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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN HOCKEY MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 5, 2015

Mike Eaves

Madison, Wisconsin

Q. Can you sense an excitement building, especially amongst your returning players?
MIKE EAVES: There is excitement there on Saturday in the rink. I was telling our son Patrick, who plays with the Dallas Stars in the NHL now, training camp you can only be in the rink for three hours, and that's not the way it used to be, believe me. They used to keep you there all day and skate you two or three times. So we had like an old-time-fashioned training camp for our guys on Saturday. We were on the ice for two hours in the morning with a break in between, and then gave them a break and came back at night. They loved it. It was a sign that the season had started, and they were excited.

We were kind of creative in what we did with the scrimmage, but I think they all enjoyed the fact that the season has started and we're full bore now.

Q. Dwelling on last year is not probably a good thing, but having shared that experience, for those who are coming back and the desire to avoid a similar kind of experience, is there a driving force that comes out of that?
MIKE EAVES: I'm sure there is. We don't talk about it. We haven't. I think we've got 10 new guys, the guys that come back. We talked about it more at the end of the last year. But the focus has been on what we're doing this year and the type of things we want to put into place as far as systems. We've got a whole new staff, as we said, 10 new freshmen. There's a lot of new things going on, and as we watch them play there are moments we see brilliance and there are moments we hang our heads a little bit and say, oh, boy, back to the drawing board, but that's what you expect when you've got 23 underclassmen. I think we're a faster team. I think we have more depth with our skill. And saying all that, we have to find a starting goaltender. So there's a lot of moving parts right now, but we do see moments of brilliance, which is a good thing.

Q. You mentioned there the goaltender spot; do you have any clarity coming, or is that going to be evolving over the course of the year? Do you spend to pick one and ride it for a while or what's your approach?
MIKE EAVES: Well, I think right now it's an everyday thing. We rate them every day as we go through, and we'll do that right up until Wednesday and then we'll have to make a decision on Thursday.

We see good things from all of them, and it'll be a cumulative effect up until Thursday. You know what, like so many decisions that are made in sports or in life, you have to make a gut call then, and we'll make that call on Thursday after practice.

Q. You mentioned with all the change in the players that you haven't talked much about what happened last year, but with the season the way it went, changes on the coaching staff and all those things, what did it do for you, whether it's motivation, focus, game planning? What's changed or what was the off-season like for you?
MIKE EAVES: The off-season was tremendously busy because of the fact that for a while there, the guy sitting in front of you was doing four jobs. We had to hire two coaches, a director of hockey ops, our director of video left, so it was a busy summer, and it just carried on. It actually was -- it was a chore until we hired the two young men, and then once they were there, the energy level went right off the charts.

Hiring John Hamre as our director of hockey ops has been really good. John and I have worked together before at the national development plan in Ann Arbor, so I knew John, and I think he's come in and just hit the carpet running. Associate head coach Luke Strand, he's been, as we talked about when we hired him, he's worked with Kevin Constantine, so we have the same Ph.D. professor in him. JB Bittner, he loves to recruit, and that's what you want in that second assistant. That's how he kind of measures his daily -- he wakes up thinking about it, and he goes to bed thinking about it, and that's a good thing for us.

Q. From what you've seen from Luke Strand on the ice, what type of coach is he would you say?
MIKE EAVES: You know, when I sit back and I listen to Luke, I think there are a lot of similarities between the two of us. He has a lot of energy. He has a very good working knowledge of what he's talking about. He's a good teacher in terms of knowing at the board. He doesn't spend a lot of time. His directions are simple and explicit. When it comes to video, he knows that less is more.

There's a lot of similarities, and I think that we can -- we can hand a ball off back and forth between one another, and you've got two people, if I'm looking at the offense, he can take the play without the puck and vice versa, so I think he gives us a real strength there.

Q. With how last season panned out, is there added pressure this year to kind of turn things around and say that's not us?
MIKE EAVES: You know, it's funny, I think whenever you ask a coach a question about pressure, I think you always kind of get the same answer, that they put pressure internally on themselves to be successful, whether it's Paul Chryst coming in here, and he got that question a lot last spring when he got the job. Everybody wants to do well, and it's always there. It exists all the time. And having, I think Paul being here, player, coach, before leaving, coming back, I think we have higher stock in the fact that we are the head coaches here because there's great pride. Is pressure a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's how you handle it, and I think the guys that are here do a pretty good job of handling it in a positive way.

Q. A lot of new forwards, too. Could you be specific about a couple of them, Luke Kunin, Seamus Malone? Both put up some pretty good numbers last year.
MIKE EAVES: Well, one of our challenges last year was scoring, and I think these two young men come in with a history of doing that, and I think you take a look at Luke Kunin and the fact that he played about 20, 25 college games last year and put up some good numbers, so I think he comes in a with a little -- he's got a little step ahead of Seamus, but both guys have that offensive flair and they're gritty, and they do a lot of good things, and we're hoping they can step in, and they're going to be given kind of that opportunity to do that right away.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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