Syracuse men’s club hockey coaches Nick Pierandri and Andrew Wolinski got their starts playing hockey at the Salisbury and Kent Schools respectively, two of the top prep school programs in both New England and the country.

For Wolinski, who doubles as the team’s recruiting coordinator, his history with the area was only one of the reasons why SU’s first-ever recruitment search started there.

Freshmen forwards Zach Bunick, Ben King and Rob VanRaamsdonk may represent the future for Syracuse men’s club hockey (8-7). As the first recruiting class in team history, the three former prep school athletes out of New England’s elite Division I hockey association are a key part of Pierandri’s push as a second-year head coach to reach the top of collegiate club hockey.

“That’s a little bit of our bias,” Wolinski said. “There’s a very hard academic rigor at prep school so we know the quality of student we’re getting is better. They’re used to a lot of structure and a lot of demand from teachers.”

Wolinski handles the inquiries of interested recruits, raises awareness for the pro-gram and attends a number of tournaments in search of potential athletes — using money out of his own salary from coaching. It was at one of these tournaments, the Chowder Cup in Boston, that Wolinski found King, who then attended the Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York.

SU “wasn’t even on the map,” King said, before he met Wolinski, but that began to change after talking to and exchanging numbers with the assistant coach.

Unlike the NCAA programs King was in contact with, Syracuse’s club team didn’t re-quest for King to take a year off to play juniors hockey to develop more. For King, who had already lost a year by transferring to prep school, this made SU all the more attractive.

The school that wasn’t on the map eventually became King’s school of choice, which he decided after an overnight visit at SU. Similar to many NCAA programs, the Or-ange coaches planned the overnights, which consisted of watching practices, talking to coaches and staying with a member of the team.

It was at the overnight that King met VanRaamsdonk, who he would eventually be-come roommates with after both decided to attend SU.

“We didn’t want to go random and we just thought that we were both on the team so it would just be easy and work out,” VanRaamsdonk said.

The three recruits, particularly Bunick, have had an immediate effect in the first half of the season. The speedy Rivers School graduate quickly became a leader for the Orange offense, ranking second in total points scored, despite not appearing in two of the team’s 15 games.

For Bunick, an S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications student that was ac-cepted after applying early decision, hockey was what “sealed the deal” in making SU his choice. Now, he and his fellow recruits hope to do whatever they can to help bring victories to the Orange.

“We’ve just been trying to do our role,” Bunick said. “The first couple weeks we were given a role of what to do, whether it was to score goals, be a playmaker (or) block shots. We all came into those roles and just tried to help the team win.”

Published on November 12, 2014 at 12:05 am