Gamecock club ice hockey wins SEC championship, prepares for tough regional tournament

IRMO, SC (WOLO) — The South Carolina club ice hockey team took home it’s first ever SEC title this pas weekend, beating Tennessee 4-3 in the championship game.

“It was pretty awesome,” Jake Puskar, a senior forward/center on the team and the tournament MVP said. “This thing is like a mini Stanley Cup we like to say. To be able to life this thing up at the end of it, collectively as a team it was a nice bonding moment for us and it gave us the confidence that we can do it going forward.”

John Riggins, another senior forward/center on the team and the SEC Player of the Year, said claiming the title meant a lot.

“A lot of our guys, this was like the final piece over all the years of winning,” Riggins said. “We’ve won a national before, we’ve won a lot of our tournaments, we’ve won a Palmetto, and we finally got that conference championship with the SEC which was nice to finish off.”

Club ice hockey is rapidly growing in the Southeast.

Allan Sirois, the Gamecock Hockey head coach, said competition levels are rising and the appeal of attending an SEC school is drawing new players.

“The South is growing tremendously,” Sirois said. “Getting players from up north has been huge but also what’s been going on in Canada right now where this players can actually leave juniors and come to US which trickle down into the club hockey level.”

Puskar, who was been with the club all four years of school, has seen the change.

“In my four years here the team has grown a lot,” Puskar said. “We’ve had a lot more skill players come in, coming from juniors and DIII college programs, they see what’s building in the Southeast with hockey and how it’s growing.”

Riggins transferred from Wentworth University, a DIII school.

“Pretty cool when you come to a rink in South Carolina and it completely stuffed and there’s a line out the rink and you’re like yeah this was the right call,” Riggins said.

Gamecock hockey actually won a national championship in 2024 while competing in AAU college club hockey.

Now they’re in a whole new league, the ACHA, where the road to glory is a whole lot tougher.

“So now we’re going to Cincinnati this weekend,” Sirois said as he explained the team’s schedule for regionals. “We have to win two games. We have Liberty on game one. If we lose there, seasons over.”

If they make it past regionals this weekend, the Gamecocks will head to St. Louis for nationals, facing the best club teams in the nation.

“That will just make our nationals run more special,” Puskar said. “The fact that it’s going to be harder to get there and more challenging for us, I think we can do it.”

Riggins added, “I think, we like stress, so we’re going to enjoy it a lot.”

With the SEC Tournament MVP and SEC Player of the Year on the ice, the guys are feeling, well, Cocky.

“We’re really high right now, we’re playing real well, we feel like,” Sirois said. “We’re ranked ninth, I feel like we’re better than that but we’re going to have to show it.”

Riggins feels the same.

“We’re in sync and we’re playing great hockey and confidence is key,” Riggins said. “So when you got it going, you got it going. So stay hot.”