Photos by Gabby Woodie. Top photo, above: UA hockey player J.D. Duenwald
The members of the Arkansas Razorbacks club hockey team all fear the same opponent.
Missouri? Ole Miss? Oklahoma State? Not them. Tooth-loosening checks from hulking defenders? Not a problem.
No, the Fayetteville team’s most fearsome foe comes in disguise. It comes in the form of dark bedrooms, fluffy pillows and warm blankets. Its voice is the sound of alarms set for feloniously early hours with the sun still a good four hours away.
It whispers gently: “Just close your eyes. Curl up. Stay warm. Give yourself a couple more hours. Everyone else gets to.”
“My sophomore year, I had practice and had to be there at 4:30 a.m.,” said Brian Romero, a fifth-year senior defenseman from Frisco, Texas. “I’d get out of practice at 8 in the morning, and I’d have a lecture at 8:50.”
Romero’s major, incidentally, is biomedical engineering.
“Yeah,” Romero said, “and the urge to sleep through that is so high. We’ve had players drop because they fall asleep during the day.”
The Razorbacks stretch the word “club” to its absolute limits — for all involved, it is deadly serious. There are red-eye practices while most sane people are asleep (more on that in a bit). There are 10-hour bus trips to such stunning locales as Hammond, Indiana. There is fierce recruiting done by coaches making part-time stipends.
None of it is for dilettantes. These are not glorified intra murals. A student with no background thinking, “Hockey — that sounds like fun,” is in for an icy cold shock. While Texas is the Hogs’ recruiting base, the Razorbacks’ roster is dotted with players from far-off hockey strongholds such as Illinois, Michigan and Maine. Every player has previously played for high-level youth and junior teams, and some are transfers from other college hockey programs.
There are no players from Arkansas, and there likely will not be. The youth-to-college infrastructure does not exist, and places to skate are few and far between.
Nine times since 2009, the Hogs have appeared in the ACHA national tournament, advancing to the semifinals twice.
Yet Razorbacks hockey matters. On a Saturday afternoon at Springdale’s Jones Center, Arkansas’ home rink, the Hogs are dismantling rival Ole Miss 8-3 before a full house. Fans are sporting either Razorback red or NHL hockey jerseys, and they remain loud and active for a game that is essentially over by the second period. Because the Jones Center’s bleachers are only on one side of the ice, others stand along the boards, peering through the protective plexiglass. Others still camp out on the Jones Center’s second floor, looking through windows.
It matters, maybe more than ever. As college sports get turned inside-out by unlimited transfers, player payments and revenue sharing, a word like “purity” can induce eye-rolls. Even non scholarship athletic programs such as those at Hendrix College in Conway, Lyon College in Batesville and the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville compete with full NCAA membership and operate under the umbrella — and funding — of an athletic department.
Arkansas hockey is college athletics pushed through the looking glass. Scholarships? Razorbacks players pay for club membership. Facilities? It is about a half-hour drive from the UA campus to the Jones Center, and due to class schedules and ice-skating Jones Center patrons, practices are often held after midnight. Strength training? The Hogs are still searching for a permanent place to lift weights.
Yet the Razorbacks win. Boy, do they win. During a particular stretch from 2019 to 2023, Arkansas went 108-14 as a member of the American Collegiate Hockey Association, collegiate club hockey’s governing body. Nine times since 2009, the Hogs have appeared in the ACHA national tournament, advancing to the semifinals twice.
The man responsible for much of this is Keller Sims, the club’s director of hockey operations and head coach of Arkansas’ Division II team. (Club hockey teams are classified as Division I, Division II or Division III, and a club can field multiple teams.) Much like his players, Sims is understandably bleary eyed, working full time as a doctor of physical therapy when he is not running witching-hour practices at the Jones Center or riding the team bus to locations across the country.
Coach Keller Sims
“I’m doing something for hockey every day,” said Sims, who also has a wife and three children at home, “and if we don’t have anything going on, I’m watching our film or our opponent’s film or recruiting or doing any of the league stuff that I’ve been required to do. It’s 12 months out of the year donating time to the program.”
Sims maintains his full-throttle schedule for one reason — his heart beats for hockey and for the University of Arkansas. Sims grew up in the Dallas area and attended Arkansas from 2009 to 2013, but a nagging hip injury limited his time on the ice. By his own admission, the experience left him “bitter,” and he returned to Texas after graduating. When hockey season rolled around, Sims’ television stayed off, and he passed on the numerous men’s leagues in his area. He was done.
“My former teammates pulled me in,” Sims said. “I kind of fell in love with the sport again. It’s important to me to make sure with what we do we’re not burning guys out on hockey. I don’t want anyone else to fall out of love with this game.”
Sims does his best, but the schedule is what it is and the demands are what they are. The Razorbacks get started in September and can play through March if they reach the ACHA postseason, which tends to happen more often than not. Once that is over, Sims hits the road, scoping out junior prospects at hockey showcases across the country.
Sims, understandably, has to be up front in his recruiting pitch: “We don’t have scholarships.” “The travel is intense.” “We practice when we can.”
Arkansas’ recruiting base is Texas, but the Hogs pull in players from all over.
Instead, Sims pushes the idea of relationships between teammates.
The Razorbacks are not exactly insular — they function as regular college students. Yet the team shares an almost magnetic bond, the way groups in unfamiliar situations tend to do. Nobody else on the Fayetteville campus is likely to be driving to Springdale for a postmidnight skate, after all. Nobody else knows how it feels to pull into the Jones Center at 3 a.m. after a road trip and lug hockey equipment off the bus. Fan interest in the club has grown over the years, a result of Sims’ relentless promotion and the players’ down-to-earth personalities, but the Razorbacks practice together, travel together, watch hockey together and party together — though given their schedule, the partying tends to be fairly tame.
“My network here, it starts with just the hockey team,” said forward Sabre Koleber, a Clarkston, Michigan, product classified as a 21-year-old freshman due to his post-high school run with the Philadelphia Little Flyers of the junior focused Eastern Hockey League. “That’s all I had coming here. I didn’t know a single person outside of that.”
For the uninitiated, the life of a young hockey player can seem bizarre, since it is not uncommon for players to start in junior leagues that will trade and cut players just like their professional counterparts. When they arrive on campus, many of the Razorbacks are already well versed in making friends in an unfamiliar locker room.
With growing fan support and postseason runs, the Razorback hockey club has grown into one of the best of its kind in the country.
“Hockey guys always get along just fine,” Koleber said.
Hockey guys also seem to like nonhockey places just fine. Koleber and other Razorbacks have had opportunities to play at the NCAA level, but the idea of living the life of a student at a large university with mild winters has its pull, and both Sims and his players know how to sell it.
“We want to have kids who come here and experience the SEC way of life,” Romero said. “You can be in a frat, you can experience really big SEC football games.”
And you can win.
“A lot of people go, ‘We have a hockey team?’” Romero said. “It’s like, yeah, we’ve had a hockey team for a long time. They ask, ‘Are we any good?’ and it’s funny because the last six years, we’ve been really good. We’re always trying to market our stuff, whether that’s helping out the community, being gentlemen of the sport or also just winning games.”
Nothing lasts forever. Romero only has months left in his collegiate hockey career. Sims can see the end — “I am going to have to step out of a coaching role at some point,” he said — but he still plans to stay in an operational role for as long as possible.
The club is set to remain — not as a novelty or a quirk or a recreational pursuit but as a highly competitive, blood-and-sweat experience that starts in the predawn hours and ends in the latest of nights. More players will come from all over the country, and they will work and bond and toil and win. They will find their way to class and prop their eyes open if they have to.
Authenticity in college sports still exists, and it wears an Arkansas hockey jersey.
“You’re coming here to get a degree, and you’re coming here to try to win as a Razorback,” Sims said. “I think that helps us a lot, for guys to know we’re becoming part of something.”
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