ROANOKE, Va. – The SPHL announced on Wednesday that Roanoke rookie forward Carson Gallagher has been named as the SPHL’s Rookie of the Year for the 2024-2025 season. Gallagher is the first Rail Yard Dawg to win the league’s Rookie of the Year award in the franchise’s history.
After starting the season with Evansville and Pensacola, Gallagher dominated for the Rail Yard Dawgs once he was acquired shortly before Thanksgiving. The Roanoke winger tied for the team-high with a plus-18 rating on the ice, while also leading all SPHL rookies with 18 goals and 47 points throughout 51 regular season games, 42 of which came for Roanoke (46 points for the Dawgs). In the first round of the President’s Cup Playoffs against Knoxville, Gallagher had three points, tallying goals in both Game One and Game Three of the series against the Ice Bears.
Gallagher earned the league’s Player of the Month award in January when he tallied a point in all but one game for the Dawgs to start 2025, scoring seven goals, adding eight assists, and finishing with a league-best plus-13 rating that month. The 25-year-old also had an 11-game point streak from January 16 through February 8, the second-longest scoring streak in franchise history behind CJ Stubbs’s 18-game point streak in the 2022-2023 season. In 45 total appearances for the Dawgs, counting the postseason, the Courtice, ON native had 13 multi-point games.