Meet Mike Kemp

Mike Kemp was brought to the University of Nebraska Omaha as its first head hockey coach on July 1, 1996. He was elevated to the position of Associate Athletic Director in May of 2009 after serving as the head hockey coach for 12 years. In March of 2019, he was further elevated to the position of Senior Associate Athletic Director - Events/Facilities.

Do you think the NCAA is does enough for athletes to prepare themselves for what sports is their athletic careers are over?

I think it's becoming a more increasingly focused area. For example, here, you know, we have we have a academic office, or that has a development director for helping individual development for your future career and experiences. Where will we have various people come in and do lectures with our student athletes to tell you how to work with them on on learning kind of what the life after athletics could be. And I think that important element plus having some practical opportunities to get experiences in the community where you're doing community service and getting exposed to a variety of different businesses. options and opportunities and just getting to meet people in the business world.

You serve on the NCAA committee for men and women's soccer as well for NCAA Division One hockey. Did you play a role in some of these new NCAA rules when it comes to paying players?

The purview of our committees because the soccer committee is just basically playing rules and enforcement of playing rules. Our hockey committee is the tournament we manage the tournament NCAA tournament at all levels at the division one level but I should say but at regionals and the Frozen Four, so we don't really get involved with those type of which we called Association wide rules, because that applies to every sport right across the board. And that's done it by at a committee level much higher than ours.

How do you think a that'll affect recruiting and how will it affect student athletes here?

I think the biggest thing is the real test for that is not over with The NCAA is going back and looking at how it might implement that. I think from the standpoint of the implementation is going to be one of the bigger things and certainly having at this point in time divided decided by the states could have some really interesting significant effects on college athletics. It is one of those things that I think is still so fluid and liquid, it's going to be hard to tell what real effect will have. We're a mid major and in all sports we would be classified as a major in hockey but in our other sports, we're a mid major institution and I think opportunities to take advantage of name image and likeness for our athletes might be a little less lucrative than it is for power five conference athletes, so that's gonna be an interesting part of it.

After serving as a head coach for 10 years, 12 years and then assistant coach before that, since the mid 80s. How do you see recruiting today in comparison to what it was 20 years ago?

It's interesting. It's so different. today. Of course, there's so much more access to information, whether it It's video that you can just get online or information online, you know, back in the late 70s, early 80s and through the early 90s, when I was recruiting coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, it was largely you're digging through newspapers you had to call a coach to get their schedule. Can you fax my roster and what do you fax me or stats, a fax machine was working overtime. And we didn't have cell phones so we were in a rink watching a junior game in Canada and you're standing in line three or four guys deep to call some recruit and you're waiting for the payphone and waiting for this other coach to get down at the payphone to make your call. I mean, it's changed dramatically. I think from the standpoint of you know, guys today the negative of that is you never get away from it. You know, you're caught you're constantly texting. You're right, that Computer you have in your hand is monopolizing your time. And so you know, from that standpoint, the information is better, the actual work might be actually harder because you can't get away from it. The other thing that's changed a lot is the fact of the matter is the family advisor has got a huge effect on what and when kids make decisions and what kind of decision they make as far as where they're going and when I was doing that as a full time job recruiting, you didn't have the agents weren't involved.

What are some characteristics that you hope to get out of the people that you have play for you as student athletes or work here?

I think one of the great things about the staff that I have here in hockey program is that two of the three full time coaches are former players of mine. So they played here, they understand the culture that we set when we started the program in 1997. There are guys who live by that culture, which is hard work, we realize that, in many cases, we may or may not be the most talented team but we will outwork anybody, we're very committed to that. The staff and our coaches reflect that and I think, part of whatever we do here, and I believe this in any aspect of leadership, is you model certain behavior and you model what you expect to have athletes who actually run reflect the what you model. I think that's kind of one of the keys that we've always emphasized here is, we model hard work, we model consistency, we model honesty, we model character. And that's what we expect out of the student athletes that are going to compete for us.

What was your approach to coming to a university that didn't have a hockey program, you had to build it from the ground up? What were some of those important pillars that you knew you needed to put in place in order to be successful?

I was at the University of Wisconsin at that time and it was one of the three, four top successful programs in the country for a long period of time. I'd been there 14 years and a lot of people asked, they couldn't believe I was leaving to go to start up a program, I wasn't going to be waiting for an established program to have an opportunity for me. The reason I made the decision was I thought, how many times in your life do you have an opportunity to put your stamp on every single element of the program? You're either going to inherit a program that has to be rebuilt, or you're going to go in there and repair something, or you're going to be maintaining a program that's had great success, but where do you actually get to start where you design the uniform you are involved with every aspect of what was going to be in place. I had the privilege of putting in so it was an opportunity that was rare. I don't know very many other people have ever had that opportunity in college hockey today. So for me, that was part of the lure of taking the job. But the things that I thought were most important, most critical for me, first and foremost, and I think it always is, I had to do is get a good quality coaching staff and support staff. I was very fortunate. The first hire I made turned out to be an incredible hire. That was David Quinn, who's now the currently the head coach in the New York Rangers. He was here from day one with me starting the program during the recruiting of that first team. Both of us work together.

What do you think goes into play there from a mentorship perspective and how coaches work together and are able to advance each other's careers?

You know, none of us we're born coaches, most of us have to have somebody we model after. I was incredibly fortunate because every step of the way, I was under an incredible mentor. My college coach Don Roberts is one of the winningest coaches from the MIT in Minnesota Division Three conference, where I went to college and played and coached under for five years. And then I went from him to Bob Johnson, of course, who is as recorded, he's a hockey legend. And then from him, it was Jeff Sauer who is the winningest coach in Wisconsin hockey history. An incredible man and you know, from each one of them you take something, you learn something. It's not just X's and O's. In fact, in every case, it was far less the X's and O's. It was way more the how do you deal with people. How do you treat people, how do you motivate people? What's important? All of those things and everything that I would say that I put into the UNO program here is a reflection one way or the other of each one of those gentlemen. Those are the things that's truly important. I've tried to do that myself with these various assistance I had throughout my 13 years of coaching here, as the head coach, each guy that was on my staff, I tried to find something that I could bring to them to help them in their careers.

And much much more....

Mike Kemp Bio