During five decades, Alan Murdoch played for, coached and managed the Iowa State Cyclone hockey team, making a life’s work out of his personal resourcefulness and initiative. Iowa State grew into a premier program in non-scholarship hockey, and as a network of similar teams became formalized under the American Collegiate Hockey Association—an organization to which Murdoch was an essential contributor—the Cyclones played at a national championship level. The trophy for which they were vying was the Murdoch Cup. By the time he left the bench, Murdoch’s teams had won more than one thousand games against opponents from around the world. Sometimes funny, sometime emotional, Coach Murdoch’s story is the story of how winning became a way of life for Cyclone Hockey.
Dr. Alan Murdoch arrived on campus in the fall of 1969 and remained part of the Iowa State community for more than fifty years. In addition to coaching the university’s hockey team, he was also a fixture in the kinesiology department and heavily involved in organizing ISU intramurals. Nicknamed “Doctor Hockey,” Murdoch was the first president of the American Collegiate Hockey Association and also the first coach to lead an ACHA team representing the United States during the World University Games. Tim Harwood is a broadcaster and writer based in northeast Iowa. He has been the play-by-play broadcaster for the Waterloo Black Hawks of the United States Hockey League since 2005. More recently, he has simultaneously been the host of a morning news program on KXEL-AM. His previous writing projects have explored Waterloo’s rich hockey history, as well as the city’s brief stint in the National Basketball Association after World War II.