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.
“This is something I’ve wanted since I was a kid, growing up in an all-Black hockey program in Fort Dupont with the Fort Dupont Cannons,” Abercrombie told me during our interview. “I knew that this was not only possible but that it could be done with excellence.”
The easy part was accepting the job.
The hard part was putting it together.
“You have to have your different focus points. You have to have a clear and direct vision on what it is you want to achieve with regards to scheduling, recruiting, fundraising, community engagement,” he said. “But you can’t do it all at once, especially since you only have one individual working on pretty much everything.”
So Abercrombie had to replace his coach’s hat with an entrepreneurial one. He attacked fundraising first because without money, he wouldn’t be able to purchase essentials like equipment and rink time, the latter for both practices and games. The Predators had a few rinks available, but he had to evaluate travel time, number of seats and cost to determine which one was most realistic.
These aren’t issues football or basketball coaches encounter, another reason why the job takes a special type of person.
Fortunately, he has a great partner in the Nashville Predators, so with a few calls, Abercrombie got approval for three of the arenas.
He’s also fortunate to have an institution fully vested in building success and providing the needed support, including an estimated $2.5 million first-year investment.
This is even more impressive when you remember that the university is experiencing serious financial challenges.
But what would you expect from the school that produced great athletes like Wilma Rudolph, Richard Dent, Ed Jones and Eldridge Dickey.
“The athletic department and the school as a whole are showing that not only do we want to have a certain level of success, we want to have great success going into the future,” said Abercrombie.
So how does a Black kid from D.C. get into hockey? Better yet. How does that kid stay connected to hockey while at Hampton, which was devoid of a team?
Fortunately for him, there were youth hockey programs with kids who looked like him, so he grew up playing the sport in comfort.
And when he got to Hampton, he simply carried his stick around on campus and practiced while walking.
Despite not playing for a team in college, he never lost touch with the game. It even became a point of connection between him and his future wife, who he met at Hampton, as her father was a fan of the LA Kings.
Duanté’s relationship with hockey afforded him and his family a great future.
“It has run through our families and we now ended up building our own family and our kids have been able to travel the world because of hockey and also to see hockey,” he told me.
The sport has placed him in the coach’s box at an institution with no history of the sport. While it’s a major challenge, it’s also an opportunity to build something special and silence any doubt.
So he’s on the road and pounding the pavement, looking for players and sponsors who understand the vision and commit to helping him build the future he saw as a young player in DC.
Abercrombie had to find 20 players to field his team, and he’s basically there now, but changing NCAA legislation and other challenges in the evolving college landscape have created additional barriers for the program that he must navigate through and around.
“We are one of 65 options on the division one level for these athletes to choose from,” he told me, stressing the competitive recruiting challenge he faces. That’s why he’s looking for players in places like Canada, Sweden and Germany, some of which aren’t necessarily of a darker shade.
And if he’s questioned about those players, he’s prepared for that conversation.
Abercrombie isn’t afraid to punch up and is working on scheduling teams from some of the best conferences in the country including the Big Ten, Hockey East and the NCHC.
Tennessee State will be an independent to start and the program is eligible for the NCAA postseason as they have more than the minimum of 20 games scheduled.
And Abercrombie is aiming to hit the max of 34.
The Weight of Being the First
Being the first at anything has its positives and negatives, but Abercrombie’s enthusiasm, passion, dedication and belief in the program creates more of the former than the latter.
“We’re going to be different,” he told me. “We need to be different. Hockey needs us to be different.”
The Tigers are different simply for being an HBCU hockey team and they take pride in that difference.
That’s why their slogan is “Hockey, our way.”
“It’s not a racial statement. It’s not saying that this is the Black way of playing hockey,” he said. “Tennesse State hockey will play hockey and operate our way.”
We all know that representation matters and that’s true for Duanté Abercrombie and his journey to Tennessee State.
He, and other Black kids, were able to get involved with hockey in D.C. thanks to Neal Henderson, the founder of the Fort Dupont Ice Hockey Club and the first Black inductee of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.
More than three decades later, Abercrombie gets to represent an HBCU with a fledging program in a sport that, traditionally, doesn’t feature many people who look like him, especially in the coaching ranks.
He now joins a select few such as Arcadia’s Kelsey Koelzer and Jayson Payne, head coach of the ECHL’s Cincinnati Cyclones.
Koelzer was the first Black female ice hockey head coach in the history of the sport and Payne is currently the only Black head coach in pro hockey.
Now Duanté Abercrombie adds his name to a list of Black coaches that includes Koelzer, Payne, Ed Wright (hired by the University of Buffalo as the first Black collegiate hockey coach) and Dirk Graham (the Chicago Blackhawks made him the NHL’s first, and only, Black head coach).
“I knew this day would come. There’s nothing like being first, but you also want to make sure that you’re not the last so we want to make sure that we do it right so that everyone sees a good example so that we can have the next HBCU and the next HBCU join as well,” said Abercrombie.
And the best part of his history-making moment is that he’s doing it at an HBCU institution as an HBCU alum in a sport many thought would never be housed at an HBCU.
That’s the opportunity hockey has afforded Duanté Abercrombie.
