The University of Delaware announced Tuesday that they hired former Penn State Associate Head coach Allison Coomey to lead their new program. Delaware announced in December that they were adding women’s hockey as a varsity sport for the 2025-26 season.
“I’m excited to welcome Allison to our Blue Hen community,” Delware Director of Athletics, Community, and Campus Recreation Chrissi Rawak said. “With her wealth of knowledge, ice hockey expertise, and experiences at the collegiate and USA national team level, she is the perfect person to build and lead this program. She’s an incredible coach who believes in the importance of a well-rounded student-athlete experience and recognizes the opportunity that we have here at Delaware to create something exceptional!”
Coomey is taking on her first collegiate head coaching role after spending the past seven seasons at Penn State. She served as an assistant coach for three seasons before being promoted to associate head coach in 2020-21. In addition to her college coaching experience, Coomey has held various roles with USA Hockey. She was on stafff with the silver-medal winning USA National Team at the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games as a team scout and extension of the coaching staff and was the head coach for the U23 US Women’s National Team in 2021 and 2022. She was an assistant at the 2021 IIHF World Championship. She was also a member of USA Hockey’s scouting staff at the 2019 IIHF U18 Women’s World Championship.
“Two things stood out to me – the academics and the support to athletics,” Coomey said about why this position appealed to her.
The Hens will play in the CHA, a conference Coomey is familiar with as the Nittany Lions captured the past two league tournament titles, earning a bid to the NCAA Tournament. The team also claimed the CHA regular season title in three of the past four seasons.
Coomey loves that Delaware and the surrounding Philadelphia and Washington D.C. area markets are widely untapped in DI women’s hockey. The Hens have already announced a partnership with the NHL Philadelphia Flyers to help grow girls and women’s hockey in the area.
Having been a student at Niagara when that program began and starting at Penn State not long after that program moved to DI, Coomey is well-versed in the unique process of starting a program.
“I’m so happy that Chrissi [Rawak] and her staff thought that I would be a good fit for this program. Being a part of a new program as a player was so special to me and to have an opportunity to do that at a like Delaware is really exciting. I can’t really put that into into perfect words, but it’s really exciting,” Coomey said.
“When you are starting a brand new program. I knew we needed to hire somebody that was established and had that type of real success. Equally as important, if not more, is who she is as a person,” said Rawak.
“When she came in and interviewed and really talked about how she would build this program and how she cares about the student athlete experiences and how she creates accountability and how she sees building out seasons, all of those things are so aligned with who we are at Delaware. It starts with culture and ultimately it starts with the right leader and we couldn’t be more excited about Allison being that right leader.”
Coomey has about 18 months to set her staff, recruit players and be ready to hit the ice. It’s the first time she gets to direct all those different parts of a program, but she’s looking forward to surrounding herself with players and coaches who are excited about the idea of creating something from scratch and developing a legacy at Delware.
“I’m looking for people that want to want to put their mark on something, want to play for something bigger than themselves, want to bring excitement to the state of Delaware that doesn’t have Division I hockey,” said Coomey.
Rawak was excited to find a leader in Coomey who has excelled at so many levels of women’s hockey but just had not yet had the opportunity to be a head coach. Previous experience in the role was the only part of Rawak’s list of desirable qualities in the first coach that Coomey didn’t check, but she said that it was so clear from both Coomey’s interviews and speaking with her references that she is ready and prepared to take on a head coaching role, citing Coomey’s presence and quiet passion as things that stood out.
“Being incredibly invested in growing the sport and giving young women the opportunity to excel and grow and earn and lead are all things that Allison believes in and she recognizes that we have an opportunity here because of the types of partners that we’re surrounded by that are equally as excited about this as we are,” Rawak said.
A rarity herself (19% of Division 1 Athletic Directors are women) Rawak is always thinking about the importance of ensuring Delaware is providing strong, talented women as role models for student-athletes of all genders.
“I always want the best coach. But particularly for women’s programs, if I can find the best coach that is a female that can lead these young women and they can see themselves in her eyes – if that’s possible, then I’m always going to choose that because I just think that it’s really important, Rawak said.
“I’m proud that we have a woman – an incredibly talented, qualified woman – to be able to lead and build our first ice hockey program Division One ice hockey program here at the University of Delaware.”
