Check this out...

Check out this article that I found over on the Mav Puck message board. God forbid anything to include college hockey would cut into the coverage of other sports. This is a blog post by Harold Anderson. For those of us including me that don't know who Harold Anderson is he is the Retired Publisher and Chief Executive Officer of the Omaha World-Herald, that's the newspaper that covers the UNO Mavericks.

I Wish The UNO Hockey Team Well But Do They Need All That Coverage?

Most surprising headline in recent memory:

“Time to recognize Blais, Mav Hockey.”

The headline appeared over a sports commentator’s column which appeared November 18. Would it be possible that the columnist has not been aware of the wall-to-wall coverage of the Maverick hockey team since Dean Blais became head coach in 2009?

I had no reason to keep track of the number of times readers were told that Blais won two national championships while coaching hockey at the University of North Dakota, but that fact must be among the most often repeated in the history of local sports coverage.

On the eve of the start of the Mavericks’ 2009 hockey season, Coach Blais and newly-hired assistant coach Mike Hastings and two unidentified hockey players were featured in a color photo that took up nearly the entire front page of a four-page special section. An inside page was devoted to the Mavericks and their schedule and pictures and a brief biography of each of 25 squad members, plus pictures and brief biographical sketches of Coach Blais and his two assistants.

Twenty-five squad members? Isn’t it true that you can have only a maximum of six players on the ice at any given time, and this includes a goalie who may play the entire game?

One of the inside pages was devoted to pictures and biographical sketches of 26 Omaha Lancers squad members.

In the total of 52 squad members on the two teams, there was one player identified as being from Nebraska—an Omahan on the Lancers roster.

Wow! Note to Harold, hockey might be a niche sport to the masses in the south that love football, however, college hockey has a big following in the upper Midwest as well that deserves coverage... You have a coach that will probably be in the USA Hockey Hall of Fame some day. You might not want to bite the hand that is paying your retirement.