Round 1 goes to Air Force. 

No Canadian Hockey League players, no transfer portal, no revenue sharing. All the same, Air Force hockey finished 18-15-4, the team’s first winning season since 2018-2019. 

Air Force coach Frank Serratore called the inclusion of CHL players in NCAA hockey a “paradigm shift” before the season began, but the Falcons’ success this year stands as proof the old-fashioned way still works. 

“On paper, there’s no way we should have been able to accomplish what we’ve accomplished this year. Not with how the rest of college hockey got beefed up from the CHL players coming in,” Serratore said. 

Air Force had three players receive all-conference honors this week, including first-team honors for senior captain and defenseman Chris Hedden, and was the only team to sweep defending Atlantic Hockey America champion Bentley in conference play. The Falcons were 4-0 against Sacred Heart University this season and beat Holy Cross in its building for the first time in a decade. Air Force also went 3-0-1 against rival Army. 

The Falcons were a one-and-done in the conference tournament, falling in three games to third-seeded Robert Morris as the sixth seed, but this year’s Air Force team overachieved. 

Saying goodbye to the Class of 2025 wasn’t easy for Air Force as not only did the Falcons lose a top centerman in Clayton Cosentino, who led the nation in faceoffs for multiple seasons, but they also lost three-year starting goalie Guy Blessing. 

Entering the season with a question mark at the most important position in the sport isn’t a recipe for success, but Air Force found a way. 

Junior Carter Claftonbegan the season in record-breaking fashion, but was replaced two weeks later by junior Dominik Wasik, who tied for the AHA lead in conference wins with 13.

Wasik didn’t even have a locker entering the season.

“With what Dom accomplished, … you can make an argument that he rivaled Hedden as our MVP,” Serratore said. “I can’t say, if you had to pick one of them, that he was our No. 1 most valuable player but I can tell you he was our most important player. He was our most important player. Without him a lot of one-goal wins turn into one-goal losses.”

Most important, most valuable or not, Wasik certainly wasn’t alone. This Falcons team bucked the conventional wisdom of Serratore, who has led the program for 29 seasons. The coach often says that Air Force teams are good when they’re old and deep. 

This team was good despite having three seniors and 10 total upperclassmen.

“For them to accomplish what they accomplished without being old and deep that’s a rarity in sports at the Academy,” Serratore said. “It bodes well for the future because even though we’re not going to have a big senior class next year, we’re gonna be deep in our freshmen, sophomore and junior classes.”

Next season, Air Force hopes to be on the power play both literally and figuratively. In the case of the former, the Falcons must improve on the power play, Serratore said.  The Falcons were seventh of 10 in the conference and 57th of 63 in the country with a .126 power-play percentage. 

In the figurative sense, Air Force is in position to finally see a benefit from the changing landscape of college hockey. Serratore hoped, prior to the season, that the inclusion of CHL players, who are largely ineligible to play for Air Force due to the Academy’s requirements that cadets be U.S. citizens, would create a trickle-down effect, leaving a larger pool of more talented American players whom top teams would typically recruit. 

That hope has become a reality, Serratore said last week.

“There’s more American players left in the pool and both Army and Air Force are benefiting from that,” he said. “There are more American players than there were prior to the CHL players becoming eligible.”