Three years removed from a national title win that changed the program forever, the Quinnipiac men’s hockey team has experienced a mix of ups and downs. Bobcats fans knew that head coach Rand Pecknold had a tall task in rebuilding a senior-heavy roster after that 2023 title, and by 2026, it seems like they’re reaping their best rewards yet.
Between a heartbreaking overtime loss to Boston College in 2024 and an early NCAA Tournament exit to UConn in 2025, the prospects this year look the best they have since their title run. The roster strikes a composed balance of flashy freshman phenoms like forwards Ethan Wyttenbach and Markus Vidicek, and grounded veteran leadership in players such as captain Victor Czerneckianair or fellow junior cornerstone Andon Cerbone.
This raises the question: Why is the average attendance for home games down? According to the U.S. College Hockey Online database and hockeydb.com, Quinnipiac’s average attendance is down this year by just over 100 people.
Nicholas Simeone, an assistant athletic director for Quinnipiac in the marketing and fan engagement department, has spent the last two months on the job addressing problems like this. While he’s just getting his start in Connecticut, he’s held similar jobs at University of Rhode Island and, most recently, Bryant University.
Simeone’s department has some ideas in the works to get students more involved in the fan community. They’ve been rotating jumbotron videos with more crowd prompts to get people shouting. In addition, Simeone has also brought in a student to run the Quinnipiac Athletics Marketing (@qu_athleticsmkt) Instagram account, which he hopes to turn into a hub for the university’s sports news for students to hear about promotions.
Athletics marketing also works with several school-sponsored fan groups. This includes cheer and club dance teams, along with the Ice Cats, Quinnipiac’s men’s and women’s hockey cheerleaders. It also includes the pep band, a group that Simeone has a tremendous amount of respect for.
“I love having the pep band there,” he said. “They’re awesome because they’re honestly some of the rowdiest, loudest people there. A good example is (Feb. 21) night, (men’s hockey) had post game senior day, and a ton of people out of the student section cleared out. But the pep band stayed there the whole time to support the guys. That’s very telling.”
Many of the pep band members are like their director, graduate media studies major Becca Steeves.
Besides the musical aspect, for Steeves and many more in pep band, there’s a sports aspect that draws people into the club. Steeves herself was a hockey fan before attending Quinnipiac, which helps bring more passionate fervor to their songs and chants.
Now, the pep band is trying to do more work to tie the student community together. Between QU Spirit, which runs promotions and giveaways and games, @qubarstool, a social media account used for student sports news, and independent fan groups, the pep band has more resources to pull on now than ever before.
“I want to say, especially within the past month or so, like this spring semester, we’ve had a great connection with the student section,” Steeves said. “I think a lot of it is (President) Marie (Hardin) as well. She’s been super excited to come down into the student section to interact with us.”
Hardin’s influence can’t really be understated. Although she was recently inducted as the 10th president of the university in the fall, she’s become an icon of the community.
Hardin’s strong communications background has made her uniquely equipped to revive the interest of the student body. She’s also put in a lot of time recognizing more grassroots student fan efforts.
QU Spirit runs the Teletubbies, where four students rotate every week to sit in the front row to get the student section hype. This is the longest-standing student section tradition, originating at a Halloween game over 10 years ago.
Hardin has shown a lot of love to the bananas, a group formed by senior communications major James Blennau, who shows up to every game in a banana costume. Blennau, a Long Island, N.Y. native, took the idea from his roommate, who initially refused to commit.
For the Yale game in 2022, Blennau whipped out the banana suit, and Quinnipiac Athletics photographer, Rob Rasmussen, found him against the boards for a shot that did the rounds on Quinnipiac social media. Blennau decided to wear it to all the big games that year, and in just a few weeks, he was getting picked out of a crowd.
“There was people that started to recognize me, maybe from the Boston College game or something like that earlier,” Blennau said. “I was like, ‘You know, this isn’t just me anymore. This is so much bigger. So now I have to do this for the people.’”
Fast forward three more years, and Blennau has attended just about every single men’s hockey game, and Saturday’s game against Colgate was his last one. With a graceful speech to the student section, Blennau announced his resignation as a banana.
“It’s about building the community so that guys like you can come in and be loud and be proud and see the student section thriving again,” Blennau said. “It’s so much bigger than a guy in a suit.”
