Happy Hockey Friday! I’m Eli Fastiff from The Ice Garden, where I cover NCAA hockey. It’s an exciting time in the women’s hockey world, with PWHL teams in Seattle and Vancouver receiving team names yesterday, and Canada and the United States set to face off in the Rivalry Series. Plus, it’s the middle of the college hockey season!
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Earlier this week, I got a chance to chat with Union College’s head coach, Tony Maci. Maci is in the midst of his second year at the helm of the Garnet Chargers, after spending stints behind the bench as an assistant coach at Clarkson and Princeton. A four-year varsity hockey player at St. Lawrence, the Michigan native has now spent over a dozen years playing and coaching in Union’s conference: ECAC Hockey.
In Maci’s first season in Schenectady, he helped lead the Garnet Chargers to a program record in wins and an ECAC quarterfinals appearance. Now, Union is not only hoping to build upon the momentum from the 2024-2025 campaign, but is also playing in a brand new $50 million arena.
Here is what Maci had to say about building a winning program at Union, what the new arena means, and what makes ECAC Hockey special. If you’re in the New York capital region area, Union takes on its rival Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this weekend in their annual matchup.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Eli Fastiff: Starting off, what drew you to the job at Union?
Tony Maci: Well, I’d been at Clarkson for about eight years, and New York’s kinda been my home for a while. My wife, she’s a state troopers investigator with the state police, so we’re kind of locked into being in New York. When the job became available, it kind of worked out in our favor since the headquarters of the state police is also near here in Albany.
There had been a lot of buzz around the school with the new rink coming, scholarships, and, for myself, also having worked with the men’s coach, Josh Hauge, knowing his family and his two boys, he kind of gave me the rundown on how things were changing, so to say, here at Union. It was a good group of kids as well, a good crop of good people and players. Seemed like a good fit and a pretty easy move from Potsdam to here.
EF: What did you learn in your first season as coach?
TM: One of the big things is patience. You come from a program that’s consistently in the NCAA tournament, consistently pushing for national and ECAC championships, to a team that is starting to build. Really just settling in and sticking to what our game plan is and our process of what we are trying to do here.
As coaches, you always want to get to things quicker, but you also have to be understanding of where you are. Being able to reground yourself every week and say, ‘Okay, we did well this or maybe we didn’t do well, we have to just stick with it and keep trying to push the game forward every week.’
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EF: That change in program history is a perfect segway into my next question. Union is not known for being an ECAC Hockey powerhouse on the women’s side, but last year, you came in and set the program wins record in year one. What goes into trying to build a culture and a program, especially in such a challenging conference?
TM: I think the big piece of what we had last year was a belief that the team could compete against anybody. Obviously, when you get a win early against what ended up being a Frozen Four team (Union beat Cornell on the road for the first time in program history early in its 2024-2025 conference season), that always helps the players really believe in it themselves.
At the end of the day, for us, it was a good step. We had the alumni involved a lot, we had a lot of support from the school, and when the kids are doing well on the ice and then also performing well off the ice in the classroom, that goes a long way too. Not only did we have a record for the amount of wins and all that, but we also had a record for the amount of players on the ECAC All-Academic Team.
EF: What is it like to be the coach of the first team to play in the new rink?
TM: It’s great. You get to put all the significant things that you want in there. You want to put your touch on everything. So, we’ve been able to put up graphics on the wall and really give the space some life. And that is part of what you get to do in the first year, is to be able to look and say, ‘Here is what we want in all these spaces,’ and design it yourself, which was kind of a unique and cool thing to happen. It was definitely something that drew me to the job in the first place.
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EF: I’m sure you have had to answer this question a lot, but what does this new arena mean to the program?
TM: It puts you in a conversation you haven’t been in in probably forever. We always loved Messa Rink because of the iconicness of it. There’s a lot of iconic buildings in our league, Hobey Baker, Yale’s The Whale, and Lynah’s been around for quite a while. To me, it’s always bittersweet because you’re going into a building that is state-of-the-art from a building that our lounge was technically shared with the lighting and visual crew. Our kitchen, you couldn’t actually eat anything in there, maybe a microwave and a few blenders. But we made do.
Now, we’ve got all the bells and whistles with the lounge being right off the locker room, and we actually have a second lounge as well, kind of a quiet area for our players. We’ve got the kitchen, the team room stuff, hot tubs, cold tubs, a weight room just for the hockey teams right there in the rink as well, dry stalls with charging ports in them. So a lot of things that help in the recruiting side of things to get us in those conversations that we hadn’t been in before, just because it’s a building you can kind of recruit to.
EF: Finally, you have spent a ton of time in ECAC Hockey both as a player and a coach. What makes the conference special?
TM: I think the biggest thing is just how many teams there are, and the fact you get to play everybody in their own building. I think getting on the road and having a different opponent every night is pretty special to our league. And then you’re also playing against some of the — not just hockey players — but some of the smartest student athletes out there. To get all those Ivy schools and to play in some of those buildings that have been around almost a hundred years and to see the history behind it, it’s special.
It’s a really cool league to be a part of as well, outside of playing. There are a ton of connections you make through the league, whether it be the times I was in the pros or moving into college hockey and meeting people who have been a part of the ECAC at all different levels. The ECAC group is just a really good group to be a part of.
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What to Read in Women’s Hockey
November Rivalry Series Preview (The Ice Garden) — Melissa Burgess previews the first of two weekends where Canada and the United States will match up. The Rivalry Series serves as a look at the national teams this winter before they head to Italy for the Olympics
A Women’s Hockey Fan’s Guide to NHL 26 — And Whether It’s Worth Your Money (The Ice Garden) — With the PWHL making its second appearance in EA’s NHL video game series, Elisha Côté takes a look at what works and what could be improved.
What to Know About the 2026 IIHF Ice Hockey Women’s Asia Championship (The Ice Garden) — The Rivalry Series isn’t the only international hockey being played this weekend! Giselle Velazquez previews the second year of the Asia Championship.
Learning From Legends: Lyndie Lobdell’s Steady Climb to PWHL Seattle (The Ice Garden) — Silvia Leija Rosas’s write-up on former Penn State Lyndie Lobdell as she gets set to start her professional career.
PWHL Seattle, Vancouver unveil team names and logos ahead of 2025-26 season (The Athletic) — The Athletic’s recap of today’s big PWHL announcement.
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