School Community

Paul Kelly, leader of College Hockey Inc. sat down for an interview with Matt Gunning on SB Nation’s Rink Side Radio yesterday and discussed a number of topics of interest to college hockey fans.

You can listen to the interview in podcast form here.

We’ll continue on with the Showcase reports for players born in 1994 and 1995.

As with the last post, the disclaimer applies that it’s impossible for me to see everything, so some very good players probably got missed. I’m just trying to name a couple players I saw that impressed me. It’s not a complete listing by any means.

Comments are after the jump.

The WCHA Media Poll Ballots are due on Wednesday, and since there’s no new information to be gained by waiting–other than that, shockingly, every team has had great chemistry in captain’s practices and it could be their best year ever–I may as well post this now.

Here’s what the ballot I turned in looked like:

1. North Dakota

2. St. Cloud

3. Minnesota-Duluth

4. Denver

5. Wisconsin

6. Minnesota

7. Colorado College

8. Bemidji State

9. Nebraska-Omaha

10. Minnesota State

11. Michigan Tech

12. Alaska-Anchorage

Player of the Year: Justin Fontaine, Minnesota-Duluth

Rookie of the Year: Jaden Schwartz, Colorado College

Though not going on the official poll, I’ll also pick a pre-season first and second all-conference team, and an all-rookie team after the jump.

With the specter of the Big Ten Hockey Conference hanging over college hockey’s head, and threatening to unseat the WCHA as college hockey’s premier conference, the WCHA brought out their big guns today.

Just months after stepping into the future of like 10 years ago with their redesigned website, the WCHA unveiled their 100% brand new logo, which is actually just pretty much the old logo, except the W is like 50% bigger.  Awesome work.

Thank goodness the teams in the WCHA put out a great product, and don’t need to rely their league to help sell it.

Inside College Hockey was the first to report yesterday that Penn State will formally announce their intention to start a hockey program, possibly as early as this Friday.

I already covered this issue over the summer, so it’s probably not worth rehashing until we get some new information of what the future holds.

Other people are writing about it though. USCHO columnist Dave Starman thinks Penn State would be good, if they wanted to join the CCHA, but bad if it meant the creation of a Big Ten conference. Also, his proposed WCHA-CCHA alliance seems pretty wacky. The solution to whatever financial troubles those smaller schools will face won’t be solved by increasing travel expenses exponentially. College Hockey News thinks a Big Ten Conference is inevitable, though not necessarily a disaster.

The reaction from the Penn State side of things has been general excitement, and why wouldn’t it be? Before even being announced, their hockey program has already succeeded where their treasured football program has failed in defeating a school from Alabama.