On Sunday, Penn State announced that its search for their first men’s hockey coach came to an end with the hiring of Guy Gadowsky to take over the Division I program that begins play in 2012-2013.

Penn State interviewed the likes of Olympic champion and Wisconsin women’s head coach Mark Johnson and also Scott Sandelin, who led the University of Minnesota-Duluth to their first-ever national championship last month, but ended up signing Gadowsky after seven years of coaching the Princeton Tigers.

During his tenure at Princeton, Gadowsky complied a 105-109-15 record and reached the NCAA Tournament twice, most recently in the 2008-2009 season when he was named Inside College Hockey Coach of the Year. Before coming to the Tigers, he headed the rise to prominence of Alaska-Fairbanks, taking them from a team who won 15 games combined in his first two years to winning 22 games in his third and putting the team in the top-15 of the nation.

Gadowsky has coached nine different players to the NHL in his fifteen years as coach including Darrell Powe of the Philadelphia Flyers, but what may have been a bigger selling point to Curley and president Graham Spanier was his athletes’ success in the classroom which started at Alaska-Fairbanks when graduation rates rose from 49 percent to 66 percent during his tenure.

This was definitely Penn State settling for their third out of three choices for a head coach, but Gadowsky has a lot to work with and the talent to make Penn State competitive from the beginning when Division I play starts in 2012.