Brown Announces Carisa Wahlig as Head Coach

On April 27th, Brown announced Carisa Wahlig as their new head coach. Wahlig was previously the head coach at Lake Forest, a Division III school located about an hour north of Chicago. She has an extensive hockey coaching resume, and relevant to the Brown job, she has experience turning a losing program into a winning one. Since 2009, Lake Forest has not had a losing season. In addition they’ve won regular season and tournament conference championships under Wahlig. For those interested in learning about the new coach, both Brown and Lake Forest released updates/bios on Coach Wahlig; Bill McLean of the Daily North Shore also wrote an excellent  article on Wahlig in December of 2017.

Wahlig will look to repeat her Lake Forest successes at Brown. With Brown's 2-27-0 record in 2017-2018, getting the program to a better record than last year is something I expect Coach Wahlig to achieve in year one, surely even by Christmas. How quickly she can elevate the program to a winning record is another question. None of the Ivies are dominant right now; in 2017-2018 only Cornell had a winning record, finishing 7th in the final USCHO poll. First year Princeton Head Coach Cara Morey finished the year with a .500 record, the other four Ivy schools finished sub .500. Given the lack of dominance out of the Ivies right now, I wonder if Wahlig can quickly get Brown into to being one of the top Ivy hockey programs, setting the stage to once again attract the best of the Ivy academic caliber hockey players to Brown.

Since Wahlig is coming from a DIII school, no additional DI coaching vacancy comes available with her hiring, negating any potential coaching carousel. If there is only one head coaching change this year, it will mark the fifth time that has happened since 2001 (the beginning of the NCAA Championship era). The last time there was only one head coaching change in a year was in 2013-2014; typically there is closer to three changes.

As for coaches going from DIII to DI and finding success, Greg Fargo, Head Coach of Colgate University comes to mind. Fargo went from being the head coach of Elmira University (DIII) to Colgate six years ago. While a $40 million dollar brand new rink that opened in 2016 likely helped recruiting, Fargo’s accomplishments at Colgate are impressive - leading Colgate to their first ever NCAA tournament and accomplishing National Runner Up this year, and earning a share of the ECAC regular season championship. Deservedly, he was named the 2017-2018 AHCA Head Coach of the year. Given Fargo's remarkable success, it is not surprising to see Brown follow suit and hire a proven head coach from the Division III level.

Also in Head Coaching news RPI removed the interim tag off of Bryan Vines, after one year at the helm, and a 9-19-6 record. Their prior year record was 10-24-2.

On the Mercyhurst front, it was announced last week that longtime Associate Head Coach Louis Goulet left the program after 11 years, leaving coaching to work in the family business. This is sad news for Mercyhurst fans, but of course I wish Lou well in his next adventure, grateful for his contribution to Mercyhurst throughout his coaching career.

It will be interesting to see if Mercyhurst hires another assistant, or if they go the route of associate head coach right away. According to collegehockeystats.net, Mercyhurst has had someone in the associate head coach role since 2006. I was curious about how common it is to have an Associate Head Coach, so I looked at the 34 Division I schools. Turns out it’s pretty common as 13 out of 34 programs had an Associate Head Coach this year. Whatever route Mercyhurst takes, next year ushers in a new era in the coaching staff.