How Kansas City’s Russell Stover paved way to Western Michigan’s NCAA hockey title
In the twilight of his minor-league hockey career, longtime Kansas City Blades winger Pat Ferschweiler had a nice plan to make use of his bachelor’s degree in finance from Western Michigan University.
Since he had spent three summers apprenticing with Merrill Lynch in Kansas City and earned a standing job offer, he figured he would seamlessly transition to becoming a financial advisor. And when a wrist injury hastened his retirement in 2001, the offer came and he theoretically braced for life after hockey.
Except that “literally” a day later, he said, the Kansas City Stars youth hockey organization called to inquire if he’d become the program director at the Pepsi Ice Midwest Skating and Training Center in Overland Park.
Naturally, he felt compelled to check it out. He well remembers one of his first impressions at the fine facility: some father-coaches out on the ice, trying to help while clad in boots and mittens.
“What I saw was a whole bunch of people that loved hockey,” he said, “and a real potential to help hockey.”
Nearly 25 years later, Ferschweiler views that as the inauspicious origin story of a career that as of last week includes the thrill of coaching his alma mater to the NCAA hockey title and being named the national coach of the year ... while becoming the object of speculation he could soon become an NHL head coach.
Over the course of a decade with the Stars and then the Russell Stover youth program that Ferschweiler conceived and created (despite an extremely nerve-wracked presentation to co-president Scott Ward), Ferschweiler helped launch about 60 players from around the country to Division I scholarships ... and perhaps another 80 to Division III programs while creating countless relationships that still move him.
No wonder about a tenth of his Western Michigan bio focuses on those days back here.
No wonder that in the last few days Ferschweiler heard from a “spectacular” number of players and families whose lives he’d touched during his years in Kansas City.
Between that outreach and letters over the years from parents telling him how those programs changed their sons and instilled a work ethic and helped them believe in themselves, Ferschweiler hardly needed to win a national title to feel validated in the career he may never have entered, if not for a couple of twists of fate.
“Those kinds of things are as rewarding, or more rewarding, than any win you could ever have,” he said in a phone interview with The Star.
Make it your NHL
That appreciation also helps explain how and why he still feels tethered to the Kansas City area.
He still returns to conduct a camp for the Stars every summer, and he was so fulfilled in what he was doing with the Russell Stover program that he never applied for any job that would lead him away.
This is where he met his wife, Stacie, once the director of human resources at the Polsinelli law firm. It’s where each of his daughters was born, one in Kansas and the other in Missouri. And a good 15 years since he last lived here, it’s even where his cell phone remains symbolically connected with an 816 area code.
It’s also where he made the life-changing pivot from a practical career path to what he was passionate about with a few indulgences from Stacie, to whom he’s grateful for adjusting paths (and apparent plans) quite a few times, just so he could pursue what he loved.
When he ventured into youth coaching, Ferschweiler said, he had no career arc in mind beyond what was right before him — a job he would go about informed by the advice of a coach he’d gotten to know along the way: Frank Anzalone, who guided Lake Superior State to a national title and later coached high school hockey in New Jersey.
“‘It doesn’t matter where you’re (coaching),’” Ferschweiler remembered him saying. “‘Make it your NHL.’”
So that’s how he went about his approach to the Stars, whose AA team — with all local players, he said — finished third in the nation in his third year here.
As Ferschweiler sought to help players advance to junior hockey, though, he ran into obstacles. When he’d call friends on the players’ behalf, he’d be challenged on the premise that AA competition based out of Kansas City wasn’t substantial enough to be junior material.
“’If you’re ever going to move anyone on from there to a real level of hockey,’” he’d hear, “‘they either have to move to go play Triple A hockey. Or (you) have to create our own Triple A program here in Kansas City.’”
Appealing to Russell Stover
Ferschweiler chose the latter, which had an impediment of its own: Who would sponsor such a program?
Mindful of corporate support for youth hockey from such entities as Little Caesars and Honeybaked, his thoughts turned to Ward — who had served on the executive committee of the Kansas City Sports Commission, and whose son, David, had played for Ferschweiler.
So he sent Ward “a little 11-12 pager” of a letter about what he hoped to establish, how he wanted to go about it and what it would take to run a program predicated on making Kansas City “a destination for those players that don’t have great options in their area.”
A meeting was set at a restaurant on the Country Club Plaza, and Ferschweiler laughs now as he recalls how he fretted over it.
“It was one of the rare times in my life I’ve been nervous,” he said, recalling that beyond the proposal itself, “there’s also a list for money to make this program successful, right? And it wasn’t a small ask.”
But it was an ask that reverberated: After Ward ran it by his brother, Tom, Ferschweiler said, he called him back the next day and said, “Let’s go. I’m all in.”
All these years later, Ferschweiler still is grateful for what was enabled by Ward, who could not be reached for this column.
“A lot of kids got to live their hockey dreams because of Scott Ward and because of Russell Stover,” he said.
That was something Ferschweiler never could financially repay but was determined to pay back by “rewarding that belief with effort.”
In this case, that included recruiting around the nation through various camps and contacts.
Even bolstered by those relationships — and even though their targets typically were players who fell just short of making their local elite teams — he had to work through ample skepticism.
As a Minnesota native, for instance, he understands the meaning of hockey in that culture.
So when he called kids in his home state, he remembers usually being greeted with “a small pause of silence.”
Then would come a question. typically along the lines of, “You want me to move from Minnesota to Kansas to play hockey?”
But after convincing prospects to come for a visit and seeing the facility and the summer training plan, four Minnesotans committed that first year into a program that also depended on Ferschweiler and his colleagues being able to cultivate a host-family program.
By the time the kids returned to Minnesota, he said, they went back as “different people and different players,” and their parents may have become the program’s best recruiters.
If someone back in Minnesota wondered what happened to make one of those youngsters grow the way they had, a typical answer might be: “Russell Stover happened to our son.”
‘Mr. Clean’ and the candy company
You could see a snapshot of that dynamic, and its impact, in the case of Gianni Baldassari, who went on to play at Division I Holy Cross and now is an attorney in the Chicago area.
In 2005, the Fort Wayne, Indiana native was 17 when he met Ferschweiler shortly after he got cut at a tryout for an under-21 team in Minnesota. He had played against a Russell Stover team and appreciated the program, he recalled with a laugh, as he also remembered thinking, “A candy company, what is that about?”
As it happened, it was about what would become a significant development in Baldassari’s life through a community he remembers fondly for its tight-knit support on and off the ice.
In addition to establishing a lifelong friendship with the host family he describes as his second set of parents, Betsy and Max Utsler, Baldassari relished the program as run by Ferschweiler — aka “Mr. Clean.”
The nickname stemmed from “the general look” of Ferschweiler, who shaves his head like the iconic cleaning symbol. But it was equally apt in the virtuous way the program was run.
“He went about his business in a very clean way,” Baldassari said in a phone interview. “It’s how I operated and still do, so I thrived in that environment. We had a very high standard that Pat set, and the expectation was we’re not just going to outwork everybody on the ice, but we’re also going to be upstanding individuals off the ice.”
All of which is why by Ferschweiler’s estimate the program that began with perhaps 53 kids trying out for two teams a few years later would have some 350 auditioning.
“Rather than having to recruit everyone, we got to select,” he said. “That’s a better world to live in.”
A world good enough to stay in until the program’s success, his reputation in coaching and longtime bonds in 2010 led to an irresistible pull back to Western Michigan as an assistant coach.
Months after his departure, he said, the Russell Stover program was dissolved when the ice facility’s compressors failed. The bill to fix it, he recalled, would have been around $900,000. Radiant Church now occupies the former site.
After his time at Western Michigan, Ferschweiler spent several seasons in the Detroit Red Wings organization before returning to WMU in 2019 as associate head coach.
He took over as head coach in 2021 — a dream job he’d never have realized if he had stayed with the plan instead of following his heart.
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 5:00 AM.