Cindy Acropolis Toye

RPI Hockey shoutout from space! LFG! From a Troy dorm room to the moon: How RPI shaped Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/capital-re…

Good reminder for us all today.

A tale of two Pennsylvania hockey teams… Penn State receives $102M donation from Terry Pegula to build an arena and start a program. In 2025, they shell out nearly $1M to land Gavin McKenna. Later that season, Mercyhurst cuts its 39 y/o program out of the blue. Brutal.

As an AD, I constantly remind our coaches what a captain really is. It is not always your best player, even though that is the ideal. It is the player who lives out your program’s culture every single day. The one who holds teammates accountable, shows up and works, puts the team first, and does the little things right when no one is watching. A captain is not just a talented kid who makes plays. It is the standard everyone else should follow.

"Trans women" haven't been banned from women's sports. Men have. Hope this helps!

@BrianBobal @donohugel Heartbreaker

Former N.J. girls hockey Player of the Year Leah Stecker and Penn State are one shot away from going to the national championship 🏒📷🏒

This is a HEAVY quote here that many people need to hear “If you disappear on a guy when he makes a mistake, I’m not so sure that’s a genuine relationship you built” Let this sink in

USA Hockey has eclipsed 100,000 female hockey players for the first time in the organizations history, per a press release. Thats a 257 percent increase since women’s hockey debuted at the 1998 Olympics.

It's been fun looking at 50 years of 🏒 state finals. Let's go back to 1976 & dive into the championship game that started it all between Brick & Chatham Twp. “It was the largest crowd that we’d ever played in front of" “For us, it was the Stanley Cup” nj.com/highschoolspor…

Team USA just won its first Olympic hockey gold in 46 years. On February 22. The exact anniversary of the Miracle on Ice. Forget the storybook narrative for a second. What happened today is a masterclass in what performance science teaches us about pressure, identity, and legacy. Consider the pressure this team was under. They walked into today carrying 46 years of near misses. The US hadn't won Olympic gold since 1980. They lost the gold medal game in 2002 and 2010...both times to Canada. Last year at the 4 Nations tournament, Canada beat them in overtime. That loss was still raw. The 1980 hero, Mike Eruzione, was in the building. He told the players before the game: "It's just a hockey game." It wasn't. And everyone knew it. Canada outshot the US 41-26. They dominated the second and third periods. Nathan MacKinnon missed an open net. Macklin Celebrini had a breakaway and couldn't convert. Devon Toews had Hellebuyck beaten and somehow the puck stayed out. Then Charlie McAvoy cleared a puck off the goal line with his glove. This was not a dominant performance. It was a team surviving enormous pressure and refusing to break. That distinction matters. How does a team perform under that kind of weight? It starts with the environment the coach creates. Mike Sullivan is now the only American-born coach to win multiple Stanley Cups AND Olympic gold. When he took over the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2015, the team was loaded with talent — Crosby, Malkin, Letang — and completely broken. His description: "There was a dark cloud over the locker room." His first move wasn't a new system or a motivational speech. It was a reframe. He told the team: "There are certain things in life we can control and certain things we can't. We needed to focus on the things that we could control and not dedicate any cognitive resources or worry to things we couldn't control." The team adopted a two-word motto: "Just play." Six months later, they won the Stanley Cup. Tonight, he helped USA do it again on the biggest stage in the world. Sullivan builds what he calls a "safe zone for learning." His video review sessions are explicitly NOT about blame. "We don't want a player walking into our video room on eggshells worried about 'Am I going to be in the film? Is Coach going to yell at me?' It's a game of mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn from them." His guiding principle from his college coach: "Before players want to know what you know, they want to know that you care." It's the difference between compliance and buy-in. Buy-in wins championships. Research backs up Sullivan. Fear-based environments don't produce peak performance. Especially when pressure is already high... They produce anxiety, risk-aversion, and choking. When people feel psychologically safe — when they know mistakes won't be weaponized against them — they take smarter risks, recover faster from errors, and perform better under pressure. We could see it in how Sullivan framed this moment in the weeks before the game. "What an incredible opportunity we have in front of us." Not a burden or expectation...Opportunity. He took the unusual step for a hockey team and kept the team in the Olympic Village instead of a hotel. His reasoning: "The Village is part of the experience." The Hughes brothers roomed together. The Tkachuk brothers roomed together. He didn't try to ignore or isolate them from the pressure. He was embedding them in it, together. And then there's the guy who scored the goal. Jack Hughes came into the Olympics injured, underperforming, slotted on the fourth line. Sullivan moved him up mid-tournament because, as he put it, "We thought by moving him and getting him more ice time, he could impact the game more." Hughes's response: "I believe in myself more than anyone. Wherever I was slotted coming into this thing, I knew I was going to play well." A coach who believed in him when results said otherwise. A player who believed in himself when the lineup said otherwise. Then two teeth got cracked in half by a high stick in the third period. And he scored the golden goal anyway. Everyone's going to remember this as the night the US ended a 46-year drought. On the anniversary. In overtime. Against Canada. But the real lesson is quieter than that. The environment you create determines the performance you get. A safe zone for learning. A focus on controllables. Relationships built on care, not fear. Pressure reframed as opportunity. That's what it looks like when a team is ready, with the right environment and support to tackle the ghosts of history. They built a culture where a team could survive 41 shots and a kid with two broken teeth could score the biggest goal of his life. The 1980 Miracle was about belief overcoming talent. Today was different. Today was talent, preparation, identity, and 46 years of accumulated hunger arriving at the same moment. -Steve

Players in recorded Olympics history to have 40+ saves & an assist in a single game: Connor Hellebuyck - Today That’s it.

This is such a wonderful interview. Jack Hughes: team first, complete selfless humility, love of USA and USA hockey. Boyhood wonder, shock, pure happiness. An elevated state of grace. Gold.

ABSOLUTE PERFECTION ⁦@jhugh86⁩ & USA MEN’s HOCKEY!

ONLY in hockey can you lose a couple teeth earlier in a game and come back and hit the game winner! Jack Hughes is a BADASS and a HERO! Congrats boys! Hollebuyck will forever be a legend! @usahockey

Wearing my vintage jacket from 1994! #myalmostmadeitjacket 🥇🇺🇸

I could run through a brick wall right now!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 USA USA USA USA 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

The US Ladies played 7 games in Milan. This was their final stat sheet: • 7-0 • 33 Goals For • 2 Goals Against • +31 Goal Differential • 2 wins over arch rival Canada A generational Olympic run by the ladies

MEGAN KELLER GOLDEN GOAL‼️ U.S. WOMEN'S HOCKEY SECURES THE GOLD MEDAL🏅🇺🇸 (via @NBCOlympics)

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” Our family business: hockey.

USA Hockey says girls' participation nationwide has surged 65% over the past 15 seasons, making it one of the fastest growing youth sports in the country. CBS News’ @NatalieABrand reports.