Coach Eric Lang didn’t inherit the best situation, but he made the best of it.

Unless you’ve been extremely fortunate so far in your hockey career, you’ve been part of a team that was bad. Real bad. Basement bad. Laughingstock bad. Just. Plain. Bad.

Eric Lang has. When he was named head coach of the AIC Yellow Jackets in 2016, the team was coming off a dreadful 7-29-3 showing the season prior. Lang didn’t inherit the best situation, but he made the best of it. The following year American International College won one more game, then jumped to 15 wins, before hitting 23 wins the following two seasons.

Worst to first. That’s impressive.

“We were near the bottom of the country in just about every aspect of anything that’s meaningful,” said Lang, during his 25-minute College Hockey Inc. Virtual Coaching Clinic presentation. “Now we’ve seen significant improvements here. We’re four-time conference champions.”

But how? How exactly does a team go from the doghouse to the penthouse?

“I remember coming in and one of the first things we did was create the AIC Hockey Bible. It looked at every single dimension and every aspect of our program. We had two goals: improving each aspect and move the needle. For us that was everything from changing the paint in the office to redoing our itinerary – anything we could control that would improve an aspect of our program.”

Lang drastically altered how things were done at AIC, including setting a new team culture, changing recruiting, improving the brand, developing a vision and team identity. He discusses his strategies during his video. But here’s a spoiler for you: the change started with baby steps.

“We were a non-competitive hockey program giving up 40 to 45 shots a night. So that’s where we started, we wanted to cut down our shots against.”

Then they cut goals against. Then they started losing less hockey games. They increased their goal differential and increased shot attempts. They won more hockey games. They increased goals for and then won even more hockey games.

Hearing Lang speak about how change is not only possible, but very doable, will help any teams stuck in a rut.