Many players from the Central Michigan University Division III men’s club hockey team describe former coach James Cadzow as the best coach they have ever had.

He is described by teammates as a very intense coach – he wasn’t afraid to get in a player’s face and yell. It was that aggressive coaching strategy that made them one of the best teams in their division in the 2017-18 season, finishing 39-6 overall.

However, behind the success and numerous wins, there was a more deceitful side to the coach – one the team would not find out about until after he left CMU.

During his one-year stint as coach in 2017-18, Cadzow embezzled more than $25,000 from the club hockey team, which CMU police said he used for gambling and personal finances such as cell phone bills, gas and groceries.

Cadzow is serving a 60-day jail sentence in the Isabella County Jail for embezzlement. He was also ordered to serve 60 months of probation and pay more than $20,000 in restitution.

But the team wouldn’t know the full extent of his actions until after he hurriedly picked up and left CMU for a coaching job at Adrian College in 2018.

When he first arrived at CMU in May 2017, Cadzow was well-received by the club team. The players were excited for him to come on as coach, said South Lyon senior Shane Agnello, and they were ready for something new.

"He was the best coach I’ve ever had," said Chicago junior Joey Simoncelli. "His practices are very intense, he expects a lot out of his players. He ran the team like D1 and believed in his players, and I was sold."

Jackson junior Alex Lasky recalled the intensity of Cadzow's practices.

“On the ice, he was really vocal, he liked to yell and really got on some guys during hockey practices," he said. "But it was effective. Off the ice, he seemed like a pretty good guy.”

Growing suspicions

Looking back on the 2017-18 season, there were instances where the team remembers the coach acted “fishy,” Lasky said.

“Looking back, I can see something was going wrong,” he said.

The team did a lot more fundraising during the 2017-18 season than in previous years, Agnello said. However, the teammates didn’t think much of it – they simply thought the coach wanted the team to have nice things and get their names out there, Agnello said.

Lasky recalled when the team got back from Christmas break in 2017, Cadzow was pushing the teammates to take part in a fundraiser called “RallyAroundUs.”

Cadzow allegedly told players that everyone needed to have a minimum of 10 people they were going to contact to donate money, and he made each teammate prove to him they reached out to the 10 people, Lasky said.

“He said if we didn’t come up with the 10 names, we wouldn’t be allowed to play,” he said. “He told us it was going toward nationals.”

Months later, after Cadzow was long gone, the team found out the coach pocketed more than $3,500 from the fundraiser for himself.

“It’s pretty obvious now, but now we know what he was doing,” Lasky said.

Simoncelli also noticed moments when the coach was acting “sketchy.” During his freshman year, Simoncelli said he worked out a payment plan with the coach so he didn’t have to pay the full fee upfront and would pay a fee on a monthly basis.

Cadzow told Simoncelli to just mail the checks to his address every month, he said. However, Simoncelli and his mom began to notice something was off when Cadzow would cash the check on the same day it arrived every month.

“I remember my mom called me after she sent the first check and was like, ‘Hey, do you think it’s odd that your coach cashed the check right away?’” Simoncelli recalled. He remembered his mom thinking it was “sketchy.”

He told her to just forget about it – the team was having a very successful season, so there wasn’t anything to worry about.

But looking back, Simoncelli said he now realizes the coach’s behavior was not normal.

Shortly after Cadzow left the coaching job at CMU, Dalton Sutherland, the club hockey president, reported the suspected embezzlement to CMU police in July 2018.

After interviewing Cadzow, investigators learned the full extent of the situation: The ex-coach had embezzled $25,539.56 during the 2017-18 season from the club hockey team, which does not receive any funding from the university.

Though Cadzow was eventually ordered by Isabella County Circuit Court to pay restitution, the team was left paying back thousands of owed bills to various businesses. The next season, each teammate was required to pay hundreds of extra dollars in dues to help recover some of the debt.

‘He made us feel like he loved us’

But aside from the $25,000 hole that Cadzow left the team to crawl out of, what made matters worse was that the team felt betrayed by the coach’s quick departure, Lasky said.

Lasky said that after the highly successful 2017-18 season, many teammates felt that Cadzow had made them feel like he was going to stick around for the long run. When Cadzow fled for a coaching job at Adrian College after only a year of coaching at CMU, the team felt heartbroken.

“It really felt like he cared for us, and out of nowhere he took the job at Adrian, and everyone was like, ‘Wait, what?’” he said. “He genuinely made us feel like he really loved us.”

Simoncelli, who attributes Cadzow as one of the main reasons he came to play hockey at CMU, said he was angry when he found out about the ex-coach’s embezzlement.

“This guy is a scumbag,” he said. “I’ve never met a guy who could do that to people who loved him and still be able to sleep at night.”

After finding out about the embezzlement, the team gave Cadzow multiple chances to return the money and apologize. Simoncelli said the team set up multiple lunch dates to meet with Cadzow, but the ex-coach bailed every time.

Despite feeling betrayed, the men’s club hockey team is focusing this year on bouncing back.

“We have a lot of guys on our team who are really dedicated to the game,” Simoncelli said. “We were so close to Cadzow, but he screwed us over.

“Now we want to prove that we don’t need him to win.”