This is the first of two parts; click here to read Part 2

There is no debating Frank Serratore’s impact on the Air Force Academy hockey program.

The veteran coach, who is wrapping up his 25^th regular season at the helm of the Falcons vs. Atlantic Hockey rival RIT this weekend, is by far the program’s winningest coach (422 victories and counting). He has led the Falcons to seven Atlantic Hockey championships and that achievement’s commensurate NCAA appearances, and three times in a nine-year span AFA reached the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight.

But his successes extend well beyond that. He’s codified regional rivalries by teaming up with fellow coaches to launch the Gold Pan Trophy between Colorado College and Denver and the Pike’s Peak Trophy between Air Force and CC. He’s even helped launch college hockey leagues and a high-level youth hockey program in Colorado.

In the process, Serratore has had a hand in helping train military leaders in an array of professional disciplines and helped grow the sport he so dearly loves in Colorado and beyond. These are 25 years is worth celebrating.

This two-part series of stories will take a look at Serratore’s career through the eyes of nearly a dozen sources who know him well and have crossed paths with him at the various junctures of his career.

The early years

Before there was Frank the coach, there was Frank the player. A goalie by trade, he won a United States Hockey League (USHL) championship with the St. Paul Vulcans in the late 1970s. He played collegiately for Western Michigan and then Bemidji State, closer to his hometown of Coleraine in Minnesota’s Iron Range, and briefly in the Central Hockey League in 1982.

Bemidji was a hothouse for developing hockey coaches, and teaching the sport held quite a bit of appeal for him.

“Frank is older by seven years, and he always wanted to be a coach,” said his brother Tom, who has been Bemidji State’s coach since 2001. “Coach Bob Peters inspired a lot of us, and Bemidji State was a coaching factory. Bob wanted to produce high school coaches because high school hockey is part of the fabric of Minnesota.”

Frank sandwiched highly successful coaching stints in the USHL around a two-year role as an assistant at North Dakota in the 1980s. He won three USHL Anderson Cups (league champions) and two Clark Cups (playoff championships) and won nearly 250 games in five seasons (1983-87 and 1989-90).

His teams’ achievements caught the eye of the University of Denver, which hired him in 1990 to replace Ralph Backstrom. In his four seasons, the needle began to point up for the Pioneers, who went from six wins during his first campaign to 19 during his third and 15 in this fourth.

He made lasting impressions in other ways, from how he advocated for his players to developing coaches – two trends that have become hallmarks of his. Sometimes those missions were one and the same. One of his former DU players, who later became an assistant coach at the Academy for 10 years, was Mike Corbett. Serratore had a major impact on his life from their first meeting.

“I had a son when I was 17. He was a year younger than Frank’s twin sons (Tim and Tom),” Corbett said. “When I was getting recruited that was 1991-92. My son was probably 2 years old, and I wasn’t married at the time. In those days, people wanted to make assumptions. I was the kid with baggage. I visited a few other schools. When I came to Denver we did the tour, and you have that final meeting with the coach, and I liked it.

“Now that I’m a recruiter I see I had different goals in mind than most kids. I had my girlfriend, I had my son. They were going to come to school with me. I’ve got see if this is going to work. And he kind of looked at me, as Frank does with his peculiar face, and I didn’t know what he was going to say because other coaches weren’t as open to it. He says, ‘Is that it?’ Yeah. ‘Well, that’s fine.’ So I said, ‘That’s it, I’m coming.’”

Once Corbett’s junior hockey season ended, he and his girlfriend (now wife) and young son moved to Denver and went right to work at a trucking company, Mike on the docks, his wife Stacey in the office.

“I had to know if this was going to work personally, and not a lot of people were willing to take that on,” Corbett said. “That’s all it took. I knew this is the type of guy I want to be around, the type of program I want to be a part of. You’re a young guy, 19 or 20 years old, and people are saying you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that. He was like, OK, we’ll help you when maybe a lot of people weren’t willing to help you so much as judge you.

“Frank was fairly intense in those days, as he is now, but Denver was building. With a class that was before me with Angelo Ricci, Paul Koch, John McLean and those guys, we were going to be good.”

The commonality of being parents of young children gave Corbett a perspective his teammates couldn’t possibly have had.

“I got to see how (his then infant daughter) Carly made the toughest guy in the building’s heart melt,” Corbett said. “I didn’t think he was that tough. He could yell at me all day, but I saw Frank in a different light than every one of my teammates. That’s one of the most unique things. He could yell at me all day, then I’d say I don’t have day care tomorrow, I’ve got to bring my kid to the rink, is that OK? He’d look at me and say of course you can.

“Any help I needed, he and Carol would help us. I got married after my freshman year, and my wife would go over to their house and the kids would play. They were helping this young couple. It was bigger than hockey, and at that time hockey could be bigger than anything. But Frank was the one who made sure I understood it was bigger than hockey. And those are the things you don’t understand about Frank until you’re gone, the sacrifices he makes for players. As intense as he is at times with all his players, sometimes you love your coaches, sometimes you don’t, but Frank would always do whatever he could for his players.”

When the DU athletic department pivoted, Serratore didn’t get to see the rebuild all the way through. The Pioneers, relying on several players he had recruited and coached, went to two Elite Eights and ascended in the WCHA in George Gwozdecky’s first three seasons.

“We inherited a lot of talent throughout the lineup,” Gwozdecky recalled. “What hurt the team the first couple years was when the school released Frank and his staff, they had an outstanding recruiting class coming in but the change happened before the signing period. There were six or seven really talented players. Let’s just say the vultures moved in right away.”

From Moose to Falcons

Serratore went into pro hockey after his four years at DU, serving as the coach and general manager of the International Hockey League’s Minnesota Moose in 1994-95 and the franchise’s director of hockey operations in 1996, when it took up residence in Manitoba.

Meanwhile in Colorado Springs, the Academy had enjoyed some success throughout its almost three decades fielding a hockey team under legendary coach Vic Heyliger (who had won six national championships at Michigan after a brief NHL career), and then John Matchefts, and finally former Falcons star Chuck Delich, who tallied an NCAA-record 156 goals in 109 games and still ranks 10^th in NCAA history in points. Both Heyliger and Matchefts, who played for Heyliger as well as coached under him, are in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. It’s worth noting Matchefts and Delich each guided Falcons teams to five winning seasons and amassed 154 victories.

There was one qualifier, Tom Serratore said. “Air Force was Division I in name, but they still had to play a good chunk of games against Division III schools.”

Falcons associate head coach Joe Doyle, also part of Delich’s staff in the 1990s, was a member of AFA’s class of 1989 that was the first to have four winning seasons. He actually took his future boss on a tour of the Academy during his interview process in 1997.

“I had lived a scenario where Air Force hockey had been successful,” Doyle said. “We’d beaten some top 10 teams. I knew deep down it was possible. I made that clear to him on his visit.

“I was still in the Air Force but had to move. But I told him if anyone can get Air Force to the Frozen Four it will be you. I did believe the program could get back on track, more was possible. But I’d be foolish to say I thought this would happen.”

What happened, in the words of Ken Martel, now USA Hockey’s Technical Director of the American Development Model but a one-time player for Serratore in the USHL and an assistant at the Academy during Serratore’s first season, was “One of the great success stories from a college coaching perspective.”

Preparing for lift-off

Derek Schooley, one of Serratore’s players during his Clark Cup championship season with Omaha in the USHL, was hired as an assistant at Air Force before Serratore’s second season. He stayed five years then was hired to launch Robert Morris’ Division I program in 2004.

“We still used wood sticks while the rest of the world was going to composites, we had a hard time beating Division III teams at times,” Schooley recalled. “We had to get better players, better equipment, better everything.”

This was the type of challenge Frank was well equipped for, his brother said.

“No. 1, Frank thinks outside the box,” Tom Serratore said. “He had a plan for what they needed to do to be successful, and he was determined to do it.”

Doyle returned to the program in 2002 as an assistant coach. The strides were stunning to him.

“He did two things in those first three to five years that were seismic in their impact,” Doyle said. “First, he got the administration to agree to allow players from juniors to enroll. It helped that one of his first ones, Scott Bradley killed it as a player, then went on to fly F-22s. But that was a big battle.

“We have a hard enough time winning with 20-year-olds. We had zero chance if we had to start with 18-year-olds. He worked hard to educate the administration on how hockey works, and they bought in. There is a maturity level to these guys, an accountability level, that overtook any concerns about how they might handle school after being out of high school a couple years.”

Item No. 2 on the checklist was just as big, and its impact ushered in change across Division I hockey. Serratore worked tirelessly to get College Hockey America off the ground, in the process giving schools such as Bemidji State, Army West Point, Niagara and Alabama Huntsville, where Corbett eventually landed as head coach, a conference to play in and a path into the NCAA Tournament.

“When I was there, we were a travelling road show,” Doyle said. “When you saw Feb. 28 on the schedule, you knew that was your last game. Period.

“Frank created CHA, did the legwork, got the administration on board. … Now you’re in it until the last game. Creating that league has had a longstanding impact for a lot of schools.”

The question was asked at the time, why not join an established league such as the WCHA with natural rivals Denver and Colorado College a short drive away?

“He wanted to do (conference participation) smartly,” Doyle said. “That’s a strength of his – he has one eye on the present and one eye on the future.”

The next step in the progression came in 2006, when Air Force joined Atlantic Hockey, a move Army West Point had made in 2000 and Niagara would make 10 years later. The Falcons’ transition coincided with RIT’s move up from Division III to Division I. One or the other of those two programs were either regular-season or playoff champions in all but two years from 2007 to 2018. Air Force reached the Elite Eight in 2009, 2017 and 2018.

“He made our league better by the product they put on the ice at the Air Force Academy,” Army coach Brian Riley said. “It was like holy smokes, we’ve got to get to work so we can keep up with them. They were the standard. That forced everybody else to raise their game. When you see the new facilities being built, the scholarship increases, the coaching staffs, the league has made huge strides, and Air Force Academy deserves credit for sparking that.”

Riley will get no argument from Wayne Wilson, who has guided RIT since 1999. The Tigers became the first Atlantic Hockey team to reach the NCAA Frozen Four, when they did so in 2010.

“I’ve always felt that when you beat Air Force you’ve accomplished something,” Wilson said. “Frank’s teams are difficult to play against. He’s done a great job for a long time, and he set the bar high for every other team in our league.

“Everyone has pushed each other. Now it’s almost impossible to predict who will finish where because the league has gotten so tight, so competitive. It comes down to who’s healthy, who’s got the hot goalie.”

Mercyhurst’s Rick Gotkin is the one coach in Atlantic Hockey with a longer tenure at his school (34 years) than Serratore’s 25 at Air Force. His Lakers and the Falcons also routinely have been playoff combatants. He, too, believes the positives from the Falcons’ successes have had far-reaching impacts for the rest of the league.

“Air Force, and Army as well, by virtue of being service academies have given our league unbelievable exposure,” Gotkin said. “The on-ice excellence is clear. They’ve represented our league very well and helped raise our profile.”

Read Part 2 here

By Chris Bayee, Founder of AFAFlightPath.com

©First Line Editorial 2022