decisions made by the club are always in the best interest of everyone involved.
The student board is different from team captains. Captains may be the best leaders or players on the ice, but the board is involved in the logistics. A player can be outstanding in the rink, but if they don’t know how to manage a budget, they are less made out for the major, off-the-ice decisions. The team recently made the change to separate the captains from the board — in the past, the captains had to learn how the team works from a logistics perspective. Now, the coach selects captains while the players elect a board.
Every season, the student board is made up of four players: a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. These four, usually upperclassmen, make sure that the voices of student athletes can be heard in all affairs, while making the student-athletes the top priority and helping organize several major events each year.
These events, like the veteran and alumni game, are the heart of Marist hockey. When the club has a big event in its home arena, its leaders do everything to make it special, often including alternate uniforms, decorations and special pre-game ceremonies.
None of these events are bigger than the yearly Pink the Rink game, a joint fundraiser with the school’s Tri Sigma sorority for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. It always draws a huge turnout, often getting the majority of the university’s Greek life population to attend. The team needs to communicate with Greek life to make the event happen, as it takes the place of one of the six unity events for Greek life and they have to avoid scheduling conflicts.
The club can afford these events — and the more typical expenses associated with operating an athletics team — in part because it has the largest budget of any club team at Marist. According to the team’s general manager, Randy Hurlbert, renting the ice for home games along with two 90 minute practices a week costs the team over $74,000 each season. Spending that much money, and having enough left over to spend on other things like four different uniforms, is a luxury that other club teams simply don’t have.
Last season’s budget even had enough money left over to invest over $16,000 in equipment for their broadcast crew, which is student run and offers internship credit with the oversight of Hurlbert and professional lecturer of communication/sports broadcasting Chris Riviezzo. This investment in equipment gained traction after a proposal from club broadcast director and senior Tommy Berry.
“This proposal is ultimately an investment in student learning,” Berry wrote in his proposal. “Now that Marist club hockey broadcasting is a recognized internship, the proposed equipment would give communication students the opportunity to gain meaningful, hands-on experience in a real-world live production environment.”
On top of the base budget the team has, the money to make investments like these comes from the tremendous amount of money donated by alumni every year. The team consistently reaches out and keeps alumni in the loop, not just looking to get donations on the annual day of giving, but all throughout the year. When successful fundraising is paired with the largest player dues out of any of the 21 club sports teams at Marist, great things can happen. A high budget, however, means nothing without smart spending strategies.
This is where Hurlbert comes into play. He organizes the schedule, coordinates ice times with the McCann Ice Arena, arranges events, supervises the broadcast for every home game and takes charge of many of the other off-the-ice logistics.
Hurlbert has had all of these responsibilities since he joined Marist as a head coach for the 2021 season. After three years, he transitioned to the general manager role, allowing him to focus primarily on the logistics around the team.
Since then, the hockey team’s footprint has grown a tremendous amount. He built a broadcasting crew to create the best experience possible for fans that can’t show up to the games in person. These broadcasts have consistently gotten hundreds of views due to the equipment and coordination on his end. Under Hurlbert’s watch, the social media pages have also grown exponentially, especially on Instagram. The team account is now the most followed out of any sports team — club or Division I — at Marist.
The biggest difference that Hurlbert has made since joining the team has been the connection with the rink. A team needing to play all their home games off campus can be very difficult, but Hurlbert has made the venue as close to a true home rink as it can be considering the circumstances. He has gotten decorations added to walls, gotten the rink to install lockers for the team, arranged for the team to freely store equipment in one of the rink’s main equipment rooms and has even gotten the arena to show promotional material on the jumbotron outside.
“During my time, after COVID, when I became the head coach to present day, our experience has been wonderful with the rink,” said Hurlbert. This wasn’t always the case, but Hurlbert has made improving their relationship with the home venue a top priority and the team has reaped the benefits.
There are, of course, still unavoidable disadvantages. The arena being off-campus means less accessibility for players, but also fans. While some nights, like Pink the Rink, are packed with students, others have far less people in the stands. Hurlbert is a big believer that more consistent attendance makes a difference on the ice just as much as it does off of it.
“I know just from experience, I know as a coach, when you have a packed house your players are gonna play with more energy with the fanbase there,” he said.
The team’s president from last season, senior goalie Anthony Russo, agrees in a more general sense.
“A lot of the behind the scenes stuff leads into what you see on the ice,” Russo said. “It’s a culture and a family. If a kid can feel comfortable and they know that they’re in the right spot where they can get better and learn and feel like there is room for them to get better and grow, that’s huge.”
At the end of the day, the goal is to win and get back to the top of the standings like they were when they won the SECHL in 2013. From the top down, all of the team’s leaders understand the team can’t win without getting the outside operations down. Recruiting, which typically does not play as much of a role in club sports, has become a necessity for the team to keep competing.
“We’ll do some more passive recruiting, but even club hockey is getting so much more amplified with our active recruiting needs,” D’Allesandro said. “We’re sending our coach and we’re sending [the general manager] to New Jersey and we’re talking about sending him to Nashville and Vegas, because we have to recruit to stay competitive with other teams even at the club level.”
Thanks to a high budget and planning from its staff, the team is able to put together a strong off-the-ice operation for fans and athletes themselves. Whether it’s successfully fundraising thousands of dollars for Breast Cancer Research, celebrating the university’s alumni, or just playing a game against their historic rivals in the “Route 87 Cup,” the Red Fox hockey team has to spend every dollar wisely to create the best playing environment possible.
Edited by Max Rosen and Mike Schiavone
Photo by Kira Crutcher
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