The women’s club hockey team celebrates its first Amateur Athletic Union national championship in Jacksonville, Florida.
Jordan Boron ’25 loved to play ice hockey, but she came to Syracuse University in 2022 because its sport management program in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics is widely considered one of the best sport management programs in the country.
Syracuse’s women’s club hockey team? Not so much.
But in Boron’s three winters on campus, the club team went from having only six players in the season before Boron arrived to going undefeated (20-0) and winning the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national championship in early March, with Boron as one of the team’s leading defensemen.
Turned out, Boron really could have it all at Syracuse.
“I am honored to be a part of this team and to be a part of how far it has come,” she says. “The team’s leadership has done incredible things to build out this program and our coaches, Christina Beam and Marty Sicilia, have been a huge part of that. This team is a group of deeply dedicated players that worked so hard to win that national title.
“That is what made this win so much better, the hard work that we all put into this team,” Boron says.
Jordan Boron (left) and Bryana Treon show off their national championship hats.
Boron is one of five Falk College students who played on Syracuse’s first women’s club hockey national championship team. The others are Sarah Anderson ’28 (health and exercise science and premed), Sophie Lauzon ’26 (public health), Neve Padulo ’28 (exercise science) and Bryana Treon ’27 (social work).
Boron was on the ice when the buzzer sounded to end Syracuse’s 4-2 win over the University of Tampa in the AAU Women’s National Championship game in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a moment she’ll never forget.
“During the last few minutes of the championship game our bench was going wild because the inevitable win was in sight,” she says. “All I was thinking was ‘I need to go hug Emma (goaltender Emmalyn Lacz) because she played so incredibly.’ The next thing I know, the whole team is on the ice, gloves and sticks thrown about and we are all screaming at the top of our lungs. We are national champions!”
Growing up in Mount Airy, Maryland, Boron started playing hockey when she was 10. She played in youth leagues and in her senior year of high school was talented enough to play for the Tier 1 Washington Pride. In youth hockey in the United States, Tier 1 represents the highest level of competition and requires significant time and travel commitments.
Boron could have certainly tried to play hockey in college, but she focused her choice on academics and once she learned about the sport management program at Syracuse, she “knew this was where I wanted to go.” While touring campus and visiting the Tennity Ice Skating Pavilion on South Campus, she met one of her future hockey teammates, Amanda Wheeler, who was working at the pro shop. They started talking about hockey, and Wheeler encouraged Boron to try out for the team if she came to Syracuse.
AAU College Hockey was founded in 2022 as a way to give club teams more structure and competitive opportunities. The league is comprised of three men’s divisions and one women’s division, and the divisions are split into regional conferences. For the women, the division includes 18 teams divided into College Hockey North and College Hockey South divisions.
The time commitment is significant—three practices a week and home and away games each weekend with the away games often involving hours of travel and some overnight stays. Guided by coaches Beam and Sicilia, the team steadily improved over the years and this past season went 14-0 before defeating Springfield and Paul Smith to win the College Hockey North.
Jordan Boron
In the national tournament in Jacksonville, Syracuse defeated Springfield again before facing the Alabama Frozen Tide—the first team Syracuse played from the College Hockey South.
“The 10-2 win against Alabama was the moment for our team that made us feel like we had a real chance to win a national championship,” Boron says. “Seeing that we could win against a team that had previously beat Tampa, our next opponent, gave us the confidence boost we needed.”
With a pool-play format, Syracuse qualified for the national championship after defeating Alabama but still had to play Tampa, which had also won its first two games to qualify for the final. But while Syracuse’s pool-play game against Tampa didn’t decide the national title, it did set the tone for the championship game that followed the next day.
“I would argue that this was one of the most important games of the tournament,” Boron says. “We needed to play that game just like we would the next day to win the title.
“After our 3-2 win in our first game against Tampa, our excitement continued to build, and everyone was locked in and set on winning the next day,” Boron adds. “We went on to win the championship game 4-2, playing and fighting even harder than the game prior.”
For Boron, who will be graduating early in December after completing her Capstone internship this fall, the championship put an exclamation point on her stellar athletic and academic experience at Syracuse. This season, she worked as a community relations intern for the Syracuse Crunch American Hockey League team, assisting with community-related projects such as honoring military members and auctioning autographed game-used memorabilia for fans during games. Previously, she had internships with the Syracuse Athletics communications team, the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the Premier Lacrosse League at the Championship Series in February.
Boron is a member of Women in Sports and Events (WISE) in the Falk College, and for the past two years she was co-chair of the Donations Committee for the Sport Management Club’s Sports Charity Auction. The 20th annual auction in December raised $59,500 for the Rescue Mission of Syracuse, and the club has now raised more than $760,000 for local charities since 2005.
As she prepares to start her professional career, Boron says she would like to work in youth hockey development to make the sport she loves “more accessible to all.” Her hope for young players is that they all have an opportunity to experience what she felt on the ice in Jacksonville, where all the hard work and sacrifice paid off in a historic championship for Syracuse club hockey.
“It was incredible to share this moment with my teammates,” she says. “After the huddle dispersed, I found some of my closest friends on the team hugged them because the moment did not feel real. There is no one I would rather be on that ice with.”
To learn more about the women’s ice hockey club, follow the team on Instagram. If you’d like more information about the team or to try out, email suwomenshockey@gmail.com.
