In Joe Battista’s lifetime, he has collected a myriad of awards, memorabilia and autographs ranging from Joe Paterno to Mario Lemieux.
But there’s only one award that sits front and center on his desk — a statue of a Nittany Lion, displaying the six years he led the Penn State ACHA Division I Icers to national championships.
And this statue only represents a small part of what Battista has done for college hockey. For his accomplishments in the club sport, Battista will be inducted into the ACHA Hall of Fame today in Naples, Fla.
“This one means an awful lot because it will be from my peers,” Battista said. “It’s gonna be funny when I’m standing there in front of five different divisions of the ACHA, and I’m thinking it all started with co-founder Tom Keegan having lunch in a McDonald’s in Chicago.”
The idea to start the ACHA, a league for club teams across the U.S., turned from pipe dream to real life shortly after in 1991. The league has now developed into 304 teams with five divisions — a long way from its 20-team, one-division beginning.
“I felt like I was the John Adams of the ACHA, because I was a little too brash for some of the folks,” he said. “[Iowa State hockey coach] Al Murdoch was like the George Washington and John Spencer was the Thomas Jefferson, because he wrote the bylaws, the constitution and the policies and procedures manual.”
Battista added that when a change in the ACHA was needed, he was a motivator and fired up everyone else to execute the vision.
His motivation has led him to a life full of achievements that have gone unmatched at nearly any level in the game. Battista has already been inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, the Penn Hills Sports Hall of Fame and the Penn State Ice Hockey Hall of Fame.
Battista said his wife has a good way of humbling him. When he told her about his most recent induction, she simply sighed and said, “Oh great, another chicken dinner and another plaque on the wall.”
The plaques in Battista’s office leave little white space showing. While he is aware of the success he has built, he goes about his daily routine as if it were any other job, despite being the Executive Director of the Nittany Lion Club. He acts like a servant, looking to please everyone around him, going as far to as to make sure he has gifts for his secretaries on administrative assistant day.
“It’s an important job, but I’m also getting calls from people complaining their parking space at the football stadium is too close to the port-a-potties,” Battista said. “If I move them, then I get calls about how far away the port-a-potties are. I guess you could say it’s a less glamorous part of the job.”
As his phone rang in his office Tuesday, he just looked at the number.
“Unidentified caller,” he said, “not today.”
It may seem like a chaotic existence, but his life is more organized than one could tell by looking at his daily itinerary sheet and his e-mail inbox. Names and numbers congest both, but he scans through them as if it were a simple grocery list. After all, organization had always been his strong point growing up.
At the age of 13, he established the Penn Hills Street Hockey League, which is still in existence today. He grew in age, but didn’t lose his youthful ambitions, as it wasn’t long before he graduated with a degree in business only to realize hockey was where he wanted to spend his life — a far cry from the nuclear engineering focus he’d started with as a freshman.
He went in as many different directions in his hockey career. Battista was once a marketing director for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and coached at Kent State, Culver Military Academy, Penn State and as a USA hockey player development instructor. But Battista said one of his biggest endeavors was creating the ACHA.
When Chris Wilk, the executive Director of the ACHA, was asked how Battista was selected for his induction, he laughed at the apparent ridiculousness of the question.
“Do you really need to ask that?” he said. “Not only was Joe instrumental in the development of the ACHA, as he helped create the league, his coaching record speaks for itself and the national championships and his commitment to the league are unprecedented.”
It was his motivation and commitment for the game of hockey that helped Battista become the ACHA’s men’s Division I coach of the year twice while with the Icers. After 19 years, he formed a record of 512-120-27 with a winning percentage of .800.
His academic record was also as unprecedented as his record on the ice. As a coach, he annually earned team GPAs above 3.0, and when he joined the Nittany Lion Club staff in 1995, he helped graduate an ACHA-best 41 Academic All-Americans.
Dr. Paul Cohen, who was the faculty advisor for the Icers during Battista’s tenure as coach, said Battista made it clear that school was first.
“I remember one of Joe’s players missed a meeting with his advisors a few times,” Cohen said. “When he came to the rink, Battista had already scratched his name from the lineup. That’s how seriously Joe took it.”
Cohen also worked with Battista to change academic requirements of the hockey team and said the Icers had one of the strictest GPA requirements at Penn State. In fact, the ACHA has stricter requirements than the NCAA, because hockey, Battista said, isn’t what college is all about.
His hard work and years of service to students and hockey crystallized in his mind as he sat in the Greenberg Ice Pavilion in March to witness the very first ACHA All-Star game. As he sat atop of the stands with fellow ACHA co-founder Murdoch, he intently watched the showcase of a product he formed 17 years ago.
“I told Al, that this is our little kid and it’s grown up,” Battista said. “Of all the things that have come out of the ACHA, the most rewarding is knowing that our little idea we hatched turned into such a massive program. It makes me feel happy that we gave so many kids the opportunity to play college hockey.”
