The Bishop Gorman High School hockey team has made the journey from Las Vegas to Irvine, California, several times this season.

It is a necessity for the Gaels, who hail from a city in a hockey desert. The sport continues to gain traction in Sin City thanks to the arrival of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights in 2017, but there’s still growth opportunities in Las Vegas. 

The Bishop Gorman program is in just its second season, and, once a month, the Gaels load up the bus and make the four-hour journey to Irvine to play against Southern California teams in a league sponsored by the Anaheim Ducks.

While the stop in Barstow, California, for some food to refuel will pretty much be the same, the reason for this upcoming trip is different.

Bishop Gorman will be playing in the 2025 Chipotle-USA Hockey High School National Championships Division 1A title.

“The level of — if you want to call it seriousness or importance — will definitely be there,” Kenny Brooks, head coach of Bishop Gorman, said. “But we're going to try and keep it as similar as possible for our boys. It really is cool that we get to play out of this rink and stay in the same hotel that we stay at every time we go down. Makes it feel like any other weekend in the sense of these are home games for us.”

While the setting will be to Bishop Gorman’s advantage, the three other teams it’ll face in the 1A field will have more experience. 

Brooks said the Gaels are just one of two nationally eligible high school programs in all of Nevada, joining Faith Lutheran, which started a few years prior to Bishop Gorman and has its home rink just seven minutes away from the Gaels’ Las Vegas Ice. But this year, Bishop Gorman jumped from Division 2 to Division 1 to play in the Anaheim Ducks league, while Faith Lutheran remained at Division 2.

Because of that, the two teams didn’t play this season before deciding which one would represent Nevada this weekend in Irvine with a best-of-three series. Bishop Gorman swept the series between the state’s two largest private schools, winning 5-3 and 4-0, to clinch the school’s first state title.

Not bad for a team in its second season of existence. 

Brooks has experience with a young program. The Vegas native left to play for the USHL’s Tri-City Storm in Kearney, Nebraska, before joining Penn State for their first season as an NCAA Division I team. There, he he learned about putting a program together, not knowing it would pay off for him more than a decade later. 

It also helps to be at a school with such a terrific sports program, led by the nationally recognized football and boys basketball teams. 

“I would say a couple of the bigger challenges were, No. 1, as a first-year program [last year], whether we had the Bishop Gorman name behind us or not, there's questions,” Brooks said. “Especially, no one knows what to expect. There's not a lot of people that are going to jump over and say, 'Hey, I'm going to go play for this new program when there's an established one that's already winning.' So definitely, year one, that was a challenge for us. Number two, and this is a Vegas hockey thing, not just our program, but it is tough to find games without having to spend a lot of money to travel. I mean, you look at our state for us, there's one team for us to play [in Vegas, Faith Lutheran] and this year, we didn't see them until states. So, unless we have someone coming down here or we're traveling away, there's no games.”

In addition to the top program moving up a division, Bishop Gorman expanded from two to four teams this season. There is also a Division 1 junior varsity team, a Division 2 varsity team and an under-16 team. Making it even better for Brooks is that the teams are comprised mainly of Gorman students, with a few from other schools also playing.

Meanwhile, the Golden Knights are helping to develop youth hockey by creating a league with eight coed teams, split into varsity and junior varsity levels, that will run April to July.

So, to be playing for a national championship in the program’s second season of existence is both a terrific accomplishment and a huge building block. Brooks said some of the goals the team is hitting now were items he had for “Year five, six or seven.”

Why the success at this stage? Some of it goes to having 15 seniors and five juniors on the roster.

“It's just the combination of personalities and players that we have on the team,” Brooks said. “I have not seen a team this close before, since I've been coaching. I'd like to think that I was hopefully on teams as close as this team is when I was playing, but just how they interact with each other. There's not only zero issues throughout the year, but extremely positive — and that's all the feedback I get from the parents, is just how great this team gets along and how much they enjoy spending time together.”

Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.