*Story by Tony Garcia from the Detroit Free Press*

The year was 2005.

Adrian College's enrollment had dwindled from more than 1,000 students to 850.

Jeffrey Docking, a Lansing native and avid sports fan, had just become president of the college. Four months in, he enters his first major meeting with trustees and lays it all out on the table.

"I've got good news and bad news," he recalls saying that day. "The good news is I have a plan to save Adrian College. The bad news is, it's going to cost a lot of money."

Docking said he was trying to get into the mind of an 18-year-old. He said he knew at the time if the school didn't "grow and grow quickly, there would be severe financial difficulty at the college.

So how could Adrian differentiate itself from not only from the thousands of schools across the country, but specifically the nearly 1,000 other liberal arts colleges?

"I decided that there are lot of students who really would want to continue to play their sport or do a curricular activity like marching band, or student newspaper or even bass fishing," Docking said.

Docking looked at his trustees with one request.

"I told them we need 30 million dollars," Docking said over the phone, a chuckle at the end as if he's only now realizes what that ask must have sounded like. "Keep in mind this was a school that had never borrowed more than three or four million dollars at a time.

"There were a lot of nervous trustees."

Return on investment
 

Docking said he would raise half the money, but needed the school to borrow the other half.

He told them $6.5 million of it would go to building a hockey rink — a bold request for a school — competing in Division III, the smallest of the NCAA divisions — that didn't have a hockey team at the time. The rest, he said, would go to improving other facilities, hiring coaches and the overhead costs of doing business, such as uniforms and equipment.

"Who's going to tell the new guy we're not going to build a rink," one board member said that day.

Fast-forward to today.

The college has gone from 16 (eight men and eight women) NCAA and club teams on campus to 50. There were six full-time coaches on campus 17 years ago. Now there are 78. Back then, the school had 230 athletes. This past year there were just shy of 1,300.

"That was the whole model," said Adrian athletic director Michael Duffy. "We were going to start sporting teams to drive enrollment."

That enrollment is now 1,850.

It's why the tears from all the grown men on the rink in late March in Lake Placid, New York, were so pure. Adrian winning the Division III hockey national championship brought out such raw emotion.

A vision, birthed nearly two decades ago that laid everything on the line, came full circle in the same city as the greatest victory in the history of American sports — The Miracle on Ice.

'I'm still ticked off about it'

Docking and Duffy kept an open mind about the sports, clubs and activities they would add to the college. No sport would be too large, and nothing too obscure.

The school now has men's and women's rugby, is known nationally for its bass fishing and even has competitive cornhole. 

Duffy has been the school's athletic director the past 22 years. He has worked at the college for 38 years — spending 44 total years of his life there if you consider his time as a student — and coached everything from football to baseball to track & field.

While the bulk of Docking and Duffy's track records are good, not everything they attempted was successful.

"We tried field hockey and it just didn't work," said Duffy, who has been Docking's right-hand man in accelerating the athletic department. "We failed at some, but you know what we found the sports that fit us and we put them together."

The sport that was never in question was ice hockey. Docking was a stick boy for the Michigan State hockey team in his youth and fell in love with the game at an early age.

He saw untapped potential at Adrian College, given Michigan's cold weather climate and love of the game. So just a few years after he began, Arrington Ice Arena was born.
 
Task No. 2 was finding a coach. He landed on Ron Fogarty, a four-year player at Colgate and assistant at Bowling Green who began working with Docking and Duffy on a plan.

"I joined with them in November 2006 and we just started building a team," Fogarty recalls. "Went around recruiting a lot of captains, some 20-year-old freshmen ... and from that first class we set in motion a culture."

That culture was centered around a mantra, something written on the walls before a game had been played: "Tradition Never Graduates."

"We wanted to make sure everything that we did was known that it would impact the program either positively or negatively for years to come," he said. "Every single thing you do is the fabric for the program moving forward."

Things started somewhat slow in Year 1, going 3-3 through the program's first six games, before the team turned a corner. The Bulldogs won their final 23 games of the season, going 26-3 overall with hopes of making the 2008 Division III tournament.

Alas, they didn't make it.

The next season, the 1-0-1 Bulldogs dropped a game to Neumann College. It would be their final loss. They bounced back the next day, beating Neumann, 10-1, to finish the season with a 26-game winning streak and a 27-1-1 record.

Surely, that had to get the committee's attention.

"Unfortunately at that time, (the NCAA selection) wasn't by the PairWise or the RPI, where it's a black-and-white computer-based model," Fogarty said. "It was up to the committee and honestly, I think we were too good too fast.

"There was some animosity toward us or we would have been in."

Instead, Adrian was out, again. Who won that year's national championship?

Neumann.

"I'm still ticked off about it," said Adam Krug, a transfer from Wayne State, the first player Fogarty recruited to Adrian and the program's current coach. "You were sick to your stomach — I'm still sick to my stomach about those opportunities.

"You don't understand the selection criteria or process is when you're a 22-year-old college student ... we just thought it was win the league and get in. But they didn't let us in."

'Getting over the hump'

Docking, Duffy and Fogarty put their heads together to figure out how they could break through this barrier. The decision? Fill out the paperwork to get their conference champion an automatic bid to NCAA tournament.

That became official for the 2009-10 season and the Bulldogs haven't looked back. Adrian lost in the opening round of the tournament in 2010, before making a run in 2011.

After getting a bye through the first round, Adrian beat Elmira in the quarterfinals to make the program's first Frozen Four. There, the Bulldogs outlasted Oswego State, 5-3, to make it to the championship game.

But the Bulldogs were still learning. They gave up four power play goals in the championship, losing 4-3 to No. 1 seed St. Norbert.

That began a string of close calls. Adrian made the 2015 Frozen Four, this time as the No. 1 seed, but was upset by Trinity — the eventual national champions — 5-3.

Two years later, Adrian beat Wisconsin-Stevens Point to return to the semifinals. Would the third time be the charm?

That's where they ran out of gas, losing 5-4 to Norwich, again the team that would go on to win it all.

"We were so darn close and for whatever reason we just couldn't get it," said Krug, who returned to coach the Bulldogs in 2014 when Fogarty left to coach Princeton. "Bad bounces, bad penalties, it just was never in the cards."

The Bulldogs were back in the tournament in 2020. They'd won the final 13 games of the season, peaking at the right time.

Practicing on a Thursday afternoon before their opening-round game with Hobart, Krug felt his phone vibrate.

"I said, 'This isn't good,'" Krug remembers. "That's when I got the call ... and I'll never forget it."

That was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tournament, canceled.

"We were sitting on the bench together, just in disbelief," Krug said. "Little did we know that it was going to be something that flipped the world on its head. In that moment, it felt like we were screwed over, which clearly wasn't the case.

"But it was similar feelings to 2008-09. The (players) were sick to their stomach. Tears. A number of the guys just sat on the ice, some for an hour."

The 2021 tournament was canceled as well, making the 2022 tournament the first in three years and one Adrian felt like it had a chance for the taking.

The Bulldogs opened this season at Utica College when a COVID-19 outbreak hit the team.

Eleven players were held out, seven of them key players — including a senior captain, the starting goalie and two of the leading goal scorers.

After taking an early 2-0 lead, the Bulldogs — who only dressed 17 players when normally there are 22 — ran out of steam and lost, 3-2, in overtime.

That would be the final blemish of the season.

Adrian rattled off 31 consecutive victories and rolled into the tournament as the No. 1 seed. From there, the Bulldogs dominated the field, starting when they beat Hobart College, 7-2, in the quarterfinal.

That's when Krug said he "could feel it," and called his old coach and mentor, Fogarty.

"He and I chatted quite a bit this year and when we beat Hobart in the quarterfinals, we talked about how it was meant to be," Krug said. "We were going to Lake Placid, that's where the Final Four was supposed to be back when I was on the team in '08-09.

"He said, 'You know what, it's time to close the circle'."

Adrian did just that, beating Augsburg, 5-1, to advance to the championship and topping SUNY Geneseo, 5-2, in the final.
 
The first NCAA championship in school history, with all the key names from that first attempt — Docking, Duffy, Fogarty and Krug — on hand.

"It was emotional for me," said Fogarty of the moment the final buzzer sounded. "From the day I walked onto campus when Arrington Ice Arena was just a pile of dirt, to see it come full circle was almost an exhale. Like it's done, the mission was completed.

"It took a lot of great people to execute it, Adam (Krug) and President Docking and Mike Duffy were gracious enough to invite me to celebrate on the ice with them. ... It was one of the top moments of my life that I'll always remember, because of just being included and being a part of something that I didn't have to be included in."

The best part, according to those closest to a program? It was all a team effort.

Not one star, but a group of stars.

Adrian had 13 wins against top-20 teams, according to PairWise. They led the nation in goals per game (5.97), finished second in scoring margin (4.03) and ranked fifth on the power play (29.5%).

Ten forwards averaged at least one point per game, while goalie Cam Gray, defenseman Matt Eller and forward Alessio Luciani were all named first-team All-Americans and forward Sam Ruffin was on the second team.

Krug was named American Hockey Coaches Association National Coach of the Year.

Finally, everything came together.

"I told my wife that outside of the family, having children and grandchildren and all of those things, that that was one of the happiest moments of my entire life," Docking said. "I felt like after all those years, it was a dream fulfilled."

'In a word, trust'

Duffy also called it one of the best moments of his professional life, and said it's about more than just the win, but instead what the win represents.

"It all just worked out really well," Duffy said of Docking's vision. "Building enrollment through extracurriculars (worked) and the neat thing now is that carries over to academics."

The Division III men's ice hockey program is one of just seven teams at the school that uses the rink. There's a women's team, various levels of men's and women's club hockey teams as well as figure skating.

The club baseball team has a formidable reputation and the men's rugby team went to the national championship in its first year.

But the board of trustees could've shook their head at Docking's bold vision. Duffy, who had been there decades before Docking arrived, didn't have to buy in.

Fogarty happened to be the right guy for the hockey job and bringing in Krug to follow him up kept the culture where it needed to be. But what was the secret?

"In a word, trust," Fogarty said. "When I first went to Adrian, I trusted Docking and Duffy with their vision. When I recruited Adam, he trusted me as the coach. When I left to go to Princeton, Docking and Duffy trusted me to recommended Adam. Then the program trusted Adam to continue the ways off and on the ice with the culture.

"Everyone had trust from the beginning and had trust we'd reach that pinnacle."