Cisek thriving in return role at Miami

When Miami made a head coaching change in mid-March, assistant Zack Cisek‘s future was a complete uncertainty.

He had spent four seasons in two stints as a RedHawks coach, including an assistant role the previous two campaigns, but MU began interviewing candidates for the RedHawks’ next head coach, and typically new staffs bring in their own assistants.

Fortunately for Cisek, Anthony Noreen realized Cisek’s coaching and recruiting prowess and decided to retain him from the previous regime.

“Coach Noreen had contacted me after he was hired and had expressed an interest in getting to know me,” Cisek said. “We didn’t really know each other very well, and we were able to sit down and let it play out for a couple of weeks and make sure it was something that it’s something that’s a fit on both sides. I’m obviously very thankful that I have an opportunity to continue here.”

Cisek has been a major asset on the Miami recruiting landscape, including in Europe, landing the team’s only non-transfer NHL draft pick.

Cisek grew up in Canton, Mich., between Ann Arbor and Detroit, in a home his mother still lives at, and while no one in Cisek’s family played hockey, his neighbors did. Cisek and he and his father watched the Red Wings religiously, so Cisek decided he wanted to play.

He still isn’t sure how he ended up in net.

“In terms of the goalie piece, I have no idea,” Cisek said. “I think I liked what the equipment looked like, and then maybe the control freak in me – I liked the idea of the pressure. To me that was interesting. I didn’t think about it that much at time when I was picking goalie – that wasn’t going through my head – but now that I think about it, I can see why I was probably leaning that way.”

When Cisek was in elementary school, his father took him to a Detroit Catholic Central game, and from then on that was his destination high school.

Cisek played all four of his high school seasons there, and his senior year he posted a 1.50 goals-against average and .920 save percentage in 26 games.

He also played soccer, basketball and golf growing up and played third base and catcher on his baseball team freshman and sophomore seasons where he exceled defensively, but he gave up all other sports to concentrate on hockey his final two prep campaigns. 

Cisek took a stab at juniors, dressing for three NAHL teams in 2011, including New Mexico and Traverse City, and he especially enjoyed the latter within his home state.

“Just a beautiful area,” Cisek said. “The winters get kind of rough but outside of that it was awesome.”

But after logging just 283 minutes and posting a save percentage in the low .800s, Cisek didn’t latch onto any juniors programs in his age-out year, and that off-season he wasn’t excited about any of his other hockey prospects.

“I was awful, I just wasn’t good enough,” Cisek said. “It was what it was — that’s the life of a goalie.”

Because that process ran so far into the summer, Cisek was unable to enroll in any major university, so he attended community college.

After a year, Cisek transferred to Michigan State, where he was lured by the psychology department and ultimately earned a degree in that field in 2015.

In his first two collegiate years, hockey was an afterthought.

Then in the fall of 2013, his junior year, one of the Spartans’ goalies had hernia surgery just as the season started, so he got a call from Adam Nightengale (then the hockey operations coordinator and now the head coach at MSU) saying he needed someone to practice with the team for several weeks.

Cisek was excited for the opportunity, especially since he knew many of the players on the Spartans, and he ended up staying on with the program for his final two college years, although he never played a minute for MSU.

As a psychology major, the possibility of coaching was something he had entertained during his collegiate career (Mike Babcock won a Stanley Cup behind the bench after earning a psychology degree from McGill University), and his first opportunity in that field would bring him to Oxford as a volunteer coach.

Cisek was interested in the sports psychology Master’s program at Miami, which also boasted a Division I hockey program with a solid reputation for advancing its unpaid coaches.

“I was at a Big 10 school, and East Lansing is enormous, and I very much enjoyed my time there, (but Miami’s) campus size and the community definitely fit my personality a little more,” Cisek said. “Just little details like the grass is always green…I could talk about this campus forever.”

In 2015-16, Cisek’s first season in Oxford, one of the RedHawks’ regular goalies was kicked off the team in early January. With Miami down to two netminders on its roster, and with Cisek’s goalie background, he was forced between the pipes in practices, donning a Michigan State helmet.

“That was obviously a unique dynamic, coming in to coach my first year – I would say half of those kids were older than me,” Cisek said. “What was fortunate about that whole situation is because I was the traditional walk-on at Michigan State, I still had years of eligibility, so they just had to roster me.”

Miami rode one goalie for all but a handful of minutes of the second half of that season but made use of Cisek in practices and was an emergency option for the RedHawks in net.

“That was a funny second semester, that was definitely not was I was anticipating, but sometimes that’s just what happens and you have to figure out a way to help,” Cisek said.

Following two seasons as a graduate assistant at Miami — where he met his eventual wife, Emily, in the psychology department — Cisek was considering a move to an assistant in junior hockey, which he perceived as his best route to ascend the coaching ladder.

Then Notre Dame coach Jeff Jackson called. He was looking for a volunteer assistant, and Cisek jumped at the opportunity.

“That was probably the best professional decision I’ve made,” Cisek said. “The volunteer position, you don’t get paid so you have to find your way to do lessons and to pay rent and to pay your car, but just being able to work with coach Jackson…it was a crash course in coaching and it was just unbelievable to be around those people.”

And the Fighting Irish advanced to the national championship game that season, losing 2-1 to Minn.-Duluth.

After just one season at Notre Dame, Lake Superior State came calling after a coach had accepted a job at prep-mecca Shattuck-St. Mary’s, and Jackson — having cut his teeth as head coach for LSSU — helped Cisek land an actual paying job with the Lakers under veteran Damon Whitten, with nine-year NHL veteran Mike York as an assistant.

“That was some of the most fun I’ve ever had, either coaching or just being around hockey, in my life,” Cisek said. “(Whitten) is an excellent coach, he’s a good communicator, gave me a lot of responsibility. I’m really proud to have been a part of those teams that were able to turn that thing around.”

In 2021, Cisek married Emily, who took a psychology professor job in St. Cloud, and the following summer, she moved to Sault Ste. Marie for what was supposed to be Cisek’s fifth season with the Lakers.

Unknown to Cisek, then-Miami assistant Eric Rud had accepted the head coaching job with Sioux Falls of the USHL, leaving head coach Chris Bergeron and associate coach Barry Schutte short an assistant.

(By a ridiculous coincidence, Rud’s wife lived in St. Cloud while he coached the RedHawks)

“We were probably in our new place for maybe a week, and then Berge and Barry called,” Cisek said. “It was really late…I think my start date was Sept. 1, which is crazy.”

The timing was obviously less than idea for Lake Superior State, but Whitten encouraged the move.

“He grabbed me and he said, ‘I know this is the right move for you and your wife’, and it didn’t matter when, even though it was bad timing,” Cisek said. “So I was so lucky that he was so gracious about it, but it definitely came out of the blue.”

In his time at Lake Superior State, Cisek had built a reputation for recruiting, as the Lakers won 23 games in 2018-19 and advanced to the NCAA Tournament two years later.

Cisek has shown a niche for locating European talent, such as freshman Casper Nassen, a 6-feet-4 Boston Bruins draft pick who is already playing on Miami’s top line, notching three goals and three assists in 12 games.

“I do go to Europe and I’ve been able to build some relationships there, and it’s something that I really like to do,” Cisek said. “We’ll see if they keep coming here.”

The RedHawks’ roster currently boasts players from Canada, Sweden, Slovakia and Latvia and Miami has high-level commits from Russia, Belarus and Austria in the pipeline.

“I think there’s a ton of access to seeing players from around the world, and I think that’s where recruiting, it’s just broadened,” Cisek said. “It used to be the Midwest kids were probably going to stay in the Midwest, and that was it. You have kids from all states going to all sorts of schools, so I just think whether it’s boots on the ground, or having relationships in lots of places that are maybe unfamiliar, they’re really key.”

But after developing a recruiting foothold for Miami in Europe and other places for two years, a coaching change was made this spring, and since assistants exist on perpetual one-year contracts, it appeared unlikely Cisek would return to Oxford this fall.

“You can’t do anything, there’s certainly no playbook for that,” Cisek said. “You just have to trust that whatever the next thing is is going to work out and that you’re going to surround yourself with people that you want to work with.”

Miami had just completed its ninth straight losing season when Noreen was hired, and the RedHawks were 15-50-7 the past two seasons with Cisek behind the bench.

“When you look at it from afar, it would have been very easy to say it’s a clean sweep of coaches and a clean sweep of players, and having said that, I think I owed it to everyone to at least get to know the guys and hear them out and see if maybe someone can be an asset to the university and the hockey team,” Noreen said. “And as I got to know Zack, man, he just impressed me more and more. Right when I got the job, the first thing I did was go to Nationals because I felt like I needed to go, hit recruiting right away, and I talked to him, I told him I was at Nationals, and he got on the next flight and met me there. For me, and the way I’m built, that was a really good start to the relationship to show me that I care and I’m all in and I’ll do whatever I need to do because I want to be here and I believe in this place.”

When Noreen was hired in April, he had only met Cisek briefly and only had a few words with him on a couple of occasions, but he recalled some earlier advice he had received from other coaches.

“I leaned on a lot of coaches that have come into similar situations — guys that I’ve leaned on and guys that I trust — and a lot of the most successful coaches in college hockey said, don’t count out that there might be a guy there, or multiple guys, that you may want to keep on staff that could be a huge help to you,” Noreen said. “(We were) coming into a little bit of the unknown, (but) they know the ongoings of the university, the academics, they know the area, they know how to set up a visit, where to go, thinks like that. I took that piece and I was open-minded. And the more I got to know Zack…I just can’t tell you how much I respect him and what he’s done and you look at his track record, and he’s worked with some pretty good coaches, and another guy that’s a lifer and a learner and he’s had to earn it.”

Noreen was impressed with not only the inroads Cisek has made in European recruiting, but his ability to evaluate North American talent as well.

Cisek’s hands are all over this season’s freshman class at the domestic level, with defensemen Michael Quinn and goalie Ethan Dahlmeir already making a major impact.

Quinn is already playing on the top pairing and has a goal and four assists in 12 games. Dahlmeir has a .905 save percentage and appears poised for a major role in the RedHawks’ net for the next few years.

“A lot of that was Zack’s doing, so that was important for me to see that, and see that, OK, here’s a guy who’s proven he can do this and he’s done it at a couple of places, and he loves this place,” Noreen said. “He came back at the time that he did because he believed (the program) could get turned around and he wants to be part of turning it around.”

Noreen hired two assistants he was intimately familiar with in David Nies and Troy Thibodeau, who were teammates at Southern Maine and both coached under Noreen at USHL Tri-City.

So Cisek was a bit of an outsider, but he said the adjustment has been an easy one.

“I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone,” Cisek said. “Going into a new staff is always an interesting dynamic, but I think I’ve been able to work for lots of really coaches now and really good staffs, and I think we’re all thinking about the same stuff, and that’s what’s made it easy — we all want to have success.”

Said Thibodeau: “He’s been tremendous in this process. It’s been great to have a guy that knows Miami hockey that can help us with certain things and has a great idea of how they’ve done things in the past, and we’ve been able to build a relationship with our staff, and Zack has been tremendous so far.”

In addition to his recruiting forte, Cisek has also been popular in the locker room since rejoining the coaching staff as a full-timer.

“I also think there’s a connection there with a lot of the players that think the world of him, and in what his role was (the previous two seasons), they think he did a really good job and really wanted him to be a part of staff moving forward,” Noreen said.

Recruiting has been a major focus for all four coaches, and in their recent blitz, Miami has already landed 22 commits for the next couple of seasons, according to eliteprospects.com.

Of them, 17 are playing in the USHL, the best-rated U.S. juniors league.

On Wednesday, Miami announced that 11 are joining the team — all of which are playing in the USHL this season — which means this program finally appears to be on an upward trajectory.

Cisek is largely to thank for the RedHawks’ recent recruiting upswing.

“I’m really excited for this program, it means a lot to all of us,” Cisek said. “I think of those kids that are here for all the right reasons…whatever role I can play in helping these kids get what they’re going to deserve. That’s what gets me excited.”