Robert Morris hockey coach Derek Schooley gets ready for playoff push
The Robert Morris men’s hockey team (11-18-5) is looking to make the Atlantic Hockey championship weekend for the seventh straight year.
If they do it, it won’t come easy.
The playoffs start this weekend. And the Colonials were unable to secure a bye in the first round. So they’ll have to advance through a best-of-three series against Holy Cross starting Friday at the RMU Island Sports Center on Neville Island.
If they survive that, they’ll likely have to visit second-place Sacred Heart on the road next week.
The Colonials finished seventh in the Atlantic with 41 points. The Crusaders are tenth with 32. The two teams split a two-game set in Worcester, Mass. last month, with Holy Cross winning the opener (Feb. 14) by a final score of 5-3. RMU bounced back to win the Saturday game 4-2.
The Colonials have knocked Holy Cross out of the playoffs three years in a row. Now they battle in a fourth straight postseason.
I was on ESPN Pittsburgh Tuesday night with Colonials head coach Derek Schooley during his coach’s show. I posted part of our conversation for the “Breakfast With Benz” podcast Wednesday. We talked about yet another series against this familiar postseason foe and how the matchup will look this time around.
It hasn’t been an easy season for the Colonials. They dealt with numerous injuries to key players. But they hope to coalesce in March as they so often have done in the past. Schooley tells us if that is possible this season, too.
RMU has gotten to championship weekend despite having to play in the first-round series in the past. They did so the previous two seasons and in 2014. The Colonials went all the way to the NCAA tournament that year after winning the conference title.
We also get into the nuances of preparing for the potential of three games in three nights, upperclassmen stepping up in the postseason, and the importance of momentum within games.
Listen: Tim Benz speaks with RMU men’s hockey coach Derek Schooley about the team’s postseason push
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.