FREMONT, Neb. — For some universities, club sports are not taken seriously. At Midland University though, club hockey is serious business.

Tieryn Arens is in her junior year at Midland University in Fremont, Neb., and is part of the Warriors club hockey team playing in the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA).

The former Fairmont High School athletic standout is majoring in human performance with a concentration in athletic training. She said she plans to either go into the Midland graduate program or go into chiropractics where she is an intern.

Arens ranks 11th in the ACHA in points scored this season with 38, on 22 goals and 16 assists.

Midland plays today in the ACHA Division 1 national tournament in Frisco, Texas. With the national tournament set to begin, Midland drove down to Texas on Monday and got to practice in the Dallas Stars practice rink Tuesday, Arens said.

Midland takes on No. 1-seeded Liberty (Lynchburg, Va.) in a best-of-three series. This is Midland’s first appearance in the national tournament and Arens credits much of the team’s success to second-year head coach Jason White.

“We’ll play Liberty the No. 1 seed in the first round, which sucks,” Arens said with a laugh. “I don’t think they’ve lost a game this year, they’re usually the top dogs in their league and in the national tournament. This is the first time in program history that we’ve made it to the tournament. We got a new coach two years ago. Second year in and he’s already going to the national tournament, he’s one hell of a coach, that’s for sure.

“We call him Whitey. Whitey is from Canada, he played for UNO (University of Nebraska, Omaha) in D1, he was a hell of a player, at least that’s what he tells us. He’s a great coach. Whitey coming from an actual Division 1 program, he’s kind of made our program not a joke anymore. Everybody jokes because we’re Division 1 of ACHA, but he takes it seriously and I think that’s why we’ve had success the last two years. He’s taken it from a joke to a good hockey team.

“Playing on the club team is time consuming, we do a lot of what a normal Division 1 team would do, we practice every day, we work out two or three times a week. We’re actually doing a lot more than the teams we play against, even the really good teams don’t practice every day. I get up at 5 a.m. for practice every day, we practice from 5:45 to 6:45. The amount of time Whitey puts into the program and into each player, it’s crazy to me how well he organizes everything.”

The league Midland plays in includes club teams from Arizona State University, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado – Boulder and the University of Minnesota.

Midland has a record of 20-16-3 after winning the Women’s Western Collegiate Hockey League (WWCHL) title in Las Vegas on Feb. 24.

With teams from all over playing in the ACHA, Arens said the team travels nearly every weekend for games and is often forced to miss school, but she said Midland and White do a good job helping athletes create their schedules to miss as little as possible.

“We travel like crazy,” Arens said. “We take busses everywhere, but Whitey really tries to make sure we’re not missing a bunch of schooling. He really tries to emphasize that we’re students first, then athletes. Midland does a really good job and Whitey does too, helping us set up our schedules. If we have an away game in Colorado or Arizona or Michigan, we only miss two days. We usually have 12- or 14-hour bus rides, so Midland has helped a lot with our class schedules.

“In February, we were gone every weekend and we’d leave close to noon on Thursdays. I have morning classes on Thursday and no classes on Friday, so I haven’t really missed any classes.”

Though Arens hasn’t missed classes, many students at Midland were forced to miss their spring break because of the recent flooding throughout the Midwest and especially in Nebraska.

“It was crazy,” Arens said. “Fremont itself didn’t get any water in the town, but we were joking about being Fremont island. Fremont Airport, there was a pilot who ended up giving people free flights out because so many people wanted to get out of Fremont.”

Arens said she stuck around for spring break, but left town with her friend to help her friend’s parents. She said seeing the people in the nearby town dealing with the flood was heartbreaking.

“One of my friends lives in North Bend, which is about a 20-minute drive,” Arens said. “There was a lot of flooding (last) Wednesday, not quite to Fremont yet. The road to her house was closed Thursday during the day, but ended up opening that night. She asked if I wanted to go with her and help her parents move stuff out of their basement and I didn’t feel like it was safe for her to go by herself after the flooding so I went with her.

“The next morning around 10, she was showing me around North Bend. We got back to her house and about 10 minutes later, everything was under water, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that could have been us.’ Her parents live just outside the town on an incline so we could see all the water coming through the fields. The first responders were outside her house and people were bringing in airboats to help evacuate a nursing home that hadn’t been completely evacuated yet. It was heartbreaking, but it was cool to see all the people helping and the people from the town risking going back in to grab the people from the nursing home.”

After the flooding, Arens said she and many students from Midland have been helping people around town to tear out carpeting and walls that were destroyed by flooding, as well as raking any debris brought into peoples’ yards.

She said many people, including herself, have donated clothing and helped bring in cots to the local churches for people who have been forced out of their homes.

But even with the flooding, spring break is over and classes must start up again.

Arens said she has enjoyed her learning experience at Midland. She said it’s not too big for her and the teachers are often willing to help outside of class and are understanding when it comes to athlete’s injuries.

She said she’s had concussions and other injury issues, and teachers have been willing to work with her individually and help her through her coursework when she’s been unable to grasp the material in class.

Outside help from teachers and from White have helped the Midland team see its best year in program history, not only in team success, but individual success as well.

This year, White was named AHCA coach of the year and had a player named to the all-AHCA second team. Arens said the transformation from her freshman year to now has been incredible to see.

“It’s amazing for me to see, when I came in as a freshman, we were a pretty low program and to see it grow each year as far as it has is amazing,” Arens said. “The dynamic of the program, the dynamic of the girls, the skills we’re bringing in with new girls. It’s cool to see because that’s our team, that’s our family doing that well.”

Through a season of success, Arens said she added one of her favorite hockey memories. It came in what could have been the final moments of Midland’s season.

“In the WWCHL championship game we were playing CU Boulder,” Arens said. “We were down 2-1 with a minute and a half left and I ended up tying the game up. I didn’t even know it went in, I got trampled after I shot and I don’t think the goalie knew either. All my teammates came over and I was face first in the ice. They all picked me up and when I got to the bench the whole demeanor of the bench went from everybody pouting to, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna win this thing.’ We went to double overtime and this girl, who is about 6-foot-1 off the ice, her and I were going around the net and she put her stick in front of me and it got caught. So I ended up, I have a perfect butt of a stick scar on my ribcage. She just kind of stabbed me with her stick. We were going so fast, I got my arm caught in a chickenwing position behind my back and I hit the boards and kind of popped my shoulder.

“I had to sit out the rest of the game, but the next play we ended up scoring and it was the greatest feeling ever.”