In 2020, Tennessee State had the crazy idea of starting an HBCU hockey team.
Ice hockey is expensive and completely foreign to HBCUs for there had never been an HBCU team. In 2021, determined to make it a reality, the university partnered with the Nashville Predators, College Hockey Inc., the NHL and the NHLPA on a feasibility study to see if it was a viable idea.
A year later, Tennessee State athletics director Mikki Allen and Predators President and CEO Sean Henry, committed to starting the first HBCU ice hockey program in history and announced they were pursuing this crazy idea.
“We have tremendous partnerships with the NHL and Sean Henry and the Predators behind us 110%,” said Allen to the Tennessean at the time. “Now we are assembling a TSU Friends of Hockey Fundraising Team. We are looking for other corporations. It could be a private gift out there or a public gift that could really help ignite this and propel us to where this becomes a reality.”
In 2023, that original dream became a reality as the school officially announced it was launching the program.
Allen hired Nick Guerriero as the Director of Hockey to build the foundation for the program, and then they started the search for a leader. Someone who played the game, could coach and, most importantly, be willing to claw and scrape to put a program together, recruit and build.
On April 18th, 2024, they announced that they had found that man in Duanté Abercrombie.
The Right Man in Charge
Abercrombie was a track athlete and Hampton University graduate who started playing hockey at the age of six in Washington DC. After graduating, he played in the New Zealand Ice Hockey League (NZIHL) and the Federal Hockey League (FHL) in the U.S.
After his playing days ended, he started coaching in 2019 at Stevenson University. Over the next few years, he became recognized for his work in the sport, including being named to The Athletic’s 40-Under-40 hockey list as an individual shaping the game’s future.
In 2023, he was a guest coach for the San Jose Sharks during training camp under head coach David Quinn and Mike Grier, who became the first Black general manager in NHL history when he was hired by the San Jose Sharks in June 2022.
He was also part of the Boston Bruins’ 2021-22 scouting mentorship program and while with the Arizona Coyotes’ “first-ever coaching internship program,” he was featured in ESPN’s NHL Bound, a four-part series that told the story of two Black hockey coaches pursuing their dream of working in the NHL.
Last season, Abercrombie worked with the coaching staff for the Toronto Maple Leafs organization, holding roles with the Leafs, the AHL affiliate Toronto Marlies and East Coast Hockey League affiliate, Newfoundland Growlers. There he learned about player scouting, analysis and development, preparing and executing practices and other coaching essentials.
There aren’t many Black coaches in the sport with those credentials, so Tennessee St knew they were getting a coach with the right tools and experience.
“I knew after our first interaction that Duanté was the right person to lead the charge,” said Guerriero. “His understanding of HBCU culture, the collegiate hockey landscape, and the NHL will benefit our team tremendously. I’m thrilled to work with Coach Abercrombie as we develop TSU Hockey into a championship-caliber program.”
Building a championship-caliber program takes time though, time which sports don’t often grant coaches, especially Black ones.
But Abercrombie is in it to win it.
