Tim Benz: Robert Morris hockey coaches happy to have the coaching 'stomach acid' back

Starting this week, Robert Morris hockey coaches Derek Schooley and Logan Bittle are taking on a significant job change.

They are actually coaching again.

Instructing players. A full team. On the ice. Getting ready for a real season.

For the first time in two years.

“It’s just a super exciting time for our programs, for the university and for these athletes,” Bittle said Monday. “As someone who has been here a long time, I find myself rejuvenated and refreshed and really looking forward to carving a new path.”

Both the men’s and women’s hockey programs were eliminated from the Robert Morris athletic department without warning in May 2021. After fundraising efforts, fan and alumni pressure, and a prospect of legal action, both Colonials teams were reinstated by December of that year.

However, they weren’t slated for a return until October of this season. Monday marked the first day on the ice for Schooley’s newly reconstructed men’s roster. Bittle’s rebooted women’s team practices for the first time as a full unit on Tuesday.

“I woke up like a kid at Christmas,” Schooley said on Monday’s “Breakfast With Benz” podcast. “I woke up at about four in the morning (Monday). Our practice was at 8 a.m. I was just really excited to get going. These are things that, as a coach, you wake up in the middle of the night, you think, ‘We’ve got to do this, and we’ve got to do that.’ We have missed that these last two years.”

For Schooley and Bittle, the fundraising element of keeping the programs alive will never stop. Recruiting may be more important than ever. But they both welcome the opportunity to prioritize the most fundamental part of their job description again — coaching the players on this ice.

“I’ve been a fundraiser. I’ve been an event planner. I’ve been everything but a hockey coach,” Schooley continued. “I had no pressure and no stomach acid on the weekends. It might have been the best job in college hockey. I went undefeated for the last two years. But it was also the hardest job in college hockey — making sure we got our programs back. So it was good to have some worry waking up (Monday) morning about how practices were going to go.”

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Schooley is the only coach the RMU men’s hockey program has ever had, taking over what was a brand new team for the 2004-05 season. Bittle was a player on that team. He is about to start his first season as head coach of the women’s team after having been an assistant on Paul Colontino’s CHA conference-winning staff prior to the team’s being dropped. Colontinio took a job with Bishop Kearney Select outside of Rochester, N.Y.

For Schooley and Bittle, keeping the Colonials alive on the ice was as much a personal endeavor as it was a professional one. Now, the hope is to quickly return both clubs to the level of success they were enjoying prior to the shutdown. The women ended 2021 in the NCAA Tournament. The men finished first in the Atlantic Hockey West Division regular season.

“When you have a team established, maybe you’re returning four or five players, there’s some roles that are already defined. I think the exciting piece for them is that they’re going to have an opportunity to make an impact right off the bat and kind of pave their own path,” Bittle said.

Last year, a small group of holdovers from the previous rosters of both the men’s and women’s players worked out together, holding joint practices as one team. But now Schooley and Bittle have their full complement of student-athletes and are working toward figuring out a depth chart before their 2023-24 debuts.

“It’s been really easy because there’s been no top line. There’s been no bottom line,” Schooley said. “But once those lines start going up on the board, and people start worrying about their position — if they’re going to be onthe powerplay — that’s where it gets hard again. You’ve got to make sure that you keep the culture and keep the players strong, and you communicate well with them to lead them in the right direction.”

The women take the ice first — Sept. 29 on the road against Union. Their first home game is Oct. 7 against St. Anselm at 2 p.m. before the men play Game No. 1 against Bowling Green at 7 p.m.

Listen: Tim Benz interviews Derek Schooley about the return to practices for Robert Morris hockey