BSU Men’s Hockey’s Tom Serratore Named CCHA Coach of the Year

The season may be over for Bemidji State men’s hockey, but on Wednesday, head coach Tom Serratore was named CCHA Coach of the Year as voted on by his peers.

The Beavers’ bench boss led the team to a 20-win season for the eighth time in his 23 years at BSU, thanks in part to a Division I team-record 11-game unbeaten streak that began on February 9 and was only broken in the Mason Cup Championship. He also helped lead the team to a regular season conference title, hoisting the MacNaughton Cup for the first time since 2017.

While Coach of the Year is an individual award, Serratore says it took a collective effort.

“Any time you’re honored with an award, you realize you’re on a pretty good hockey team,” said Serratore in a phone interview with Lakeland News. “We had a great run, we had a great last two months and that probably was a separator in all this. The head coach kind of gets – you get the credit, you get the accolades. But, you know, we’re only a small part of it. It goes to everybody, it goes to the players, it goes to the coaches, it goes to the leadership group. And they’ve done a great job.”

This is Serratore’s eighth time being named conference coach of the year, and his first in the CCHA. He won it twice in the WCHA and five times in the CHA, including back-to-back wins in 2004 and 2005 and a three-peat from 2008 to 2010.