After all the turmoil that has surrounded the Bowling Green hockey program this season, it was hard to know where to begin when interviewing head coach Ty Eigner earlier this week.
Luckily, it was easy: Eigner opened up right away.
“First and foremost, the situation we had with our team in our program early in the year, it’s something that you don’t want to be associated with,” he said, referring to an alleged hazing incident that resulted in Eigner and multiple players being suspended while both the Bowling Green Police Department and the BGSU administration investigated. “We’re all grateful that the process worked out the way it worked out, and we’ve got all our players back and we’re able to get back and start moving forward.”
The whole story is complicated, but to be somewhat brief, it goes something like this, according to the police report: Former BGSU player Austen Swankler accused some teammates of hazing during an optional, off-campus “rookie day.” The players interviewed by authorities denied that the allegations happened as Swankler described, and in turn accused Swankler of refusing to accept accountability after he was caught stealing from the team, which was causing a rift in the locker room.
On Nov. 14, the BGPD released its investigation report and found that no hazing charges were warranted. In the end, there were no legal consequences for anybody, but Swankler has since transferred to Michigan Tech. The Bowling Green players who were suspended have been reinstated, along with Eigner, who returned to the bench in late October after missing the team’s first four games.
Without going into too many details, Eigner said there are lessons to be learned for everybody.
“Our goal in terms of that is to be better and do a better job in those kinds of situations and learn from it. And we will,” he said. “As far as our team goes, we believe our group has a chance to be a good team when it’s all said and done and hopefully we’ll continue to move forward and improve as the year goes on and be that kind of team when it’s all said and done.”
The Falcons, currently 4-10, understandably started the season poorly. After beating Robert Morris in their season opener, they lost six straight games, including sweeps at the hands of Augustana and WMU. They were doing so without a full complement of players–in one game against WMU, a combination of suspensions and injuries meant they had to dress an injured player
“There was a stretch where we were playing games with literally every single available player,” Eigner said. “And then we had the Western Michigan series. We had six guys that were unavailable, and we were dressing a player who physically couldn’t play due to an upper body injury, but we just dressed in case we had to serve a penalty and he could skate across the ice to the penalty box. That’s not ideal, but the guys handled it great.”
Eigner credits assistant coaches Curtis Carr, Stavros Paskaris and Dylan Schoen with making sure the team didn’t get their heads too far below water during the difficult early season.
“There’s nothing in the coaching manual or any coaching history that you have to deal with,” he said. “But it’s on us, and we own it. And our guys have handled it great. Once we got all our players back, our mindset was there’s nothing we can do about what has happened on the ice prior, and we can’t go backwards. We can’t press reset. We can’t rewind. But we can learn from it.”
Eigner said it’s been helpful for the team to look at it this way: Forget about the first 10 games of the season and focus on the rest.
“So that would mean we have 24 games left in the regular season. We took those 24 games where we just said listen, fellas, we’re going to break these 24 games up into three, eight-game segments and we’re going to take them just like that,” he said.
That seems to have paid off. In BG’s past four games, they are 2-2 against Lake Superior State and Northern Michigan and have taken seven of the available 12 points.
One benefit of having so many players missing is that it has forced some younger players to step in and gain experience, which can only help BG in the long run. Take, for instance, freshmen Brody Waters, Gustav Stjernberg and Cole Moore. All three have been getting a ton of minutes.
Waters, a forward, has 11 points and scored three goals in the team’s past four games. Stjernberg, a defenseman, has seen major power play minutes and leads all BG blueliners with four goals and three assists. Moore has seen a lot of time in net after starter Christian Stoeever has been battling injury, he has a 3.14 goals-against average and a .900 save percentage.
“Because of the situation we were in earlier a lot of guys, whether they were freshmen or maybe older guys who have been around a little bit that hadn’t played a bunch, have been put in a situation where they where they played, and that’s pretty good for them,” Eigner said. “Hopefully down the road all this experience that some of these guys are gaining pays off. You look at Cole Moore in the net. Cole’s played well for us as a freshman and we weren’t exactly sure how many games you would play, because we had Christian Stover coming back.
“So that’s just an example of an opportunity presenting itself, and you take advantage of the opportunity, and you do the best you can with it.
“We’ve had a lot of guys who have done that and so ideally, everybody gains that experience and gets some confidence and gets more comfortable. And now when we get our 27 healthy bodies, there’s competition for playing time and then the practices get better and and you see then that translates into a better on ice product.”
The Falcons still have some significant injuries and won’t be 100% healthy until likely after Christmas. Returning all-rookie defenseman Dalton Norris is dealing with a knee injury and should be back in December, while Stoever’s wrist injury might also keep him sidelined for another few weeks still.
The Falcons have three more CCHA series to close out the first half of the season. This weekend, they travel to Michigan Tech, then return home to Ohio to host Ferris State before ending 2023 at Bemidji State.
“This has been one of the positive things about this group. They genuinely enjoy coming to the rink and spending time around each other, which as a coach really energizes you and makes you want to come to the rink and do your job to the best of your ability,” Eigner said. “And so I think we’ve got two road series, at Tech and then at Bemidji in a couple of weeks, and then we’re home next weekend. So our guys are focused, just like in school, and we’re getting toward the end of the semester.
“The focus is to finish this first semester in the classroom and on the ice. We’re going to spring through the finish line, and we don’t want to, we don’t want to limp through it.”
