Welcome Back to Icers event an inspiring success!

Welcome back to Pegula and the 2025-26 season of Icers hockey!

We had a successful "Try Hockey Free" event last Friday as well as "Welcome Back to Icers" event which saw our organization add 10 players in the last week!  The event saw us add new families to our growing Icers family at multiple age groups and I have a feeling we'll start celebrating the start to every season of Icers hockey this way!

We want to give a special shout out to some people that donated their time to make this night so special for our kids.

We are incredibly grateful for our SCYIHA goalie coach, D1 Penn State Women's goaltender Katie Desa. Katie took shots from a few 8U kids and even jumped in on some cross ice. Katie is an inspiration to young girls in our association and beyond and is a big reason SCYIHA was able to launch it's first Girls Tournament team this season! Head coach Julia Mudryk, a former PSU Women's club player herself, was also there to meet players and families. This week she lead a successful first practice for our girls tournament team. The goal of the tournament team is to form the foundation for a full season 19U PAHL team in the 2026-2027 season!!

Adding more inspiring athletes was John Seifarth. John was part of a storybook written last year at Penn State's D1 program when he was called up from the club team, had wins at the D1 level and was part of the team's first ever appearance in the frozen four! John suited up to let kids try their best move for a lot of shootout and cross-ice fun!

And last but not least, a huge thank you to recent Penn State transfer Mac Gadowsky for making a surprise appearance. I got a chance to ask Mac who he played for growing up at center ice and he said "Icers!". It's not every day you get to talk shop with a Hobey Baker finalist Icer! Mac wanted to see how his old club was doing and show off some silky mitts in the process. We are so thankful to Mac inspiring our kids to see that they can start at Pegula and with a lot of hard work come back years later!

We are so thankful to each of our local celebs for joining us. Seeing little girls jump up and down at getting to meet Katie, or goalies pull pucks out of the net to keep that Mac tucked in, or seeing kids throw their head back as they {almost} scored on John was awesome to witness up close and are experiences our players are sure to take with them as inspiration this season.

We're happy to report a successful first week back at the rink as we start the next 6 month campaign trying to build better humans who happen to be pretty darn good hockey players too! I would like to also recognize the countless hours our coaches, TMs, board members and volunteers will dedicate to make this season successful and thank you to all who were able to help out with our kick-off event. We couldn't have done it without you!

We Are... ICERS!