No Gifts

Coach Thomas O’Malley’s brick-by-brick ethic inspires Pioneer hockey players past and present.

From the fall 2025 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

Key Highlights

• Coach Tom O’Malley’s trademark warning—“No gifts!”—reinforces his belief that nothing in hockey, or life, comes easy.
• His work ethic was forged early, helping his bricklayer father on tough Saturday jobs “brick by brick.”
• As a Boston College student, O’Malley lived at the rink—running the scoreboard, driving the Zamboni and eventually coaching the women’s club team.
• He built championship teams at BC, launched Michigan’s first DI women’s program, and has led Sacred Heart since 2003—making him the longest-tenured active DI women’s coach.

Maddie Bishop ’20 sobbed into her phone.

“I want to quit,” she told her father. The freshman forward had hoped to play in Sacred Heart’s opening game. But Coach Thomas O'Malley scratched her from the lineup. She didn’t even suit up. It was a shock. During high school, Bishop rarely came off the ice. In college, she would have to earn her stripes all over again.

She hung up consoled but resolute.

“Maybe I’m not the best. Maybe I’m not going to score all the goals. But I am never going to let anyone outwork me,” Bishop pledged to herself, unknowingly enacting a lesson O’Malley had designed for his prized recruit.

After that flat start, Bishop’s career trajectory shot up like a hockey stick. By her senior year, she wore the captain’s “C,” tallied three game-winning goals, and was voted the program’s hardest-working player two seasons in a row, receiving the team’s Commitment to Excellence and Valor Award. She also earned First-Team All-NEWHA honors and a contract with the NWHL’s Connecticut Whale.

O’Malley foresaw this transformation—even provoked it.

“I think I lacked the confidence to say, ‘Hey, I’m good enough to be here,’” recalls Bishop, who now works in finance and scouts part-time for the NHL’s Washington Capitals.

Players don’t need to be told they are good enough; they need to prove it to themselves. O’Malley gave Bishop the push she needed—from the bench to belief.

No Gifts!

“Coach always said nothing’s promised, everything’s earned—and he meant it,” says Jayne Lewis ’20. “The demands were high, but that’s what made us better. He created a really competitive environment that brought out the best in everyone.”

Now in his 23rd season, O’Malley still laces up and skates through every practice with his assistants and players. “No gifts!” is one of his favorite admonishments to remind skaters not to hand over pucks at the opposing blue line.

“Christmas is still 40 days away!” he’ll shout at an early-season practice. “No gifts!”

Nothing easy, nothing free, like he learned from his father, Mark O’Malley. Mark helped build the downtown Boston skyline brick by brick, from the Prudential Center to the John Hancock Tower. On Saturdays, the Irish-born bricklayer would wake Tommy at dawn to mix cement and transport brick, block and stone to homes down the Cape for side jobs.

“It wasn’t the most enjoyable thing to get up at six in the morning and go mix cement. But my father was committed to doing that for people,” Thomas “Tommy” O’Malley recalls of those early mornings. “He worked hard. And I’ve continued to work hard.”

That brick-by-brick ethic became O’Malley’s blueprint for hockey, too. The younger O’Malley applied that same work ethic to earning an opportunity within the game he loved. He began to hang around McHugh Forum, home of the powerful Boston College hockey program. A lot.

“When the Zamboni would come off the ice,” O’Malley says of his “rink rat” days, “you’d be shoveling snow in the hopes that you’d be able to get out on the ice yourself.”

When he enrolled at BC, he scrapped his way onto the Eagles’ sub-varsity team while working on the McHugh Forum rink crew. He ran the scoreboard, drove the Zamboni, and crammed in homework in the Zamboni office. (Zamboni comes up a lot in conversations with O’Malley.)

Opportunity knocked one day when O’Malley noticed a flyer seeking a coach for BC’s women’s hockey club team and soon became a work-study coach. He set up a rigorous program for the team modeled after his college hockey experience at BC under coaches Len Ceglarski and Steve Cedorchuk.

After he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics, O’Malley continued to coach the BC women for more than a decade, winning national club titles in 1992 and 1993 and working to elevate the program to NCAA Division I status. After a stopover at Wayne State to launch the state of Michigan’s first D1 women’s hockey program, O’Malley joined Sacred Heart to build its own D1 program.

^{Net Result: A former player for Boston College, Thomas O'Malley has led Sacred Heart Women's Ice Hockey for more than two decades, building a program defined by commitment, humor and heart.}

Since his arrival on campus in June 2003, he has become the longest-tenured active women’s hockey coach in Division I.

Sunday Morning Feeling

Anyone who has played for O’Malley knows his “Sunday morning feeling” mantra—a reference to the sense of earned accomplishment and ease that players feel after pulling off a Friday-Saturday sweep—often celebrated with O’Malley marching through the locker room, broom in hand.

“SMF!” O’Malley told his players on a recent October afternoon, sprinkling the locker room with hints of the feeling his players would enjoy if they managed to sweep conference rival Saint Michael’s College in back-to-back home games at Martire Family Arena on Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. “SMF!”

The Pioneers scored 12 goals in two games to sweep the Purple Knights and get that Sunday morning feeling.

Don’t mistake his colorful expressions for a lack of seriousness. O’Malley demands and gets results. In 2024–25, SHU won its conference championship and went on to play the first NCAA Tournament game in school history.

“When I first met him, I was like, ‘This guy’s terrifying,’” says Nicole Farrelly Poulsen ’06, who watched the first steps of O’Malley’s SHU program take shape and then coached with him for three years after graduating. “I know him now as the joke teller, prankster, good guy. But when it comes down to business, he can switch that pretty quickly so that his players can, and will, respect him. They understand what he wants out of them by his attitude.”

Poulsen has internalized those same traits as the head coach and assistant director of the NJ Bandits, an elite travel team in northern New Jersey.

“I’m pretty easygoing, but when things kind of go off the rails, you know, I’m Irish just like Tom,” she says. “I have that kind of Irish fire, so I am very much a protégé of his coaching.”

Academics is No. 1. Hockey is 1A.

“My team kills it academically,” O’Malley says.

Alumni can attest to O’Malley’s encouragement of their learning above hockey.

“It’s not like we just get kids to come to school here, like, ‘Hey, great to see you. Make sure you’re at practice.’ It’s quite the opposite,” O’Malley says.

“I tell my players, you’re here for school first,” O’Malley continues. “Academics is No. 1. Hockey is 1A. If you put that in the story, just like the ‘no Christmas gifts,’ that will put a lot of smiles on some kids’ faces. They’ll remember it, I’m sure: ‘Yeah, that’s Coach O’Malley talking.’”

One more push—to smile.