Strange as it sounds for someone who has been associated with Omaha hockey for nearly three decades, Mike Kemp briefly but purposefully stayed away from the Baxter Arena ice after it was put in for the new season.
The Mavericks’ former coach of 12 years and later an executive associate athletic director at UNO, Kemp retired in May. However, he has stayed on part-time as a special advisor for hockey and facility administration to Adrian Dowell, the university’s AD since 2021.
Among Kemp’s current duties are attendance at meetings with NCHC officials and liaising with organizers like those at the Ice Breaker Tournament this weekend in Las Vegas, where UNO will face Massachusetts on Friday and either Minnesota or Air Force on Saturday.
In April, it was announced that the Baxter Arena hockey playing surface would be named Kemp Ice. A dedication ceremony for that was held Saturday, ahead of the Mavericks’ exhibition game against Wisconsin.
“I’d been in town for a few days once they put the ice in, and I was in the arena but would not go out into the bowl of the arena to look at it,” Kemp said of the wording that includes his surname around the center circle, as well as his signature located on the ice near one of the blue lines.
“I wanted to wait until the day we were going to have a public scrimmage (on Sept. 22), and I took the elevator to the press box and looked down from there, and it put chills down your spine. You look at it and go, ‘Wow, this is really happening. This is really out there.’”
Around 40 of Kemp’s guests were at Saturday’s game and dedication ceremony. Among those in attendance were Kemp’s wife and two daughters as well as extended family, plus the widow of former Wisconsin coach Jeff Sauer, under whom Kemp served as an assistant before becoming Omaha’s first head coach. Also on hand was former Denver, Miami and Minnesota AD Joel Maturi, who was a sports administrator for hockey at Wisconsin when Kemp worked there.
“Everybody was at the same hotel, and we had a sneak peek for family and friends on Friday night at the arena, where my wife and daughters set up a big display in the club room,” Kemp said. “People could go out on the ice and take pictures, and we got the grandkids out and I skated there with them on Friday night. We did a lot of things to make it a whole weekend.
“It was incredibly humbling. It’s not something that happens to many people, and to have your name on the building like that, a part of the building that will always be there, it’s something that is extra special.”
Kemp is making the most of his extra free time these days. He visited his family’s lake house in northern Wisconsin this summer and got several rounds of golf in this week alone in Omaha before he and the Mavericks left for Nevada on Wednesday afternoon.
“I’ve been back in town since the middle of September, and I’ve been at the arena almost every day, but it’s show up, have a cup of coffee, talk with people, see what’s going on, maybe make a suggestion here and there, get in the car and go home,” he said. “It’s one of those things where, 48 years of working in college athletics, it’s kind of hard to quit cold turkey.
“And it was appropriate that Wisconsin was our exhibition opponent. (Current UNO coach) Mike Gabinet was working on getting an exhibition game, and certainly worked with (Wisconsin coach) Mike Hastings to make this happen. Mike (Hastings) had been in Omaha virtually the whole time I was coaching, he was coaching the (USHL’s Omaha) Lancers while I was coaching the Mavs, and he spent a couple years on our staff. It was so nice that he would do that for us and do that for me.”
Going forward, Kemp will continue to not take his longevity and legacy for granted.
“Guys in coaching don’t necessarily stay someplace this long, and I was just blessed with being able to be fairly consistent in coaching,” he said. “I had five years at Gustavus (Adolphus), one year at Illinois-Chicago, 14 at Wisconsin. We didn’t have to move around a lot, and didn’t have to uproot our family.
“Then, to have the opportunity here that I had when I stopped coaching to go into administration and still impact our athletic department as basically the AD for facilities and being able to have an impact on the conversion of our (former) football stadium into one of the best soccer pitches in the country, the development of our academic center in our fieldhouse and then the opportunity to be designing on Baxter Arena, how many times do you get to have that kind of impact on so many different levels?
“I’ve been very fortunate that way. We came here in 1996, not expecting that Omaha would be home for the rest of our lives, and lo and behold, it’s going to be.”
