The audio is a little broken up at times due to the cell phone that MacWilliam was talking on. I don't know if it was talking on a Verison cell phone or not... Can you hear me now?
You can listen to said podcast of UND defenseman Andrew MacWilliam and his appearance on the Pipeline Show with Guy Flaming. All you have to do is clicking on this link to the right of this paragraph. Also, you can down load the Pipeline Show by down loading it from ITunes if you want to listen to their show on a weekly basis. [Click to Listen]
Guy asked Mac what it means to be the captain at UND.
“It’s awesome – it’s a great honor,” MacWilliam said.
“Like I have said… there have been a tremendous amount of guys that worn the “C” throughout the years. I have played with two of them – it’s a great honor and an absolute privilege and it’s something that I take a lot of pride and I take very serious.”
Guy asked Andrew MacWilliam about the goaltending situation at UND with Aaron Dell and Bard Eidsness moving on.
“Yeah were excited... We have some good new guys coming in…” MacWilliam said.
"Like you said we have couple of fresh faces in net and that will be good… They’re going to compete hard and have a completion through the week and they’re going to push each other which is going to make everyone better. So they are both good goalies. You have Zane Gothberg that played at Fargo in the USHL and Clarke Saunders that is actually a transfer from Alabama Huntsville.”
Guy asked Andrew MacWillam about the big changes coming to college hockey landscape and college hockey re-alignment. Is it a little bit different because of this being the last year in the WCHA?
"It is, but it’s not a huge thing on our minds – but it’s definitely something that we’re thinking about leaving our mark on the WCHA for North Dakota especially being a senior and our senior class," MacWilliam said.
"I know we have kind of talked about it and it would be kind of nice to be the last ones that MacNaghten [Trophy] and that Broadmoor [Trophy] … and just kind of leave our mark on the WCHA and the University of North Dakota."
During the last segment of the same show - Nate Ewell from College Hockey Inc was also on the Pipeline Show with Guy Flaming and you can listen to that segment by clicking on this link. [Click to listen]
Nate Ewell on the upcoming CBA and the impact on college hockey… Guy asked Nate to give a bit of a perspective from the college hockey point of view.
“A lot of the thought coming out of the last CBA agreement was that it would benefit college hockey because of the rookie salary cap,” Ewell said.
“The sense was okay, it’s not as lucrative now for a player to leave school for example and so they were more likely to stay. Well… In fact, it made it smarter for NHL teams to stock up on young players; more and more often they were signing players out of school early – even a lot of players that weren’t quite ready for it. So from a college stand point, it was bitter sweet to see guys sign and then get stashed in the minors because they weren’t ready. “
“What we are hopeful for with the…first of all we are hopeful that they sign an agreement soon so we can get some NHL hockey back going. Hopefully, it can address some issues that we think could help the college game and really help developmental hockey on a wide scale. Just a few things that we have sort of asked about, is the possibility of assigning deadlines so that colleges can have a sense of what their roster will be you know before say July or August.”
“Some looks at the draft, I know the 19 year old draft has been talked about a lot. We feel like that would benefit college and really benefit the pros because they get another year to look at the prospects before they select them. You know there are any numbers of things that could change and as we see from the last experience a small change could have a big effect.”
