Marcus Baxter - Head Coach
Marcus enters his third season with Griz hockey and is excited to take the program to new heights. During his first two season at the helm of the University of Montana, Coach Baxter has taken the team to the regional tournament, last year finishing with the teams highest regional ranking in program history.
Marcus prides himself on developing player's both on and off the ice. During his nine years coaching Missoula Junior hockey, his teams collected an impressive 277 wins while always playing an exciting and high paced level of play. He was also named coach of the year twice. As a player, Marcus played two years of tier 2 junior hockey before moving on to play division 1 hockey at the University of Connecticut.
A native of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, He has called Missoula home for the past 15 years. In his time away from the rink he enjoys fishing, golfing, and spending time with his wife Bridget and their two daughters.
Coach Baxter can be reached at mbaxter16@gmail.com or 860-420-9106
Eric Penn - Associate Head Coach
Coach Penn can be reached at: eric.penn09@gmail.com or 406-370-8910
Josh Nowak - Assistant Coach, Goalies
Josh is in his fourth season as the Griz goalie coach. He cares deeply for his players and brings years of goalie playing and coaching to our staff and is committed to his players. Josh has a tendency to make his hobbies harder than they have to be: playing hockey goalie, archery hunting and working in statistics and computer coding. He grew up fishing and hunting in Michigan and then spent five years in the U.S. Navy as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, trained to handle and disarm explosive devices and chemical or nuclear weapons. He does a little less parachuting these days but still brings the same attention to detail and love of problem solving to his current role. He earned a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Montana and then a PhD from University of Laval in Quebec City, Canada. There, frustrated by a lack of statistical software packages capable of answering his many questions about population dynamics, he started teaching himself computer coding and Bayesian statistics and set out to build his own. He joined the Lukacs lab as a postdoc in 2012 and is now a research scientist at the University of Montana.
Coach Nowak can be reached at: josh.nowak@speedgoat.io or 406-214-7666
Tucker Sargent - General Manager
Tucker has been involved with the hockey community in Missoula for the past 15 years. Having spent a stint on the previous iteration of the Griz Hockey team back in 2006. Since then he has been involved in the men’s league and also coaching the University of Montana Lacrosse team for the past 12 seasons. In his time as head coach for lacrosse program Tucker has elevated the team to a perennial national contender, developed a large local fan base for the team in Montana and developed partnerships with local businesses and media promoting the team. He is taking this model of success over to hockey to grow the prominence of the team both on campus and within the hockey community of Montana.
Tucker’s duties with the team include working with the University of Montana to ensure academic success of the student athletes within the Griz Hockey program, marketing and promoting the team, over seeing player recruitment and retention, scheduling, and many other various administrative roles. Tucker will also be assisting Co Head Coaches Mike Anderson and Will Grossman with on ice practices.
Tucker can be reached at tucker.sargent@umontana.edu or 406-546-6171