Wallstrom, Kramer earn major national award recognition

SPRINGFIELD, Massachusetts – American International College ice hockey has two student-athletes up for major awards, as senior defenseman Brian Kramer has been announced as a nominee for the Hobey Baker Award, while freshman goalkeeper Nils Wallstrom is on the watch list for the Mike Richter Award and the Tim Taylor Award.

The awards, issued for Division I men's ice hockey, are for the nation's top player, goalkeeper, and rookie; the former is given by the Hobey Baker Award committee, while the latter two are each conferred by the Hockey Commissioners Association.

Kramer, AIC's co-captain, is among the leading scoring defensemen in the nation with nine goals, and has 19 points on the season to go with a team-best +12 rating. He plays on the team's top defensive pairing and is a mainstay on both the power play and penalty kill for the squad. He leads the team with three game-winning goals this season, including an overtime winner over then-No. 19 RIT.

Wallstrom has won the starting job in net with an impressive first collegiate season. His 13 wins are an AIC single-season rookie record and rank second-most in a season in the Division I era of the program. He was the HCA Goalkeeper of the Month for November, and has helped lead AIC's penalty kill to an 87.8 percent success rate since the start of November.

Each of the three awards carries with it the weight of college hockey history:

Hobey Baker was the captain of Princeton University's ice hockey team and considered to be the game's first superstar before his death shortly after the end of World War I. He led Princeton to national titles in hockey in 1912 and 1914 as well as the 1911 football title, and was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as the only American in the inaugural 1945 class.

Mike Richter played at the University of Wisconsin from 1985-87 and represented the United States at the World Juniors, and later the World Cup, World Championships, and Olympics, and also backstopped the New York Rangers to the 1994 Stanley Cup across a 666-game NHL career where he became the franchise's first 300-game winner.

Tim Taylor played college hockey at Harvard University but is most well-known as the longtime head coach at Yale University from 1976-2006. He was three-time ECAC Coach of the Year and won the Spencer Penrose Award as National Coach of the Year in 1998; following his passing in 2013, the ECAC named its coaching award in his honor.

One of the components for the Hobey Baker Award is a fan vote; fans can vote for Kramer for the award by visiting www.hobeybaker.com/vote.