UAA Tabs Former Seawolf Shasby as Head Coach

Alaska Anchorage has found the seventh head coach in its 40-year hockey history.

Former Seawolf skater Matt Shasby has been chosen as the next head coach of UAA, which has not played a game since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and university cost-cutting measures, the latter of which resulted in a massive fundraising campaign that has saved the program for the time being. The Seawolves sat out last year and are doing so again this year, while rebuilding their roster for the 2022-23 season. 

Shasby played on defense for UAA from 1999 to 2003, where he tallied 12 goals and 53 assists for 65 points in 127 appearances to go along with 158 penalty minutes. A 1999 draft choice of the NHL's Montreal Canadiens, he won a Clark Cup with the USHL's Lincoln Stars in junior hockey prior to enrolling at UAA. An All-WCHA Second Team selection as a junior, and the team captain his senior year in college, he later captained the ECHL's Alaska Aces in a pro career that spanned 375 regular-season games and included a Kelly Cup title in 2006. He was also named to the ECHL's All-Decade team for 2000-2010. 

Shasby, 41, from Eagle River, Alaska, has coached amateur and high school hockey in the Anchorage area after retiring as an active player in 2012, and had also been serving as vice president of player development for the state of Alaska. At UAA, he succeeds Matt Curley, who left Anchorage in June after three years as head coach of the Seawolves to take over the USHL's Des Moines Buccaneers.

UAA, which began as an independent program in 1979 and made three NCAA tournament appearances in the early 1990s, is an independent again following the dissolution earlier this year of the WCHA, which the Seawolves had called home since 1992-93.