BOWLING GREEN — Ty Eigner is the first one to say he’s a simple man.
The new head hockey coach at Bowling Green State University always foresaw a career within the game without much thought given to anything else.
“I was never going to go to law school or become a doctor or run a Fortune 500 company,” Eigner said.
Most of all, Eigner wanted to coach at the college level — a dream that, in his case, required more than a decade of patience and a cross-country risk to achieve.
From 1996 to 2010, Eigner coached high school hockey in Minnesota and was on the verge of becoming a decorated lifer in the state’s robust prep hockey scene.
In 2008, the family moved from Brainerd, Minn., where Eigner had been a head coach, to the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie to be closer to family. As an assistant, Eigner helped Eden Prairie High School to the state championship, and his family had a fulfilling life in the Twin Cities.
Then came a call from Chris Bergeron, with whom the Eigners were close.
In 2010, Bergeron was a finalist for the head coaching position at BGSU, where Eigner was a captain as a player. In the event Bergeron earned the job, he wanted Eigner to be one of his assistant coaches.
Eigner had just turned 40 years old and had not spent a minute coaching college hockey. Bowling Green was in the midst of a full-scale rebuild, and Bergeron was a first-time head coach. Eigner and his wife, Erika, had three young children and had just built a new house in Minnesota.
But this was his chance to chase a dream, and Erika told him as much.
“Without hesitation, she said, ‘This is what you wanted,’” Ty said.
About six months after they moved their belongings into their brand new house, they loaded up the moving truck again and headed 650 miles away to Bowling Green.
Staying put would have been easy — and even reasonable — but the Eigners thought they could not pass on the opportunity.
“I believe in Ty and what he does,” Erika said. “I have not ever met anyone quite as passionate as he is about what he does, and I think you’re really lucky when you can love what you do and make a living at it.
“I don’t think there are a lot of people in the world who are able to do that, so it’s always been something I’ve been support of and open to.”
But revamping Bowling Green was a different story entirely.
The Falcons, to put it mildly, were a project.
They had won five games the season before, almost been cut as a varsity sport a year earlier, their facility was outdated, and their roster was galaxies away from being competitive. Bergeron’s final game as an assistant at Miami was the national championship game, and the change from that level to his new job at BGSU was jarring.
Ty, on the other hand, was thrilled to finally be a college coach, even if they were starting at the ground floor of Division I hockey.
“For Berge, it was difficult because he was coming from a program that had just been in two straight Frozen Fours to now, ‘What is this?’ ” Ty said. “I’d come to the rink real excited about what we’re trying to do, and he’d come into the rink like, ‘Holy cow, what did I get myself into?’ It was a little bit of a balance between the two of us.”
Bit by bit, though, Bowling Green built a winner.
The Eigners had known Bergeron for almost 20 years and thought he was the type of person who would not accept failure as a head coach.
Conversely, Bergeron gives a great deal of credit to Ty and assistant Barry Schutte for their exhaustive recruiting efforts.
At the beginning, Bowling Green was borderline toxic to recruits in nearby places like Michigan and Ontario. Players were wary of the program being cut and not exactly storming the gates to play for a losing team.
So Ty and Schutte began traveling everywhere from British Columbia to Quebec to find quality players who did want to play for BG, and before long, the Falcons were churning out pro hockey players again.
“The recruiting is what makes college athletics, and they were the two that ran the recruiting,” Bergeron said. “They were the guys that had people not call them back for the first two or three years, and they just kept pursuing and kept pushing and kept raising the bar in terms of the type of hockey player we could get without sacrificing the type of person we were getting.”
Lee Smith, the longtime coach of Eden Prairie High School, said Ty’s best qualities made him a natural recruiter at the college level.
Smith said Ty’s honesty, work ethic, and structure are apparent upon meeting him, which translates to the recruiting trail.
“What mom or dad doesn’t want their kid to be part of that?” Smith said. “There are kids who have that have the desire to build something, and if you find the right ones who are hungry to change something and you put them on the ice together, you can create something special.”
The Falcons have won 20-plus games five consecutive times, and their NCAA tournament berth in 2018-19 was their first since 1990. After the season, Bergeron accepted the head coaching position at Miami, his alma mater, leaving BG in the market for a new coach.
After a search, Bowling Green named Ty its next head coach.
The program finds itself in a good position, and he will be the one leading the next charge with a new title: Division I head coach.
Ty said he never had to be talked into college coaching. After nine years of behind the scenes work, his sizable career risk in 2010 bore fruit.
“It was a difficult decision, but it was not one we worried about,” Ty said. “It was what we wanted. We waited a long, long time for this.”
First Published May 4, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
