A winning coach: Michael Rousseau heads up boys’ hockey

ARMS special education teacher Michael Rousseau has also been the head coach for the Amherst boys’ varsity hockey team for five years. 

Seniors on the varsity squad from ARHS include Alexander Marlin, Jason Kim, Graham Arguin, Ben Remensyder, as well as senior Ethan Mooney from Pathfinder Tech. 

The MIAA says you can only dress 22 players for a game, which includes 20 skaters and two goalies. No one was cut from the varsity team this year, as only 20 total people tried out for the 2025-2026 season. Though Rousseau made no cuts, he said that “playing time will vary based on the game situation.”

This year, Rousseau said he expects big things from Sawyer Ferro, Nate Desbien, Graham Arguin, Ethan Mooney, and “solid brickwall goaltending” from Jason Kim. 

Rousseau believes he knows what it takes to be exponentially more successful than he was last season, with his 12-7 win-loss score, and he plans to do that with speed. After their non-stop high-intensity 60-minute practice, Rousseau saves roughly five to ten minutes of the end of practice for team conditioning. 

“No pucks, just simple sprinting,” he said. “The team that’s in better condition will be much more successful than the team that is not.”

Kim, who has been playing hockey for twelve years, is the goalie for the varsity team. He appreciates the sense of “brotherhood” on the team and said it offers “a great community since we all have been playing together forever.” 

Arguin has been playing hockey for over a decade. “The team has great chemistry, and we’re all ready to fine-tune our skills,” he said.

 Rousseau’s assistant coaches this year include Rich Ferro and James Stone. Ferro is his long-time friend, who has been Rousseau’s assistant coach for the past 6 years and mostly coaches the forwards. Stone is a new addition to the team, a UMass junior who will be coaching the defensemen and also has experience coaching goalies. 

“We’re gonna be a tough team to beat if they buy into and commit to the system, which they are doing,” Rousseau said. 

Rousseau said that when players come to him as freshmen, he has to work on teaching them to work together and have respect for each other and the sport. “We have a lot of young players, so our job as coaches is to try to find that line of communication to get them to understand that this is a team game,” she said. “The days of being coached by parents are over. [At the high school varsity level], it is the Amherst way. It’s Amherst puck or nothing.” 

This year, Rousseau hopes that more of the student body will come out to support the hockey team. He recalled a time when he played his first high school hockey game at the Big E Coliseum, where he played in front of 5,000 people. 

“These kids today are lucky to play in front of 50 people,” he said. 

The co-op team is made up of players from ARHS, Pathfinder Technical, and Hopkins Academy. Rousseau encouraged students to “come support the boys when there are home games at Orr Arena at Amherst College.”