Breaking The ice

Coach’s Corner with Joe Mullen 

Joe Mullen and his team used their most recent loss to Team Trottier in the Grand Rapids Final as motivation, and that motivation pushed them back to the Final against Team Murphy in Hershey. For the fourth time this season, Team Mullen has made an appearance in the Final and their win in Hershey marked the third time they’ve left a city as the weekend champions. 

“The guys are loving it, I'm loving it myself, and it’s almost a surreal feeling,” Head Coach Mullen said. “Going in when you start the tournament, you’re really just trying to get through each and every round, and especially the first round because that's the one that's going to knock you out the quickest. We're finding ourselves in the finals all the time, which is a great thing for us because it's always exciting to win.” 

The Mullen approach of taking it one game at a time has resulted in a lot of success for the Yellow Team, and it certainly paid off for another championship title in Hershey. Just like every other week, Mullen credits the success to everybody on the team with a special shoutout to goaltender Jake Theut. There were a couple of games where Mullen felt his team took a lot of penalties, but Theut stopped everything that came his way to keep his team in the game. 

“Everybody does their job that I ask them to do,” Mullen said. “I ask them to play both ways (defensively and offensively) and they do a very good job at that, they kind of got it down. It's in their heads that this is the way our team plays, and this is what we got to do to win.”

Prior to the inaugural puck drop in Las Vegas, Mullen wasn’t quite sure what he had put together when it came to his team. In the first four weeks of the season, the head coach is beyond grateful for how quickly they came together off the ice and have developed on the ice.

“They all love playing with each other, and they just have so much fun together as a group,” Mullen said. “So, I just sit back and kind of watch sometimes. They're in the dressing room every week and they're talking hockey, talking about how the next game is going to develop for us, and what we need to do to win.”