College Hockey:

North Dakota new No. 1 in men’s poll

Don’t really care that they are #1 right now. Need them to be #1 in April at the end of the national tourney. But I am sure there will be a lot of opinions on why they shouldn’t be #1.

I think I’m going to have to agree with a good portion of people here, #1 right now doesn’t matter, I think teams are just shooting for top 4 in the PWR, because quite frankly, no team has the right to be #1 now. the top few teams could all be considered the top team. This is definitely going to be a fun tournament to watch!

As a Union fan I’m just happy they are in the discussion and in the hunt.

Go Sioux.

“I’ll drink to that! where are my feeeeeeeet?????”

I’m glad the blog are back on just hockey. So you will understand where I’m coming from I went to Merrimack College as a freshman in 1949 when there was no senior class, the school having been founded in 1947 by the Augustinians, whose other school is Villanova University. An attempt was made to have an independent team in the early 1950s but a serious injury to a player caused the administration to order that team to stop using the name Merrimack because there was no insurance coverage. By the mid 1950s Fr. Thabault, who had been a wing for St. Michael’s (VT) when a student there decided to get hockey into the athletics program, which then had only basketball, tennis (on rented courts) and sailing. An outdoor rink was built for the late Winter and Spring of 1955 but due to the weather only one game was played against Babson. Several games were played in indoor rinks in 1955-56 and the team clearly was considered varsity by the Fall of 1956. Jim Reynolds, who had been a key figure in the earlier independent team and now was a lawyer, came back to coach for several years and he and Fr. Thabault gradually built a schedule that relied on facing good opposition more than the number of games played. If you want to see how that was accomplished see the complete results from 1956-57 on the Merrimack hockey website. I handled the Sports PR as a student junior and senior year and thus added hockey when I returned to join the faculty at age 23 in the Fall of 1955. About 12 of the 16 years from 1951-67 I served as Sports Information Director, but by age 35 had to stop because we added more sports and it was too much to do while teaching full time. By the late 1980s Hockey East had added Lowell as a seventh team and invited Merrimack to be the eighth. I preferred the ECAC as I felt we could compete better against the Ivys and schools such as Union and RPI which we sometimes played. At my request the committee asked ECAC, which had 12 teams then, what were our chances. ECAC not only indicated that 12 teams were the maximum they wanted but also told us that, if anyone dropped out, the slot was promised to Union. Union replaced Army when it left the ECAC. The only other change was when Vermont left the ECAC to be Hockey East’s tenth team with Quinnipiac moving to the ECAC (the ninth HEA team was UMass-Amherst). At that time Merrimack went 25-0 in ECAC East, the combination of Division 2 and 3 teams, and was selected as the Division I Independent because we had indicated we wanted to move up (in two game total goal matchups we trailed Northeastern 8-3 about midway in the second period of the second game but scored seven straight goals to advance to the quarterfinals at Lake Superior State, which won the national title that year; we won the first game, LSSU’s only home loss since very early in the season, but were blanked in the second game. So Merrimack moved to the HEA with high hopes since we already played some of its members, but it is only now in 2011 when we are headed back to the NCAAs since Coach Dennehy, now in his sixth year here, has a team he selected based on known ability to win in junior hockey or in the case of a few others prep or US Development Team experience, the latter being the way goalie Joe Cannata readied himself.
That is a long preamble but reading the posts tonight I felt I should comment since at age 79 I am still teaching (I missed 2007-08 to get both knees replaced).
I never advanced as a child from double runners to skates and had trouble with a two foot decline in the backyard when I tried skis.
It is wonderful that so many of you truly love your alma maters and their athletic programs but the most important thing going on is the education of these young people who have received scholarship aid to attend our colleges and universities. I have been blessed with teaching many college athletes over the years, some of whom are among the top one percent of the thousands I’ve taught. Time management is the key to their success. Please remember that their education and future life as citizens of a troubled world when you are posting. On a different website the UMass goalie, who was pulled in our 11-2 win in January, was blasted, apparently at age 25 for behind over the hill, but played magnificently in defeat this past weekend in both games.
The second item is the debate on Strength of Schedule. Last year we opened with two games at North Dakota, but were on the attack at the end in a 3-2 loss at what I now know Fighting Sioux fans refer to as the Ralph. For this year Coach Dennehy wanted to take us further West to Denver and Colorado College, but the dates could not be worked out, but I have high hopes Merrimack will open in WCHA territory in 2011 as we did in 2009. Hopefully some WCHA team will visit us, even if one game along with BC, BU, Northeastern or Harvard (we won head to head this year against all four Beanpot teams). The SOS for all HEA TUCs was hurt last Fall when HEA teams did not do well as a group against other conferences, a rarity, except for Merrimack (6-0-1, the tie the opener at Niagara) and BC (4-1-0). I hope no one minds that both Merrimack and Providence went South to play UAH (our games with UAH were at Nashville to introduce college hockey to the state of Tennessee) to help fill their schedule. When you book a non-conference schedule I don’t think anyone is deliberately trying to find soft touches. For short periods we have had home and home weekends over two seasons with some CCHA teams, one being Ohio State, which ended up each year in a split. Over the years we have played all the Ivys but not often, including Pennsylvania when it had a varsity team; Dartmouth has invited us more than once to their invitational and one calendar year (two seasons) we traded weekends with Princeton.
I think SOS is an important item to look at in picking the 16 teams. Merrimack is 7 of 7 against HEA teams so far but I can’t guarantee we can win twice at Orono this weekend since we’ve never done it before. Neither can I guarantee sweeping Providence on the last weekend of the regular season since Beaudry blanked us 2-0 there in November. Someone pointed to our losses 6-4 to Lowell, our nearby rival, and the shutout at PC. Both, along with the other three losses to BC, Northeastern and UNH, were fought to the last minute, all being one goal losses in a way since PC and Lowell scored empty netters at the end.
My best wishes to all of you. I’m quite new to blogging but have a lot of journalism papers to do for my students, who include Cannata and Jesse Todd this semester in Feature Writing, after Ryan Flanigan, Carter Madsen and Karl Stollery in the Fall, all quality students.