Cal Ice Hockey: Bears Pay to Play and Are 25-0 Heading to Playoffs

Cal's club hockey team, coached by a software engineer, completes a perfect regular season with no scholarships, many injuries and unusual challenges

Cal's Henry Conlin and the crowd react to a Bears victory / Photo by Spencer Lee

Roy Chebaclo, a forward on Cal’s ice hockey team, attended his first frat party the night before Saturday’s game at Oregon, but when got back to his apartment at 3 a.m. his electronic key fob didn’t work. After his multiple calls to management and 911 asking for assistance failed, he ended up sleeping on his roommate's yoga mat and missing the 8:45 a.m. Saturday flight with the team. He got into his room, with help from management, at 10:20 a.m. and was told there was a flight to Portland at 11:50 a.m., so he hurriedly packed, got an Uber to the airport, buying a plane ticket with his own money on the way, barely made the flight, landed in Portland, was picked up by Cal officials and arrived in Eugene an hour before game time.

Oh, and, by the way, Chebaclo is the team’s leading goal-scorer this season with 22, and he scored a goal on Sunday in the second of the Bears’ two weekend victories over the Ducks, completing the Cal regular season with a 25-0 record, the only unbeaten team among the country's 255 Division I and II American Collegiate Hockey Association club teams.

No thoughts just Roy Chebaclo on the breakaway pic.twitter.com/t1tVuIgCZm

— Cal Ice Hockey (@Cal_IceHockey) February 3, 2025

And it’s on to the playoffs for Cal, then possibly a spot in the regionals, and perhaps a berth in the nationals for the first time in 28 years.

“I think we’ve got a chance,” said Cal team captain Tyson Storrs.

Players on what may be the most successful sports team at Cal this season do not get scholarships or NIL money or the direct payment to college athletes that is expected to start this summer. In fact, it’s the reverse: The players pay to play, about $4,000 a year. They also must do the fundraising and make their schedules.  They pay – with some help from donors -- for their own gear, their travel, the referees for games and the $625 an hour to rent out the Oakland Ice Center for home games and twice-a-week practices at 9:30 p.m. on Mondays and 6 a.m. on Thursdays.

Sometimes the Cal players even sing the national anthem before games, which is what they did in a game against Washington when the public-address system broke down, joining the Huskies players as they broke into an a cappella version of the Star Spangled Banner.

Storrs recalls in the video atop the story an issue with the travel to USC.  The five vans they thought had been reserved to take the team to USC that day for a game that night were for some reason not available at the rental site.  So while scurrying around to find other vans to rent they thought about taking the train or driving personal vehicles that would allow only part of the team to be available for the game. Eventually, they found a place to rent a van while some other players drove their own cars, leaving Saturday afternoon and arriving about a half-hour before game time that night.

By the way, Cal won both games at USC that weekend.

To play for Cal’s ice hockey club team, which receives little financial support from the university, is to face issues like the ones Chebaclo and Storrs faced.

“It’s by no means glorious,” said Cal defenseman Enzo Goebel. “Even my peers find it a bit curious that I should devote so much time to what one could reduce to a hobby.”

Broken clavicles, concussions, torn knee ligaments, smashed faces and myriad other injuries plus some missed classes have been the players’ rewards for playing club hockey for Cal this season. The Bears played without at least one key player in every game, and Cal had a particularly challenging road game against Eastern Washington. The Bears were without both their captains as well as their alternate captain for that game, and since the referees could only speak to players with a “C” or an “A” on their chests, Cal had no communication with officials amid frustrations about the heavy-hitting, emotional play in that contest.

So during intermission, Cal head coach Devin Cox cut out the letter “C” from a piece of printer paper he had used to write the starting lineup, then grabbed a clear piece of tape to attach the “C” to the front of the jersey worn by Kodai Mizuno.

Presto, Cal has a captain who could talk to officials.

And, by the way, Mizuno, a rookie, scored three goals in that Cal win.

Cal is a Division II club team in the Pac-8 hockey conference, but the Bears defeated Oregon, a Division I club ice hockey squad, twice on the road this past weekend – winning a shootout for a 6-5 win on Saturday and taking a 3-2 victory on Sunday when Chebaclo scored his final goal of the regular season.

“That was the most talented team Cal has ever played, much less beaten,” said Cox.

Head coach Devin Cox / Photo by Spencer Lee

The 25-year-old Cox gets a $1,500 stipend to coach the Bears, but he earns a living as a software engineer for a San Francisco company. On some road trips he has to investigate software problems with customers before and after games, and he was able to solve such an issue between the two wins against Oregon. Lawyers and architects occupy some of the assistant coaching spots, and all are Cal alumni.

Cal’s coaches are hired by the players, so technically they could fire Cox if they wanted, but coaching staffs of 25-0 squads typically are not let go.

And the coaches must endure difficult situations. Against Cal State Northridge, Cal logged 76 penalty minutes in a 60-minute game, and seven players were ejected as referees were tossing players left and right.  Cal had only five players on the bench at times, a goalie was asked if he could be a defenseman, and the game lasted so long that fans were ordering pizzas into the arena. 

The Bears came away with a victory.

The biggest improvement from last year’s team is the goaltending.  Cal had lost its top goalies from the 2022-23 season, so the Bears put out a public call for goalies for the 2023-24 squad.

Yusuf Akbas, a molecular and cell biology student, responded to the call even though he had never been on ice and his only goaltending experience had come in middle school in roller hockey.

Akbas was Cal’s goaltender last year.

This season, Cal’s goalie is Aidan Comeau, who spent four seasons with the San Jose Jr. Sharks and Oakland Jr. Grizzlies Triple-A youth hockey teams. He has a 1.51 goals-against average this season, the best in all of the ACHA.

Ah, club sports.

And Bears ice hockey is developing a following. Cal running backs Jaydn Ott and Jaivian Thomas attended Cal’s final home game two weeks ago against San Jose State wearing Cal ice hockey jerseys.

🤝🤝 @JaivianThomas @THEJAYDNOTT pic.twitter.com/2ZQybre368

— Cal Ice Hockey (@Cal_IceHockey) January 29, 2025

The home games against Stanford are big-time events. The 17,562-seat Oakland Ice Center is filled for that rivalry game, with the Cal band filling a section, in what is a rather rowdy event. Cal won the Big Freeze this season 17-5.

Crowd at a Cal hockey game reacts to a goal / Photo by Martin Cox

Cal must play games at odd hours, starting some games as late as 9:45 p.m., but not at midnight as the Cal team did years ago when its home rink was Berkeley Iceland until that facility closed down in 2007.  Cal-Stanford games in those days were wild affairs with plenty of -- how should we say it? – fan involvement.

The Iceland rink, which was much bigger than the standard hockey rink, had no plexiglass extending above the boards and only chain link fencing behind the goal.  Peter Werner, who played on the Cal team that advanced to the nationals in 1996, recalls that in one game against Stanford at Iceland a Stanford player got checked over the boards and into the raucous Cal crowd. He returned to the ice without his helmet, his gloves or his stick.

“It was a zoo,” said Mark Arneson, who played for Cal in those days and is a Bears assistant coach now.

Though still rowdy, it’s more of a petting zoo at the Oakland site by comparison, and college club hockey across the nation is more organized now under the UCHA umbrella.  Cal ice hockey has built an internship program with a marketing and broadcasting team, and intermissions typically feature youth hockey teams going at it.

“More people know about us now,” Arneson said.

Cal players and coaches wonder how many more people would know about them if they had an ice rink on the Cal campus. Being undefeated is a pretty good argument for that cause, and who knows how far Cal can go in this postseason.

The Bears are the top seeds in the Pac-8 playoff starting Friday (today) in Cheney, Washington, hoping to win the conference title for the first time since 2004.

And then it’s perhaps on to the regionals in Westminster, Colorado, February 20-22, when Cal might get three of its top players back from injuries.

And then maybe, just maybe, Cal can qualify for the ACHA nationals to be held in March in St. Louis.

What would it take for Cal to reach the nationals for the first time since 1996 and just the second time ever?

Well, for one thing, no key players can get locked out of their rooms.

Cal hockey team / Photo by Spencer Lee

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