The Kent State Golden Flashes represent Kent State University's athletic teams. The university boasts 19 varsity teams competing in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division I level, with football participating in the Football Bowl Subdivision. As a full member of the Mid-American Conference (MAC), Kent State has been a part of the MAC East division since its creation in 1998.
Athletics at Kent State began shortly after the school was first organized in 1910 and the first classes held in 1912. The first intercollegiate athletic event, a men's basketball game, was held in January 1915 and the baseball team held their first intercollegiate game later that year. A dedicated athletic field was built around 1920 and the school's first gymnasium opened in 1925.
From 1932 to 1951, Kent State competed as a member of the Ohio Athletic Conference before joining the Mid-American Conference in 1951. Additional women's sports, including swimming, field hockey, basketball, and volleyball, were added as varsity sports in the mid-1970s following the passage and implementation of Title IX. Budget constraints and other factors led to the university dropping swimming, tennis, ice hockey, and men's soccer during the 1980s and 1990s, with ice hockey becoming a club-level sport in the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) Division I as part of College Hockey Mid-America (CHMA).
Although no Kent State team has won a national title in any sport, several Golden Flashes teams have placed highly in NCAA national tournaments. The program has also produced individual national champions in men's and women's track and field, men's gymnastics, and wrestling.
Kent State sponsors 19 athletic teams at the NCAA Division I level, with eight for men and 11 for women. All current teams compete in the Mid-American Conference. Fall sports are football, women's field hockey, women's soccer, women's volleyball, men's and women's golf, and men's and women's cross country. During the winter sports season, Kent State has men's and women's basketball, women's gymnastics, wrestling, and men's and women's indoor track and field.
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Let's take a closer look at the history of the Kent State Golden Flashes Men's Ice Hockey team.
The Kent State Golden Flashes Men's Ice Hockey Team
The Kent State Golden Flashes Men's Ice Hockey team was an NCAA Division I ice hockey team from 1980 to 1994. The Golden Flashes would finally debut with Switaj as their coach in 1989.
In 1970 the Kent State Ice Hockey Club was founded. Steve Albert, Kent State alumni and legendary broadcaster convinced Don Lumley, a hockey player at Boston University and skating teacher at the KSU Ice Arena that if he could gather enough players for a tryout, Lumley should coach them. Lumley thought it was a joke.
“I put flyers in as many places as you could think of and more,” said Albert. “Inside beakers in science labs, under people’s doors at apartments and dorms, hell, even in girls’ restrooms. I didn’t care who tried out, as long as someone did.”Albert’s motive for founding the team was, as he admits, selfish. He wanted to be a part of the hockey team - but not on the ice. Albert was going to assign himself as the team’s Play-by-Play announcer.
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He couldn’t believe his eyes. “I saw in front of me at least 60 kids dressed and ready to play hockey,” said Lumley. “It was way more than I anticipated.” That’s when the Clippers were born. “The team wasn’t associated with the school in anyway, so we had to use that name, the Kent State Clippers,” Albert said.
The team had a few rough years getting used to big competition, but that didn’t matter. Everyone was excited to be playing collegiate level hockey. That tradition continues to this day. According to current Head Coach Jim Underwood, Kent State’s Hockey Club thrives on it’s reputation for having well-rounded student Athletes.
There’s one player on the hockey team who stands above the rest when it comes to their plans for the future. Rob Ferrari, a 25 year-old transfer student who originally played hockey at the University of Alabama had to face adversity before coming to Kent. “Rob’s a good kid,” said Coach Underwood. “To be able to study and put in hard work is what we need from players on the ice and in the classroom.” Ferrari needs that ability to help him in his major at Kent State - nursing.
An additionally unusual aspect of this team, is there depth in net. The team has three young goalies who will all return next season. The team’s been working hard all season long and has managed to start all of their goalies multiple times. The Kent State Ice Hockey team has three goalies this year.
It came after things went unbelievably well on the broadcasting side. Albert teamed up with WKSU, Kent’s award-winning NPR station, to broadcast hockey games. They did it all season long. With the locations of the KSU Ice Arena and WKSU being a quarter mile apart, both the signal - and as Albert would tell you, his broadcasting crew - sounded great.
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Then the ambitious broadcasting crew decided to travel and broadcast and away game at Ohio University, where Steve’s brother Al was the goalie. “We made the trip, took all our equipment, and for the first time were going to use a sideline reporter,” said Albert. “We were all very excited, the future of our careers felt very solid.”
For whatever reason, the signals didn’t align properly and WKSU didn’t broadcast the game. Albert sat on the footsteps of a building on Ohio University’s campus and wept. “That’s how I knew I wanted it,” he said. “I knew at that exact moment that every thought I had, thinking that this was a far-fetched dream was rubbish. I knew I was born to be a broadcaster. I cared too much not to be.”
He got a call one day from an AHL Minor League Hockey Club in West Virginia. “They were too cheap to send their broadcasters to road games,” Albert said. “Anytime they were in Cleveland, they asked me to broadcast their games. Of course, I took the opportunity, but I mean it when I say that this team had to have been the cheapest sports team in the world. They didn’t have headsets or microphones. They had telephones that you would hold up to your ear and call the game. I swear to god the funniest thing was having to talk to a player during the intermission and hand them the phone when they answered questions.”
His crazy idea to found a hockey team at Kent State and assign himself the Play-by-Play announcer paid off. Coach Underwood’s team is off until mid-January, but they’ll continue to prosper and evolve.
Rivalries
The most prominent rival for Kent State is the Akron Zips of the University of Akron, located approximately 10 miles (16 km) to the southwest of Kent in Akron, Ohio. The earliest athletic meeting between the two schools is a men's basketball game on February 19, 1916, in Kent, followed by a baseball game later that year, also in Kent. The two schools first met in football in 1923. They were conference rivals as members of the Ohio Athletic Conference from 1932-1936 and again from 1944-1951.
Since 1946, the two football teams have competed for the Wagon Wheel trophy. Through the 2022 meeting, Akron leads the overall series in football 35-28-2, but Kent State leads the series since the Wagon Wheel was contested, 27-24-1. The rivalry in men's basketball is an even closer series with Kent State leading the Zips 83-81 through the 2022-23 season.
In 2011, the two schools created the Wagon Wheel Challenge, which counts all athletic contests in the 14 sports where they compete head-to-head. Each sport is worth one point, awarded to the winning team. In sports with multiple meetings per season, whichever team wins the most games takes the full point. If the teams split the season's meetings, each school gets a half-point.
Kent State also has a long-standing rivalry with the Bowling Green Falcons from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. The two are sister schools, created together by the Lowry Bill in 1910, and both have been members of the Mid-American Conference since Bowling Green joined in 1952, the season after Kent State.
Other Kent State Athletic Teams
The baseball team is Kent State's second oldest sport, though it is the school's oldest intercollegiate team. Formed in 1914, they were known originally as the "Normal Nine" as the school was originally known as Kent State Normal School. The team has enjoyed significant success both in the Mid-American Conference and on the national level and has sent several players to the major leagues over the years.
The men's basketball team, which began play in 1913 and intercollegiate competition in 1914, plays in the Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center and is Kent State's oldest sport and second-oldest intercollegiate team. After decades of near anonymity, since 1998 the team has been one of the most consistent in the Mid-American Conference with a league record ten straight twenty-win seasons from the 1998-99 season through the 2007-08 season (the previous record was five straight).
The women's basketball team, which began play during the 1975-1976 season, also plays home games at the Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center. Since 2016, they are coached by Todd Starkey. They have nine MAC East titles, six MAC overall titles, and four MAC tournament titles. In addition, they have six NCAA tournament appearances, the most recent being in 2024, and three WNIT appearances.
The Golden Flashes football team plays in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. Home games are played at Dix Stadium on the far eastern edge of the Kent State campus. Since 2022, the head coach is Kenni Burns. Kent State has five post-season bowl game appearances: the 1954 Refrigerator Bowl, 1972 Tangerine Bowl, 2013 GoDaddy.com Bowl, 2019 Frisco Bowl, and the 2021 Famous Idaho Potato Bowl.
The men's golf team has had success both in the Mid-American Conference and at the national level, winning 28 MAC titles and making 36 appearances in the NCAA tournament, including 23 trips to the championship round and three regional championships, as of 2022. The team is coached by Jon Mills, a Kent State alum who has been head coach since 2019. He succeeded Herb Page, a KSU alum who coached from 1978 to 2019.
The women's golf team, founded in late 1998, has enjoyed success from its beginning. Every year of the program's existence it has won the Mid-American Conference title and is so far the only school to win the Mid-American Conference Women's Golf Championships, which began in April 1999. Through 2025, they have advanced to NCAA play for 24 consecutive seasons, reaching the championship round in five of them.
First developed in 1959, the Kent State women's gymnastics team was the first women's gymnastics team at the collegiate level. They began intercollegiate competition in 1964 and Mid-American Conference competition in 1981 and have enjoyed consistent success throughout their existence, which includes 11 Mid-American Conference meet championships and 14 regular-season titles.
The softball team plays its home games at the Judith K. Devine Diamond, adjacent to Dix Stadium. The team has won six regular season MAC titles and 10 MAC East Division titles, the most recent in 2016, and three MAC Tournament championships, with the most recent in 2017. In 1990, the team went 43-9 en route to their first MAC title, an NCAA regional championship, and a berth in the Women's College World Series.
Mid-American Conference Titles Through 2017
| Sport | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Golf | 24 | 19 |
| Gymnastics | N/A | 11 |
The Kent State Golden Flashes have a rich athletic history, marked by successes in various sports and a strong sense of rivalry. From the early days of basketball and baseball to the more recent achievements in golf and gymnastics, Kent State continues to foster a competitive and spirited athletic environment.