Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our sports newsletter here.

Two years ago, the Syracuse Women’s Club Hockey team had just seven players and no head coach. They had no chance of competing with schools like Colgate, Clarkson and Ithaca.

But this year, 30 girls tried out for the squad, forcing first-year head coach Christina Beam to cut five players.

“I think it’s really nice to see that we’ve been there for every step of the way,” said Vice President Talynn Wylie, a three-year member of the team. “Sometimes you take a step back, and you’re like, ‘wow, I can’t believe (the team is) actually here’ because it started out with basically nothing.”

With Beam providing leadership at the top, the team is 10-0 midway through this season, outscoring opponents 53-3. It’s been a season that’s marked the start of a new era, looking to bring prominence to a recently non-existent program.

Team president Amanda Wheeler, who’s played for the Syracuse Women’s Club Hockey Team for three years, recruited Beam to coach the team after playing with her in an adult league over this past summer. Wheeler said Beam has been the perfect person to create and uphold the competitive standard the team is looking for.

“(Beam has) been really great and understands that we’re a club sport, but we still want to be competitive,” Wheeler said. “We still wanna go win games and we all wanna get better, even though this is probably the last stop in the hockey world for a lot of us. I think she gets that.”

The first-year coach wants her players to be recognized for their involvement with the team as well as respected and commended for what they achieve on the ice.

“We’re gonna create our own culture, we’re gonna be respected,” Beam told her players before the season. “When people hear that you’re a part of the SU club team, I want them to know that we’re a respectful group of women who work hard, play hard and we hold great standards to ourselves on and off the ice.”

With only seven players, it was hard for Beam’s message and goals to come to fruition. But now with 25 players, Syracuse Women’s Club Hockey has the quantity and quality to get better and win.

The moment Beam took over as head coach, she recognized the chemistry between her players. Even during the tryout period, despite many of the players not knowing each other well, they impressed their new head coach.

“It was impressive to see some of these girls have never even skated together, and they just had great chemistry from the beginning,” Beam said. “The girls are like sponges, they take in any new information and are always willing to improve their game…And the things that I’ve seen with them is they are just even tighter on and off the ice,” Beam said.

At the start of the season, Wheeler was looking forward to the opponents they would play this season, even though they didn’t have much success last year.

In their first game, Syracuse showed it’s turning the program around, knocking off Binghamton 10-0. Throughout the first half of their schedule, the Orange won four of their 10 games by 10 or more goals — matching their total number of wins from last season.

“Now we’re like a very, very dominant team and like we have this group of girls that’s extremely dedicated and we all just wanna get better,” Wheeler said.

Published on January 16, 2024 at 11:02 pm