For Dennis Williams, coming “home” to Bowling Green after nearly 15 years was easy. It’s the rest of it that’s going to be more difficult.
“I don’t know if I would have left to come back to college hockey if it wasn’t Bowling Green,” Williams said.
The 45-year-old has deep roots at Bowling Green, a place where he both played and coached for a long time. He left in 2010 for a different experience in junior hockey – first in the NAHL, then the USHL before landing in the Major Junior WHL. He became head coach of the Everett Silvertips in 2017, winning 204 games behind the bench and earning the opportunity to coach the Canadian World Juniors team to a gold medal in 2024.
It’s not a very common pathway for Major Junior coaches to return immediately to college hockey. But for Williams, named the ninth head coach at Bowling Green in February, returning was special.
“I was happy where I was at. I was very thankful, because it’s a great league, it’s a great team, it’s a great organization, but having the opportunity to come back to a place where I played, I was a grad student, I was a grad assistant coach, assistant coach and interim head coach, where my oldest daughter was born…. it was just something that was a change and a challenge that, personally, I think I needed,” he said. “I was very fortunate and thankful that my wife, Hollie, and my girls, Emerson and Elise, were on board with it, because these type of decisions can’t be just made solely for, you know, myself.”
Moving is challenging – especially with two teenagers in school–but there’s more work to be done on the ice. Williams is returning to a college hockey landscape that is vastly different than the one he left in 2010, when he was BG’s interim head coach for one season following the sudden departure of Scott Paluch.
“I haven’t been in college for 15 years. The landscape has changed drastically. Everything’s changed,” Williams said, saying he is leaning a lot on his coaching staff – Curtis Carr, Stavros Paskaris, Dylan Schoen and Buddy Powers – to help him get up to speed. “I need them more than they need me probably. I’m lucky to keep those guys around with me. They’ve been very instrumental in the transition and the transition of recruiting and helping with transfers and keeping everybody at bay, as well as instrumental in helping me adjust to the college game, and understanding what are the cans and cannots we can do, I can continue to focus on my coaching and trying to develop our players.”
One big change Williams mentioned is the transfer portal, but oddly, it’s not one Williams had to deal with much this season. Often when there’s a coaching change this is a big exodus of outward player movement. But that didn’t happen for the Falcons this year. Nearly every player with eligibility returned to Bowling Green this fall, giving BG one of the more experienced teams in the CCHA.
“It’s a credit to these guys,” Williams said. “They’re a tight-knit group. They want to stay together, they want to play with each other and for each other, and having everybody back and three transfers and three freshmen is just elevating the competition and guys are really enjoying battling for spots.”
The Falcons have two players (Ethan Scardina and Seth Fyten) who came back to school for a fifth year, as well as five players who are entering their fourth year at BG (including team scoring leader Ryan O’Hara, Ben Wozney, Christian Stoever, Pete Eigner and Salvatore Evola). They also return all-CCHA rookie goaltender Cole Moore to the fold.
Williams has now gotten the chance to see this group play four times – twice against Mercyhurst to start the year then in exhibitions against Robert Morris and Simon Fraser last weekend. In the games that counted, the Falcons swept Mercyhurst on the road, winning 2-1 in overtime and 5-4 the next night.
“That was our first crack at watching the guys where games meant something, and those were important nonconference games to win,” Williams said. “That first game, we held onto a lead in the third, six-on-five, six-on-four for a bit, it was a real gutsy effort for our group. Then the next night, we’re down 3-1, we’re playing pretty good hockey, but nothing to show for it, and then we’re able to score three goals, take it to overtime and score in overtime.”
Those games showed Williams a lot about his team, but he said he learned just as much from their exhibition games. BG beat RMU 7-2 and Simon Fraser 4-1.
“I don’t like the term exhibition, because everyone thinks it all means nothing. But every time you play it means something,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’d much rather play these games and learn from it, than be sitting here at 1-3 and 0-4. We’re realistic enough to know that we have to play much better. Even though we’ve been able to win those four games, there’s more in the tank and our execution has to be better, our consistency has to be better. And in college hockey, we need discipline, especially playing against a team like Western Michigan, you can’t give them freebies.”
That Western Michigan game – a single game in Kalamazoo on Thursday before BG travels to RIT on Saturday – will be a big test for the Falcons. But Williams said even though he has done some scouting on WMU, he’s still more focused on making sure his team is playing their own style than anything else.
“For me, right now, still being early in the year, I’d like to see us get a little bit better at how we want to play and play to our identity, and then maybe throughout the game, if we have to make some adjustments, we will talk … as a staff to make sure that we know exactly how Western plays,” he said. “And then we just give our players X amount of information so that they’re not overthinking but allowing them to be able to play our game still. It’s gonna be a good test.”
