As someone who began college during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ondrej Pavel is used to finding unique ways to get his work done.
He couldn’t join the Minnesota State men’s hockey team for workouts prior to his freshman year in the summer of 2020, as the pandemic made international travel extremely difficult at that time.
Instead, the Prague, Czech Republic native found a way to use driftwood to simulate weight training, as all the gyms were closed.
If that was possible, how about finishing a mechanical engineering degree remotely while pursuing hockey at the highest level?
“COVID helped me a little bit because it taught the entire planet how to do things remotely,” Pavel said. “The rise in Zoom and such helped me tremendously to be able to find this alternative.”
Pavel, who signed a professional contract with the Colorado Avalanche after the completion of his junior hockey season at MSU, ended up completing his degree remotely in four years earlier this month.
Planning and coordination between Pavel and MSU was the key to it all and that started well before he signed with Colorado.
He had a great sophomore season, helping the Mavericks reach the 2022 national championship game. Following that season, Pavel began drawing serious interest from NHL clubs, but decided to return to MSU for his junior year to continue his studies. Despite that, he had a pretty good idea he might sign after his junior season, so he started looking into options for continuing his degree.
Getting him to finish was a complete team effort between Pavel, MSU athletics director Kevin Buisman, both the current and previous MSU men’s hockey coaching staffs and countless faculty members in MSU’s College of Science, Engineering and Technology.
“He had a lot of other options. He could’ve, just by proximity, probably finished at the University of Colorado or somewhere else out there,” Buisman said. “He just made it very clear, Ondrej has that way of getting his point across, ‘no, I started here, I want to finish here.’”
Pavel said that he was able to finish some classes during the summer of 2023, but his fall semester still included six courses, while he took three in the spring.
Unlike MSU, where the practice and game schedule is tailored around a typical school schedule, his schedule with the Colorado Eagles, the American Hockey League affiliate of the Avalanche, was not.
He had to get to the arena around 8 a.m. on a normal practice day and would usually be done by 2 p.m. His professors recorded lectures so that he could go back and watch if he couldn’t view them live. He was able to take exams virtually during office hours, and relied heavily upon those sessions to get help with coursework.
“All of the individual professors in my classes, they had to be on board,” Pavel said. “Every single person in the process had the power to say ‘no, I’m not doing this. I don’t think I want him to graduate like this.’ …
“All of them got on board and helped me get my degree, and also helped me do it in a respectable fashion so I wasn’t taking any shortcuts, because I wasn’t looking for any. They were great at providing me a way to do the same amount of work that people did in class, online.”
Pavel also did pretty well for himself on the ice.
Though he spent most of the season with the Eagles, he also played in two games with the Avalanche. His NHL debut came last November against the New Jersey Devils.
Pavel got the news of his promotion from Eagles’ coach Aaron Schneekloth abruptly, but still managed to get his coursework done that day.
“It was pretty funny submitting my assignment that morning and then walking into a locker room with (Avalanche stars) Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar that evening,” Pavel said with a laugh. “It was pretty surreal for me. You dream about those moments for so long and then you’re actually with those guys.”
Pavel’s schedule will be less hectic in his second full professional season this fall, and he hopes many more hockey seasons are still ahead of him.
MSU coach Luke Strand got to know Pavel some throughout the process after coaching against him when Pavel played junior hockey in the United States Hockey League.
Strand feels Pavel will have a long professional hockey career.
“Strong like bull,” Strand said with a laugh when describing Pavel’s game. “You can really see why he had such good success here, and he will continue to have success.”
Whenever Pavel finishes playing hockey, he knows what field he’ll go into. He’s already taken the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to get officially licensed, and is excited to someday use the degree he worked so hard to get.
“That’s a pretty good second plan if you ask me,” Pavel said. “I think it’s going to still be a little interesting to see where my life takes me, but I’m glad this part of my life is completed, and that I’m able to have an engineering degree.”
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