ASU Hockey's Home Opener Becomes a Rally for Matthew Mayich as Coaching Fallout Deepens

TEMPE

There was a hockey game at Mullett Arena on Friday night — ASU's home opener, against Holy Cross, per TSN and the Associated Press. But nobody walking through the doors was thinking about the score. They were handed yellow pins at the entrance, thousands of them, each one carrying the initials and the jersey number of Matthew Mayich, the 21-year-old Sun Devils defenseman who collapsed during an outdoor summer workout on August 20 and has been in a coma ever since. It was the team's first home game since that day, and the night belonged to him.

Inside the building, the mood wasn't a funeral. Students told Fox10 they were there to bring the energy back — the chants, the noise, the unmatched atmosphere of an ASU hockey night. But Mayich was on every mind. "It's really sad what happened to him, so it's nice to see everyone out here supporting him," one ASU freshman told Fox10's cameras. A junior said coming out together is what community means when it's tested: "When you have people that have your back, it pushes you to keep going, even through tough times."

Mayich is a 21-year-old defenseman from Ontario who was drafted by the St. Louis Blues, and by every account one of the young anchors of a program that has been climbing. What happened on August 20 has been described in reporting from the Arizona Republic and TSN as exertional heat stroke — his body overheated to the point that oxygen flow to his brain was reduced. His condition has not improved, his family attorney Rob Carey has said, and Mayich is unlikely to recover.

The workout that put him there is now at the center of one of the darkest chapters in Arizona State athletics history — and the details, laid out in a letter seven players sent to the university through an attorney, are hard to read. The session was led by a former Green Beret. According to the letter, water was used as a reward rather than a given: players who couldn't keep up were denied breaks, and Mayich received no water at all. When he began showing signs of distress, the letter says, coaches and the athletic trainer didn't respond. After he collapsed, he was treated with hose water and wet towels while left on the ground. Head coach Greg Powers, the players wrote, minimized what was happening in real time — calling it "just a little heat stroke" and "heat exhaustion," saying he had "seen this a million times," that Mayich "just needs an IV." The letter also says Powers told the players afterward that the workout had brought them closer to the Frozen Four.

Temperatures that day reached the mid-80s with humidity around 50 percent, per Fox10. In Arizona in August, an outdoor exertion workout in those conditions, with water withheld as a motivational tool, is the kind of sentence you have to read twice. The seven players who signed the letter did so anonymously through legal counsel, saying they feared retribution.

The fallout has moved fast and keeps moving. Powers was placed on administrative leave on September 30. On October 8, assistant coach Alex Hicks was separated from the team — the university gave no reason — and he was not at Friday night's home opener, per TSN and AP reporting. Athletic trainer Amanda Doyle has been reassigned to another sport. An interim head coach is expected to be announced any day.

The institutional response is now running on two tracks. ASU asked former Arizona Supreme Court chief justice Scott Bales to lead an independent review of the August workout; that report is due in early December. Separately, ASU police are conducting their own investigation, and the findings are expected to be forwarded to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for review. Whatever the independent review concludes, whatever the police report says, the players' letter already put the university on notice that this wasn't a workout gone slightly wrong — it was, in the players' telling, a workout run in a way that put young athletes in danger.

And yet the team is still playing. At the season opener — a 5-0 win at Lindenwood — Mayich's jersey hung in the locker room, and players wore yellow ribbon "27" helmet decals, per the Arizona Republic's October 2 coverage. Friday night's home opener extended that: the pins, the moment before the puck dropped, the knowledge that the kid whose number is on everybody's helmet isn't coming back through that tunnel anytime soon. The players wanted to play. The fans wanted to be there for them. "I'm really happy the team was able to keep playing after what happened," one supporter told Fox10. "Something like that is really rough on the team, so seeing them be able to come out here and play is really cool."

There's a line you hear at campuses when something like this happens — that the community rallies, that people show up. Friday night, they did. But the harder question doesn't get answered with pins. It's the one the Bales review and the police investigation have to answer: how an August workout got run this way at a major university, who knew, and who said nothing. Mayich is 21 years old. The Sun Devils' season will end in the spring. The question his family and his teammates are living with doesn't.

Elsewhere in the Valley this week: a federal judge in Phoenix dismissed a USDA lawsuit and barred the plaintiff from using AI on the amended complaint, and Phoenix Fire rolled out e-bike teams to cut mountain rescue times in half.