As of this weekend, three Hockey East programs –Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Providence- have disclosed their 2010-11 schedules. All are subject to change, naturally.
Unfortunately, you can bet your blades that any tweaks the itineraries undergo in the four months left until the curtains reopen will be next to negligible. You know how that goes. This means you won’t see any icebreaking additions, such as, say, a previously unconfirmed get-together with the likes of Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth, or Wisconsin.
Nope. So far, we are assured of only one regular season matchup between a member of the New England Only League and a member of the only conference with teams outside of the Eastern Time Zone. That would be a two-night visit to Duluth by UConn over the weekend of October 23-24.
For the defending national champion Bulldogs, by the way, we already know those two games will be their only interleague matches. Translation: no one east of the Great Lakes is going to have a chance to watch the collegiate queens of women’s hockey next winter.
Meanwhile, barring any spontaneous NCAA tournament encounters, Brian McCloskey’s capstone class will go without facing a western school for the second year in a row. Not even the aforementioned UMD team that has ended each of their last three seasons.
Bob Deraney’s pupils in Providence will similarly miss out on facing a WCHA rival for the first time since 2004-05, when they waited until they earned their tournament passport to venture out to Minnesota. This coming only one year after the Friars really went for the gusto and played a whopping four WCHA games –two at home versus Wisconsin and two on the road in St. Cloud, Minn.- after typically playing just two per season.
After October, the Huskies will travel beyond New England boundaries one more time when they take a reasonable two-hour ride to battle Union on December 8. Other than that, beyond Halloween, the Huskies, Wildcats, and Friars are all sticking exclusively to fellow Hockey Easterners and local ECAC adversaries. If they have any more engagements with a team from New York or Pennsylvania, they’ll be staying home for that one.
And there is every reason to believe we will see a similar trend when the other five WHEA teams finalize their schedules. Ditto the other teams in the other three leagues.
Even the upstart Syracuse program, which boldly commenced its second season last year with an excursion to the Twin Cities, will neither be traveling far nor reeling in any distant adversaries. Being from College Hockey America, the nation’s smallest league, the Orange have plenty of room for intriguing nonconference games -18 of them, to be exact. Yet save for a two-nighter at the somewhat proximate Ohio State, the rest of those games will be against northeastern schools.
Dare we bring up the “M” word in the effort to explain what we’re seeing here? Because it is easy enough to conclude these teams are taking a monetary precaution, but let’s not plunge into that. Whatever the culprit or culprits might be, the consequence is still a downer.
This is what makes you wonder why the steadfast puritans in charge of Major League Baseball took until 1997 to realize that it would not be an apocalyptic mistake to introduce interleague play. Or why, during the NHL’s post-lockout reconstruction period, Boss Bettman decided to excessively amplify divisional rivalries at the expense of nonconference play, ultimately limiting teams to only 10 games per year against only two divisions from the other conference.
Generally speaking, sports fans and participants alike want to explore other worlds once in a while. Every now and then, they want to welcome perfect strangers from another region. In college hockey especially, you have to wonder where we would be without the endless, unsolvable, regionalist bragging rights battle between Minnesotans and New Englanders.
Not to mention, even if they won’t be staring down the exact same uniform later, chances are your team would like to have a feel for the conference they might be challenging come mid-March. History and logic both tell us that the road to the crown goes through the Midwest. Therefore nothing whets the long-suffering appetites of the three eastern leagues quite like a potential playoff preview against a WCHA bigwig.
Come what may, NCAA women’s fans will have to go largely without it in 2010-11. They will just have to graciously accept what they get and cheer harder for the now-evermore coveted right to face an alien program in the Elite Eight and/or Frozen Four.
And of course, cheer for a little better luck and a little more variety on their team’s 2011-12 schedule.
No comments:
Post a Comment