SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — The growth former New Ulm Eagles hockey player Noah Wilmes has had over the past two years at Dordt University has seen him develop as a person, leader and player.

Wilmes, a New Ulm Cathedral graduate who last played for the Eagles boys hockey team in 2021, is wrapping up his sophomore year of college this week.

Wilmes finished his sophomore season of college hockey this past winter for a Dordt Defender hockey team that finished 16-6-1 overall and 7-1 in the Great Plains Athletic Conference of the American Collegiate Hockey Association III.

As a freshman last season, Wilmes finished with 18 goals and five assists in 21 games.

Despite dealing with injuries and missing two games this season, Wilmes finished his sophomore year with 26 points, scoring 12 goals and collecting 14 assists.

The success he’s had during the first two years of his college hockey career has been impressive, even more so after learning Wilmes had no plans of playing college hockey in the first place.

“I had no intentions of playing hockey after high school,” Wilmes said. “My father, actually, was looking at colleges around West Iowa, and Dordt University came up. He wanted me to check it out, a private Christian school, so he thought I would love it. And I do love it very much.”

Dordt College is a private evangelical Christian university that sits on 150 acres of Great Plains prairie. While it’s a cozy little school compared to some of the other monster universities across the United States, it boasted a school-record enrollment of 1,858 for last year’s fall semester.

Wilmes’ intro to the school, however, wasn’t the dream college visit a teenager imagines. In fact, it was a school he admitted to originally wanting to cross off his list at one point.

But after Dordt head hockey coach Tyler Morgan reached out to Wilmes for a second visit, everything started to fall into place.

“The hockey coach contacted me and I was quite surprised by that because I had no intentions of playing hockey after high school,” Wilmes said. “So I was, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what to say to this.’ So I went down there for another tour and I fell in love with the school and how they did things, and the whole Christian aspect and living in the eyes of God. So I accepted their offer and committed, and ever since then, there’s zero regret at all.”

Wilmes said after Dordt got a new hockey coach a few years ago that wanted to help the team create a positive, winning culture, he was part of a freshmen group brought in in hopes of doing that.

And while Wilmes was viewed as a key player for the Defender hockey team his freshman year, his sophomore year saw him take on a greater role as a leader.

“This year, the beginning of sophomore year, I had to play more of a leadership role and I had to teach these freshmen the things we do around here,” Wilmes said. “It was more so I have to play the best I can and set standards for the younger kids that come in. And it wasn’t just me, it was a lot of other older guys that joined the program within the last two or three years.”

Wilmes also had a few offers to play baseball in college, but after making the trek to Iowa to become a member of the Defender hockey team, his time playing baseball took a back seat to college hockey. Now, Wilmes dons a baseball cap during the summer as a member of the Searles Grizzlies, a Tomahawk East League amateur baseball team.

As a student at Dordt, Wilmes said he’s enjoyed the school for its size, community and values.

“The relationships you’re able to have with a professor or teacher with a small class, small classes averaging, like, 18 to 20 students, you don’t really get that opportunity at a bigger public university,” Wilmes said. “But here at Dordt, every classroom you go in, everyone has talked to the professor, everyone is friends with the professor. It’s a really nice community that these professors build in the classrooms.”

Wilmes’ sophomore season ended with his teammates voting him the Team MVP, a testament to the work he’s put in and the bond he’s developed with his team along the way.

“We eat dinner every day with each other, we work out a lot during the week with each other, we do everything together,” Wilmes said. “It’s awesome. I wish more hockey players could experience what we do here at Dordt.”