On the face of it, considering Miami hasn’t finished a season with a winning record since 2015, it would’ve been understandable for Anthony Noreen to want to make a big rebrand out of the RedHawks.
New coach, new team, new us.
But it quickly struck him, after being announced on April 1 as the program’s seventh head coach, that the bones of Miami’s structure were right for the job at hand.
Noreen, who was hired one day before the NCAA’s transfer portal opened, did bring in four college veteran players whom he had either previously coached with or against in his last job, behind the bench for the USHL’s Tri-City Storm. But as for Miami’s 17 returners from last year’s team that went 7-26-3, everyone was not only on board, but also highly determined.
“When I first got here, you don’t know what you’re going to do staff-wise and you don’t know who you’re going to keep player-wise,” Noreen said. “You look at the record from a distance and you start drawing conclusions, but I knew to some degree the previous staff, and that they were good hockey guys and good men and coaches.
“One of the most impressive things, and this speaks volumes about the university, (is that) every single player that was here who had eligibility to come back met with me. I set up shop at a local coffee shop and just said, ‘Hey, if you want to meet with me, this is where I’ll be and you’re welcome to come sit down with me,’ and every single guy, to a man, came and met with me and said, ‘Coach, if you’ll have me, I want to be back. Here’s what I think I can do, and here’s where I think I can be better.’
“They believe in this place, they love this place, and they want to be a part of it,” Noreen continued. “There’s something special here.”
Miami is off to a 3-3-2 start through the season’s opening month. The RedHawks were unbeaten (2-0-2) in their first four games, then lost three straight before earning a gutsy 4-1 win Saturday at home to Lindenwood. A Raimonds Vitolins shorthanded goal 11:31 into the third period and an empty-netter from Christophe Fillion — one of Noreen’s transfers, from Quinnipiac — made the final score not especially indicative of how the game went.
“We lost a hard-fought game on Friday night (4-2 to Lindenwood), and on Saturday, we had to kill nine minutes of penalties in the third period when we were up a goal,” Noreen said. “We blocked a ton of shots, scored a shorthanded goal and we were up 4-1 with less than 20 seconds left in the third period, and we had guys diving head-first to block shots. That’s what we want to be, and that was a really positive step, but we got right back to work this Monday.
“There’s been some good and some bad, and there have been nights where we felt we should’ve been better, and some nights we got what we deserved. In the early going, you evaluate every game and what really good players do is that they evaluate themselves. They identify what they like about their game, what we like about our game, where we can grow, where we can be better and how we can apply it. We’re making sure we live by a standard, and we have a standard of how we play and what we want to play to, and we don’t bend in that for anything or anybody.”
Miami is already coming up on the end of its nonconference slate, finishing it this weekend with a home series against Rensselaer. Then comes the meat grinder of an NCHC schedule, but Noreen isn’t looking past the Engineers. Next Friday’s road game against St. Cloud State is a while away still for a team in a situation like Miami’s this season.
“We have a ton of respect for our conference, and we know how difficult and challenging all those games are,” Noreen said, “but with a new staff, a new structure and all the things we have to worry about internally, we haven’t really talked past the next day’s practice.
“RPI has been really good so far this year, and we’ve pre-scouted them and stuff like that, but with our team, we have to focus on ourselves. We have to get our house in order, make sure we’re playing within our structure and the right way. That’s what we have to be focused on, while also telling the guys, ‘Hey, these are the major tendencies you’ll need to be aware of going into this series,’ but let’s get our internal stuff right.
“I think you’ve got to narrow the focus, especially with a totally new staff, new lines, new teammates and sometimes when you focus on too many things, it muddies the water a little bit,” Noreen continued. “You don’t want to be the master of none. You want to make sure that the things that are really important to us and the things that matter the most, let’s get those in place.”
