Photo courtesy of PENN STATE ATHLETICS
The Penn State men’s ice hockey team celebrates on the ice after a goal at Pegula Arena, in University Park.

UNIVERSITY PARK — Gavin McKenna will make his much-anticipated Penn State Lion ice hockey debut in the Arizona desert on Oct. 3, when the Nittany Lions kick off their 2025-26 season.

Penn State announced its men’s hockey team’s 10-game non-conference schedule on Tuesday, which includes an Oct. 9 home opener against Clarkson at Pegula Ice Arena in University Park.

Fresh off their first-ever Frozen Four appearance, the Nittany Lions open their campaign on the road for the third-straight season with a trip to Arizona State on Oct. 3-4. The Sun Devils were the first team out of the 2025 NCAA Tournament after finishing the 2024-25 season No. 15 in the Pairwise Rankings.

ASU finished second in the National Collegiate Hockey Conference during the regular season, advancing all the way to the Frozen Faceoff in Saint Paul, Minn., before losing to Denver during its inaugural season in the league.

This series is a return trip as Penn State makes good on its part of the Big Ten Hockey agreement that saw Arizona State play a Big Ten regular-season schedule for the shortened 2020-21 season during the pandemic.

The Nittany Lions are 8-2 all-time against the Sun Devils with the last meetings coming during that 2020-21 campaign, a pair of thrilling overtime victories for Penn State at Pegula Ice Arena.

Penn State then returns to Hockey Valley for three-straight weeks of non-conference action with a Thursday-Friday series against Clarkson serving as the home opener on Oct. 9-10. The Golden Knights finished 2024-25 with a second-place finish in the ECAC regular season, falling just one game shy of an NCAA Tournament berth after dropping the ECAC Championship game to Cornell and concluding the season No. 20 in the Pairwise Rankings with a 24-12-3 record.

The Nittany Lions then host Long Island University on Oct. 17-18 before concluding October with their first-ever meeting against Stonehill on Oct. 24-25.

Penn State closes non-conference play to begin the New Year with a home-and-home series against RIT, battling the Tigers at Pegula Ice Arena on Jan. 2 before completing the series in Rochester on Jan. 3.

With just seven non-conference losses over the past seven seasons, Penn State leads all Big Ten teams with a 0.764 winning percentage in non-conference games and 94 victories against non-Big Ten teams since the league was formed prior to the 2013-14 campaign.

Times for these games as well as television and streaming information will be released in the coming months along with the full Big Ten schedule, which is traditionally released in late August.