PNW is the latest stop on Andrew Remer’s journey to discover his passions. 

Growing up in an athletic family from Lake Orion, Michigan, Remer’s parents wanted him to find his interests on his own.  

“I owe my parents the world with how they raised me,” said the freshman Finance major. “It wasn’t ‘you’re going to do this,’ it was more of ‘the world is your oyster.’ I loved that.”

He grew up about 40 miles north of Detroit, an area nicknamed “Hockeytown” in the late ‘90s. The game took root in Remer soon after he strapped on his first pair of skates when he was 4 years old. 

Remer fell in love with the hockey atmosphere surrounding Detroit. 

“There’s a certain level of respect that you have to have for the game and its competitors,” he said. “I loved the camaraderie of the whole thing.”

After youth hockey, Remer played eight seasons with the Detroit-based HoneyBaked Hockey Club,  where he met former PNW men’s hockey head coach, Nick Tomcyzk

“I played all the way up through Triple-A in the Detroit area growing up,” he said. “[In] U15 and U16 he was one of our assistant coaches. … Tomcyzk immediately jumped out as an awesome human being. Great coach, awesome hockey mind, and just a guy you wanted to play for.”

Remer spent his senior year of high school playing in Canada. 

“I went up and played in Ottawa,” he said. “First time away from home for me. It was different.”

Remer was not homesick, but he missed important high school milestones.   

“You see the pictures on Instagram from homecoming,” he said. “You’re missing football games and … senior-year parties. A lot of guys in our line of work had to make those sacrifices. At the end of the day, you got to be okay with it, which I was.”

He returned from Canada to play junior hockey with the Maryland Black Bears of the North American Hockey League. 

His first season was interrupted by COVID-19 in March 2020.

“We ended up hopping on a bus to Jamestown, New York, for a weekend series,” he said. “We figured that we were not going to play this weekend. We got about halfway to Jamestown and stopped at a gas station for two to three hours. Coach came back on the bus and told us that the season was over.”

His second season in Maryland was also riddled with COVID tests and game cancellations. 

“That next fall, we didn’t find out until late that we were actually going to have a season,” he said. “For the first couple of months, we were getting shut down every couple of weeks. We’re doing COVID testing at the rink. … It definitely wore on me. There was not much hockey being played. I thought it was time.”

He returned home to reacquaint himself with a childhood hobby. 

“I started to a push to go play college golf,” Remer said. “It was one thing that was always in the back of my mind. It seemed like that was the prime time to do that. My dad and his father bonded through golf. My dad never pushed anything on me, but I think he wanted that to be a big part of my life, and it has been.”

A few days after getting home, Remer got a message from a familiar contact. 

“I woke up to a text from Nick Tomcyzk,” he said. “At the time, [PNW] was a DII program and I think he was just trying to bolster the lineup a little bit. I heard of the school but did not know really anything about it. I told him that I just hung up the boots and was trying to play college golf. 

“He happened to know the golf coach very well and looked to get me as a dual-sport [athlete],” Remer said. “As soon as I heard that, I was pretty much all in.”

The 22-year-old freshman plans to be a part of the men’s golf team next fall and says he could not be happier. 

“These last couple weeks I have noticed that I have completely fallen back in love with the game of hockey,” he said. “The guys on the team have made it a very positive experience. Living together, going to practice together and grabbing lunch with some of the guys, the connections I’ve made here have been fantastic. 

“It’s been pretty cool for me to come full circle.”