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Killers

Sadie Limback and Rose Shires celebrate.  This happens a lot.  Photo stolen from omavs.com; photo credit Dayna Berry.

Pay attention to Omaha Volleyball.  Now.

It would have been easy to miss them.  In the takeover of the World-Herald by cost-cutting Lee Enterprises, Our Man Tony Boone has been assigned, inexplicably, to cover Iowa high school football, so you can look to him for the score of the big Beebeetown-Mondamin tilt.  The remaining volleyball media bandwidth is devoted to the other two D-1 teams in Nebraska.  That’s malpractice. These women are killers.

We ought not be surprised.  In 2015, its first season of full Division I eligibility, Omaha had Denver down 10-5 in the fifth set of the Summit championship before falling in a heartbreaker.  One of the great classes of Maverick heroes in any sport (Bailey, Schmale, Wollak, Banderas, Taylor, Schimmer) graduated, and Rose Shires was left to rebuild in 2016 and 2017.

Rebuild she did.  Elena Pietro, a rising star who came to the Mavs after coaching Papio South, is a remarkable coach.  The website lists her as Omaha’s recruiting coordinator, and from my day with the team she appears to be Rose’s chief operating officer.  Her instructions to the team in the huddle are equal parts ultra-dense tactical points and sharp-tongued inspiration.

Micah Rhodes came most recently from Creighton, having coached also at Buena Vista.  He is quieter, but no less intense; when front-row players are about to rotate in, he delivers a concise point to which his charges intently listen.  As you’ll see, he knows what he’s doing.

The Mavs have a flawless start in the Summit League, and it’s due largely to the variety of ways Omaha can kill you.  The heart of the offense is the middle blockers, Bella Sade and Anna Blaschko, each devastatingly effective in her own way.  The willowy Bella is a sniper, picking out square inches of vacant floor; Anna will simply put the ball through you.  Omaha’s outside hitters also offer contrasting style; Abby Bergsten, the only senior regularly on the floor, is a beast, while Claire Leonard, who transferred from Canisius this summer, brings a high level of slightly deranged energy to the squad.

On the right you’ll find Sadie Limback, a true freshman who is a treat to watch.  That’s her pictured above.  She’s getting loads of playing time and using it to assemble some great statistics.  Limback and contributed 16.5 points to lead the Mavs against North Dakota.

The Mavs are looking great on the back row.  Back is Omaha native libero Claire Mountjoy, who is a calming presence when opponents assemble runs, and who dug, among others, the ball that won the match against North Dakota.  Courtney Morehead and Kenzie Michalek are wonderful servers (Kenzie has a baffling knuckleball that dives right as it crosses the net; Morehead had four aces against UND).  Setter Sydney Case has answered perhaps the biggest question the Mavs had going into this season - who would replace the titanic Sydney O’Shaughnessy.  Not only has she four powerful weapons to choose from on any given play, but her no-look, over-the-back sets to Limback steaming to the net are electrifying.

For as much fun as this is, Rose has cards she’s not yet playing.  Some very talented players remain in reserve this season; Rose hinted that even more insanely talented lineups await the seasons ahead.  She’s also expressed great pride in the next few recruiting classes, saying that players closer to home are committing to Omaha.  In a volleyball-crazy part of the world, right on top of the Ogallala Aquifer of volleyball talent, that’s great news.  The best is yet to come.

Finally, this is a joyful bunch.  It’s hard to catch them not playing with smiles on their faces.  Pay attention to the bench mob on kills, blocks and aces for well-choreographed dancing and hollering, often instigated by Rylee Marshall (one of the aforementioned reserve beasts).  This is a happy team.  Watching them will make you happy.

Some very large contests remain this year.  There may be no bigger game on campus in any sport this fall than against 15-1 Denver (of course) on Tuesday, October 16.  This game may well decide the regular season championship in the Summit.   There are five regular season games remaining at home.  Get to a game. Join them on this rocket ride.  You’ll become an instant fan.

This post is the work of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the views of any other member of The Red Army, though it probably should.

[redarmyuno]

Structure

This post is the work of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the opinion of any other member of The Red Army.

“Dude, chill.”

My teenage son looked over at me, with that “ohmyGodyouaresoembarrasing” tone that teenagers use to address their parents. To be fair, I had just finished bellowing from the upper deck of Baxter.

“FIVE TIMES! YOU’VE TRIED THAT BREAKOUT FIVE TIMES, MADE THAT SAME PASS FIVE TIMES, AND THEY’VE SEEN IT COMING FIVE TIMES!”

The Mavs were in the middle of an early Swoontober game against Miami last season, and utterly failing to figure out Miami’s neutral zone defense. They were either coughing up the puck or coming in offside every single time. It was reminiscent of Dean’s mortal struggle with Bemidji State during the WHCA years.

At a media time out, Mike Gabinet had a grease board and was explaining something to the bench. The next time down the ice, the Mavs didn’t run right into the same trap. They dropped the puck back as they approached center ice, flattened out the wings’ angles as they approached the Miami line, and boom: Problem solved. They could hit the line with speed and possess the puck. They went from being out-shot 11-5 in the first period to playing on even terms with Miami the rest of the game. The night before, Gabinet had drawn up a power play that allowed the Mavs to scramble to a tie after having blown a two-goal lead.

That may have been the night that I finally understood that Dean was no longer able to coach a new-millennium hockey team. (I had had my doubts when Dean essentially laughed off North Dakota’s historic ass-kicking in November.) After the Miami win, the Mavs would go 3-9-3 in their last 15 and meekly exit the stage, once again, right around .500, and playing their least effective hockey of the year, once again.

In retrospect I should have seen it coming. Puck Daddy Ryan Lambert had argued for two years, including the Frozen Four year, that UNO’s success was at most an artifact of goaltending, not the product of a fundamentally sound hockey team. He pointed out that he had been right after the Providence game of the Frozen Four. He pointed it out again in the spring of 2016 when the Mavericks converted a 10-0 start and a stint at #1 in the Pairwise to a first-round exit from the playoffs and no at-large bid.

We should have all seen it at Providence game. Providence had some very solid hockey players, but none of the star power of a BU or a UND. Even so they were perfect on and off the puck. They took away virtually everything UNO had, and the 4-1 result wasn’t that close, and Omaha looked every bit the 2-5-3 team it had at the end of that season.

We could have seen it before that. Innumerable losses to Bemidji. Failure to reach the conference finals, even once, with or without home ice. The clockwork regularity of Swoontober, when we watched every season goal, no matter how modest or seemingly certain at Christmas, slip away from our team.

In the end, Dean’s “recruit fast horses and let them run” philosophy was a meth addiction: At first we found the drug exhilarating, all breakaway goals and dazzling speed. In the end, we were strung out, howling as one more crazy three-line pass went harmlessly for icing, changing goaltenders four times a weekend, desperate for just one more hit, wondering how first-class people like us wound up toothless and living under a bridge in College Hockeytown.

It turns out Lambert was right. You can’t win over the long run if you can’t possess the puck. If you don’t have systems. If you don’t have structure. The days of winning college hockey games 8-7, Dean’s favorite score, are over.

Into the smoldering wreckage of five catastrophic winters enters Mike Gabinet. He dismissed the previous assistants, who, I understand, had generated a total of three official visits to campus in what was outwardly a nonexistent recruiting effort in 16-17. He attracted his brother alum Dave Noel-Bernier, the video man for the Red Wings, and Peter Mannino, the goaltender behind Scott Parse at Tri-City and a highly-reputed salesman.

The contrast between Blais and Gabinet could not be more pronounced. Gabinet is said to have thrown out the beer Dean kept in the coaches’ lounge fridge - his “moneychangers in the temple” moment. Where Blais is beer and pizza, Gabinet is kale and chicken breast - bland by comparison but far better for you.

The word coming from Baxter now is “structure.” By the sound of it, the players are getting terabytes of information from the staff. The captains say the practices are unrecognizable from the year before. Good. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Gabinet’s ascension has drawn snark from the Trev-is-always-wrong crowd. Team Eeyore will probably get to feast during the rugged non-conference season. Teams that live on structure take a while to get up and running. Denver, for example, is routinely shambolic until Thanksgiving but glittering by March. Add to this that our veteran squad has never seen this information while in Omaha, so the learning curve is steeper. You’ll need to make liberal use of your mute button before Christmas.

The measurement, rather, will be at the end. If the team is playing its best hockey in March, we’ll know Gabinet was a good hire.

I suspect he was. Under Dean, he had small opportunities to impart knowledge to his team (without committing a mutiny), and the results were positive. I’m hearing from several places that Gabs & Co. are paying attention to details that Blais either willfully neglected or didn’t understand. Joel Messner, a highly reliable and technically competent defenseman, is the captain. There is circumstantial evidence that this will go well.

Like Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, I can’t define structure but I know it when I see it. We haven’t seen it in Crimson and Black, at least not since 2008. Trev’s diagnosis and prescription for the hockey team are the right ones. Now it’s time to see if the treatment works.

[redarmyuno]

The Blue Hat

Yesterday's article missed the point in a big way. But it was never going to be fair.

The below is the opinion of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the opinion of any other member of The Red Army.

When UNO cut football and wrestling, tinfoil hat types claimed that Trev had done so at the request of Tom Osborne, to snuff out the threat of an ascendant Omaha campus.

We snickered at the thought, though we appreciated the compliment embedded in it. Now UNO's ascendancy, which the Omaha World-Herald had until yesterday cheered on, is suddenly the object of "wisdom" we must all "question."

Yesterday's article was three things: Irresponsible, sinister, and in the end, ugly. It failed to ask the right questions because it wasn't about the questions. As a close reading of the article reveals, it was never going to be fair.

Irresponsible

Why does UNO have sports? What is it trying to accomplish by having them?

Moralize all you want, but college sports serve as the most prominent brand investment of most universities. Even Harvard has Division I sports. I'm just going to guess they don't make money. Nor, would I guess, does anyone say that tuition at Harvard is excessively affordable. UNO's investment in its brand is 2 1/2%. Is that excessive? Is it working? How does that figure compare to UNO's spend in the D2 era? The World-Herald has no idea.

The paper printed a sidebar of unvarnished numbers that suggests, as the reporter is forced to concede, UNO's subsidy level is in the middle of the pack in gross terms. That fact alone suggests that carving up our mascot with the top half of A1 is hysteria.

Lots of worthwhile things don't make money. The City of Omaha turned a golf course into Memorial Park, which makes it a total money loser. But if you want a picture postcard of the heart of Omaha, and a place to gather on America's birthday, you look at the monument we built to the Omahans who gave everything for our freedom. Nobody, not even Public Pulse tax cranks, thinks we should charge admission. The question here is: Is UNO's investment worthwhile? The newspaper made no effort to confront that question with facts. So far as the reporting reveals, nobody asked the following:

In a time of fewer college-age people, how is UNO's enrollment doing? How does it compare with the D2 era?

How is the foundation doing? How is alumni engagement? How are donors responding? (They put in tens of millions for Baxter, so it can't be all bad.) How do these figures compare with pre-D1 outcomes?

What are the schools we left in the MIAA doing now? How's Ouachita Baptist done since 2011? Fort Hays? Do these schools give us a clue about how UNO would be doing if we hadn't made this leap?

These questions would have taken legwork. They would have gotten at the right issue. The answers might not have stoked as much outrage. And they didn't make it into the newspaper. That's a shame.

Going over budget is not the same thing as going broke. A budget is how much you expect to spend on something. Everyone, from households to universities, makes budgets so they can plan, measure, and evaluate their expenses. We knew, going in, that Athletics was going to be subsidized - the whole university is subsidized. Strip away the finger-wagging, and the story stands for the modest proposition that athletics cost more than it was forecast to cost. It's significant, but why?

Budget overruns can happen because expenses are too high; it can also happen because the forecast is too low - that even well-managed and reasonable expenses can exceed the estimate. There's no analysis in the article. It just cost more than they thought. Nonetheless, the newspaper irresponsibly whispers, "question the wisdom."

Factually, the University is active in managing expenses right down to the K-Cup. While terse, President Bounds's quoted email asking why expenses were high is exactly what a president should be doing. The University is facing a significant revenue shortfall, as is all of state government. As far as the newspaper's reporting shows, the University leadership is on it. And the story is...?

The story in 2006 was that the people charged with minding the store - Belck and Buck - were instead skimming the till. They were throwing lavish dinner parties and listening to satellite radio on the Athletics budget. That's not present here. The World-Herald appears to think assistant coaches drinking "expensive" Donut Shop (fact check: about 50 cents a cup at Costco) is on par with the bacchanal that led to John C's ascension. It's silly.

If the newspaper was going to say, in its lede, that "some" (who?) may "question the wisdom" of moving to Division I, then it bore the burden to prove that D1 is not successful, not merely that it cost more than anticipated. It utterly failed to carry that burden; the newspaper didn't even bother to define the "wisdom" it now "questions." That's OK, not every story's a winner. But what makes it irresponsible is that the newspaper, having failed to prove its point, failed to sift out its negative slant. This is where the editors failed. As an institution committed to the public good, the Omaha World-Herald let us down, and smeared the incredibly hard work of very good people to no useful end. It's a great disappointment and I hope they'll do considerably better journalism in the future.

SINISTER

Something sinister is at work in this article also.

Yesterday when I was exchanging tweets with @OWHOpinion, they said they did the story because got "a lot" of questions about Athletics' finances. That does not appear to be all they got questions on. People at the University tell me that there was a significant anti-Trev bent to many of the questions they were asked. The questions had this tenor: It's a fact that some members of Trev's senior circle have moved on (though a strong core of Mike Kemp, Ann Oatman and Brent Meyer remain); doesn't that mean Trev's an autocrat, that he's a prima donna who's impossible to work for?

Similarly, Athletics people tell me a man claiming to be an OWH reporter accosted student-athletes in a UNO parking lot, asking loaded questions about how "morale is low" and people dislike the Athletic Director. (The student-athletes, I'm told, denied the premise and reminded the newspaper that requests for interviews should go through the Sports Information Director, which the OWH certainly knows.) No student-athletes were quoted, of course, in the making of this film.

The explicitly anti-Trev thread didn't make it into the story, and I suppose it's to the OWH's modest credit that they didn't report facts they couldn't find, if not for lack of trying. But it gives us a clue about who might have been badgering the newsroom, as the newspaper told me, to do this unfortunate piece.

Who was the one UNO coach whose comments appeared in the story? Mike Denney, the long-gone wrestling coach. His outrage was understandable in 2011; in 2017 one wonders if a national-championship wrestler might have a little more emotional resilience. More to the point, his inclusion in the story at this point is editorially indefensible. His viewpoint is uninformed and irrelevant.

His former wrestlers are no better; the OWH online page is filled with angry and personal comments from James Reynolds, a former UNO wrestler and until recently, Denney's assistant at Maryville. A number of other commenters used the shopworn rhetoric of football and wrestling anger from six years ago ("Traitor Trev!"). It's a fair inference that the story was driven, at least in part, by these people, who have no more elevated ambition than to put a political bullet in John Christensen and Trev Alberts. The newsroom should have sifted out this crankery, but perhaps the prospect of a carved-up Maverick was too appetizing. They didn't. It's on all of them.

UGLY

For months, the newspaper bombarded the University with FOIA requests and informal requests for information. I've been read emails to the University from the paper that ranged from chatty to badgering. Countless hours of University personnel time were devoted to this story. To some extent, that's fair: University records belong to the public and ought to be examined. But there was something ugly about this from the beginning, and it's well beyond the fact that the article's author is a fan of Denver, whose supremacy in the Summit League Omaha is rapidly challenging.

"Stay where you are," the newspaper seems to be saying. Other than a throwaway line in Shatel's column from time to time, the newspaper simply won't ask Creighton and UNL why it's so hard to schedule Omaha when exhibitions used to happen every year in D2. The paper quotes a faculty member from another university as saying "Why not play at a level ... where you can actually win a championship?"

In Division I, UNO has won two regular-season championships in baseball and two in men's soccer, one outright. It's played in the championship games in volleyball, men's basketball, and men's soccer. UNO is competing for championships. Its competitive success is bizarrely good for this point in the process. Without that context, the quote from Professor Doom is at best a serious editorial failure. With everything else wrong with this article, the newspaper's good faith in a level story is no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

One paragraph, however, seems to sum up the ugliness: The quote from the student wearing the Creighton hat. I've been on campus for any number of events and meetings since I first met Chancellor Christensen in 2006. It's been a long time since I've seen a kid in a Creighton hat strolling across the quadrangles. Somehow, the one student that the newspaper manages to interview for the story is a Creighton fan who goes to UNO. (Why does he go to UNO and not his beloved Creighton? Because he can't swing the $40K that Creighton charges, and the University makes higher education accessible? Again, no answer.) The reporter must have seen the kid was wearing a blue hat as he approached. How many kids weren't wearing Creighton gear at UNO that day?

We're supposed to think this kid's views are representative of the student body. Instead, he's hand-picked by the paper to support a hypothesis that the newsroom had in its mind before it sent out its first FOIA: Nobody on campus cares about UNO Athletics. This, of course, is remote from verifiable fact. UNO students engaged enough to defeat UNL students in the "best student section" competition for first place. If the reporter had, moreover, been at Morrison Stadium last month, he would have heard UNO students drowning out Creighton kids in their own building.

We don't hear about any of that. The newspaper picked the kid in the Creighton hat for its story. It was never going to be fair.

"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."- Ghandi

[redarmyuno]

Off the Window

To be completely honest, the shot should probably not have gone in.

With 4.9 seconds left on the clock and the Mavericks down by two to league monster South Dakota State, the crowd almost half Jackrabbit fans, and a streak of bad luck and tough beats a mile long, Mikaela Shaw fires a pass to a moving Marissa Preston, who lofts an off-balance shot that has no chance from the moment it leaves her hands.

Except it banks off the glass and drops though.  

Maverick women’s basketball is ten bench minutes away from greatness.  UNO has hung in with (or led) the likes of Abilene Christian and Nebraska to the end of the third quarter any number of times, only to see foul trouble and fatigue catch up. But there also seems to be a dash of cruelty in it - dozens of improbable opposition shots and crucial but wrong calls seem to pop up right when the Mavericks don’t need them.  (Fans of hockey have well-refined senses of impending doom).  To watch a game is to take in hope and heartbreak in equal measures.  Every game it seems someone key is on the bench in a shooting shirt and a pair of crutches.  But you get the sense that one day this team’s going to bust through.  Even our man Tony Boone, who does not cheer in any press box, seems to hold a special place in his ink-stained heart for women’s basketball.  

Brittany Lange came to UNO fresh from college to direct operations at the dawn of the D-1 era.  Two years later, and three removed from college herself, she was the head coach.  She assembled a highly credible staff from the debris of Chance Lindley’s abrupt departure hours before the 2013 season was to begin, and immediately began what she calls “scripting” success.  She saw each minor milestone as the next scene in the play.  Her Twitter timeline is a well-crafted public relations message calendar for the inevitable success of the program.

Shortly after being offered the big chair, Lange got an appointment with Nebraska’s deity incarnate, Tom Osborne, to consult on building a winner. The meeting was as smart a move as a young coach could make: Humble, context-appropriate, and on message: We’re going to be like them.

You can see why Trev would pick her: They are both from small-town Iowa, they both have collegiate connections to Nebraska (Lange played a year at Creighton before transferring to Iowa State), and they both radiate determination wherever they are.  Ask a question about the direction of the program, and Brittany, like Trev, will shift from social graces to articulating a vision described in short, declarative sentences, spoken not with aggrandizement or bravado, but with intention and resolve.  You want to sign for her on the spot.

With a millennial at the helm, the coaching staff intuitively grasps how to coach millennials.  Lee Aduddell, an intense competitor from D-1 juggernaut Abilene Christian, sits down-bench from the others and coaches the guards in parallel. Rod Rogan, soft-spoken and just as charismatic as Brittany, will get a head-coaching gig himself one day.  The father of the house, Kirk Walker, is hard-wired into the Iowa high school basketball ecosystem, having coached about as long as his colleagues have been on the planet.  The affection players and coaches have for each other is evident. At one point in the SDSU game, Rogan was warning one of his players to cover the Jackrabbit in the corner, but she had lost track.  The ball swung out to the corner, and the uncontested three went in.  Rogan turnedd his back on the court and hopped in obvious frustration.  Lange touched his shoulder and Rogan sat down.  There was no tirade as the Mavs came back up the court.

After a baffling loss at IPFW earlier in the week, the hallmark of a team finding its way, the Mavs raced out to big leads on the Jacks, and played the best half of their season in the first. They made life miserable for SDSU, who compiled a miserable shooting percentage.  They still led at the end of the third.

But as UNO’s warriors began to wear down - Mikaela Shaw started to go cold from the sheer accumulation of minutes - South Dakota State kept sending in fresh 6’3” Vermillionites and Rapid Citians, and kept chipping away at the lead.  At a pivotal moment in the fourth quarter, a contested rebound under the Mavs’ goal went out of bounds, and the ref on the baseline signaled possession for the Mavericks.  The crew chief, however, came from fifty feet away to demand a rhubarb, and the call was reversed.  It’s the kind of thing I’ve come to expect in the fourth quarter of a game the Mavs have led from the tip.  The Jackrabbit fans, accustomed to this kind of deference from Summit officials, were roaring lustily.

With just under five seconds left, the Jacks were up one and shooting two.  The first one was good, but the second clanged short.  Preston’s wild, improbable shot banked in, and the celebration was on.

Until, that is, the same crew chief demanded a video review of the game-winning three.  (Can’t let the top of the conference go down without a fight.)  That review established that Preston’s feet were a good eight inches beyond the arc, and the ball left her hands with a second or so left.  The video shows Lange, her arms folded, scowling at the scoring table as the referees examined the video.  As they step onto the court and signal the three is good, Lange - for just a moment - indulges a youthful exuberance, crouching and howling with her players, but for her suit, almost indistinguishable from them, before she turns around, instantaneously composed, with her hand extended to the SDSU coaches.  

Sometimes you get lucky and wild buzzer-beaters go in off the window.  It’s not luck, however, when you’re in a position to win a game against the runaway conference favorite with five seconds left.  It’s not luck when you’ve, to use Brittany’s word, “scripted” this moment.  So you get full credit when the reserve guard you promoted to starter this week kisses the glass before finding the twine.  If the saying is true, and you make your own luck, it’s well past time fortune smiled on the Mavs.  

[redarmyuno]

They Didn’t Belong

When a team is obviously and humiliatingly unprepared for its competition, isn’t it appropriate for the coach to take responsibility?

This post is the work, and the opinion, of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the views of any other person. 

Even in its darkest hours, the UNO hockey team has never given up 16 goals in a weekend. After losing 10-1 to Michigan in the playoffs, the Mavs held the Weasels to just two the following night. The second-worst weekend of all time now belongs to a weekend in Orono, Maine in February 1998, in which the Mavericks gave up 14 goals.

In a split.

The beatdown the Mavs took from North Dakota is not historic merely as matter of quantity, but of quality. This from UND fan @UofHockeyBlog, was painfully incisive:

Sweep doesn’t quite encapsulate what we did to the Mavericks this weekend, they didn’t belong.

We can object all we want to the gigantic jackwagons UND fans can sometimes be (though there is, to be sure, decency in some of them) but the path forward requires acknowledging that this guy is right. The Mavericks did not belong.

Not if you ask the coach. “I thought we played a decent 60-minute game,” Coach Blais said after losing 7-3. “I thought we had them in a few situations.” AIC and Arizona State might be able to justify 7-3 losses as “decent efforts” in which we all indulge the fiction that we had them right where we want them. Unless grotesquely out of context (which I doubt, as Tony Boone is careful about that), Dean’s comments are outright denial, contrary to plain fact.

Nowhere in the weekend press conferences is there any sense of responsibility, and very little compunction. One of the players had the decency to express modest embarrassment at the outcome Saturday. These weren’t tough games, bad beats, a team that got hot at the right time. This was a team, notwithstanding some impressive talent and even more impressive quote-barking into the midweek feature story, that was not ready to play.

I wonder if the Baghdad Bob-level denials result from the singular, hermetic environment the hockey team occupies.

The basketball locker rooms are nice, by visiting locker-room standards. The men’s locker room has one fewer locker than players, so two underclassmen have had to share one. Volleyball’s room is triangular, obviously the last thing crammed below deck in a square building filled with an oval arena. And these are the better off sports. The soccer players sit in a dimly lit fraction of the abandoned football rooms at Caniglia Field. Baseball, softball, track/cross country, and tennis have no spaces of their own to compete in, to say nothing of taking a shower.

You know what the hockey locker room looks like. Brushed aluminum, custom cabinets for lockers, negative-pressure ventilation, carpet. Nearby, Iggy’s shop, impeccably organized and opulently stocked with everything from spare blades to bubble gum, stands ready to eradicate the smallest issue with a player’s equipment. A private lounge awaits the hockey players so they can exist wholly apart from the rest of the student-athletes and students. Top-flight training facilities are on site so aches and pains can be tended without the slightest inconvenience.

Maybe Baxter Arena has inadvertently created a bubble of unreality around the hockey team. Maybe in the bowels of the purpose-built palace at 67th and Center, everybody is telling everyone else things are fine, and everyone is believing it.

Asked earlier in the week about the coming of winter and the Mavericks’ repeated slouches toward oblivion in the second half, Blais reportedly mean-mugged the questioners and dismissed the questions owing to the players’ greater character, apparently, than previous teams.

Not only is Dean’s appeal to this team’s character an appalling disservice to some terrific alumni, but it’s a massive dodge on which everybody seems to have given Dean a pass. Isn’t it the coach’s job to select players with character? Isn’t the coach responsible for a culture of accountability? When a team is obviously and humiliatingly unprepared for its competition, isn’t it appropriate for the coach to take responsibility? It’s great to act like Joe Namath and make the big predictions, if you win the Super Bowl. Otherwise, you’re Willy Loman.

One of the #thunderingbums cautioned me not to make too much of this weekend - it’s one bit of data, a point on a line. And it is, but it’s a point on a line that heads downhill, and has been pointing downhill every January for seven years. Given the schedule ahead, and the apparent renaissances of Miami and CC that began this weekend, and bearing in mind this team’s second-half performances of late, 0-14 is a very real possibility.

This isn’t “just hockey.”  These things don’t “just happen.” We know that because they’ve never happened before, not with rosters full of forgotten names, not against powerhouses greater than North Dakota is at the moment. To treat this as a one-off may be comforting, but it obscures an important truth: Despite fine talent and hardworking kids, this team doesn’t belong.

Only by recognizing the problem - no matter what Coach says - can we fix it.

[redarmyuno]

The Beautiful Game

How I Came to Love Maverick Men’s Soccer

(And Why You Should Check it Out)

This post is the work of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the opinions of any other member of The Red Army.

It was a spring day in 2011.  I was at the Fieldhouse to meet with Mike Kemp about something or other.  (The organization responsible for bringing large drums, beach balls, a fish, a miniature Zamboni and other implements of hilarity into the hockey game quite rightly enjoys close supervision from Athletics.)  We were headed down the stairs, and a guy considerably shorter than I was bounding up.  On the landing, Coach Kemp introduced me to Jason Mims, “Our new head coach for men’s soccer.”  Mike summarized his resume; Mims had been Bob Warming’s assistant at Creighton and at Penn State, both highly successful programs.

At this point, men’s soccer had existed, even in concept, for about three months, having been conjured by the transition to Division I and the Summit League in sports other than hockey.  Kemp said that Mims had to field a team in the fall and had a matter of weeks to assemble it - an even steeper challenge than Kemp faced in 1996.  I remarked on the daunting prospects he faced.  Mims smiled.

“I’m excited,” he said.  “I’m totally pumped.”  

Fast forward five years, and I find myself on a perfectly nice Sunday night in a vast, dank, prefab agricultural building on the southwest fringe of the city, watching Mims’s team play an exhibition against what had been the state’s biggest men’s program outside of Creighton, Hastings College.  I’ve become a fan of soccer.  I write to suggest you do the same.

I played Catholic elementary school soccer in the seventies when it was starting to become relevant in the States; Pele was showing up on Wheaties boxes and the NASL, a predecessor to Major League Soccer, was getting rolling.  In five or six years, I scored two goals, both on penalty kicks in games where my team was leading by 8. (“Even if he scores on us,” my coach must have reasoned, “it won’t hurt.”)

I lost touch with the game, and adopted American prejudices against it.  Boring.  Euro.  Flopping.  Even after Mims’s program started playing (and in the early days, losing), I maintained a friendly disinterest until Caniglia Field reopened as a soccer stadium late in the 2013 season.  

A couple months ago I attended an event for student-athletes, and was seated at a table with Jake McCain and Jacob Weiler, two of Mims’s upperclassmen.  Another person at the table asked, rather indelicately, I thought, what the soccer players thought of hockey.  

“It’s not beautiful,” Weiler said.  “Not enough passing,” said McCain.  “We liked Miami,” Weiler said.  “They have a nice technical game.”  What would improve hockey? “More power plays,” he said.  “Power plays are awesome.  Just have the teams alternate power plays.”  

Goals in soccer generally aren’t scored in net-mouth scrambles or by brute force.  Ordinarily they are a cruel form of art - the matador’s fatal stroke after disassembling the opposing defense, the culmination of tactics designed to defeat the other side, first slowly, then quickly.

Even the lightning strikes are astonishing.  Mark Moulton, a magician with the ball at his feet, scored a goal against Denver in 2014 from an improbable distance and impossible angle; with his left foot and on a dead run at the corner of the penalty area, Moulton arced a rainbow over the Denver keeper.  It succeeded entirely on finesse, not on power.  It hung in the air long enough that everyone had a chance to drink in its lush beauty before it settled almost delicately into the far side of the net.  The crowd needed a moment to understand what it had seen before it went bonkers.  (Start this video at about 1:10)

Or Logan Mendez, who, with five seconds left in a 2015 double-overtime match with Bradley (who plays a frustrating Bemidji-like defense), bent a corner kick from the right side to within six feet of the far goalpost, where the narrow chest of defender Felipe da Silva needed only bump the ball home, touching off a wild celebration not unlike that following Alex Hudson’s last-second winner against North Dakota. 

However they turn out, these games are reminiscent of a simpler time in hockey. In the late 90s, UNO was an upstart.  Every win was an upset; every well-fought defeat was a claim to legitimacy in the existing order of the sport.  This strange game that I barely understood was captivating, and the stakes were much lower than they are now.  An enthusiastic coach, who had spent time in Omaha before, and was well-connected in the sport, had returned to town for a shot at starting a program from scratch as a head coach.  

Like Kemp, Mims immediately started mining the community.  He and his assistant Tim Walters each coach youth club teams (Walters’ 14U boys beat the UNO women’s team in the indoor matinee before the Hastings match).  Mims attracted local high school stars destined elsewhere but under Creighton’s radar; today’s roster features players from Creighton Prep, Westside, Papio South, and South Sioux City, as well as South Africa, Kenya, Trinidad, and Colombia.

Mims has started a coaches’ club that attracts a couple dozen benefactors and the handful of alumni he’s already turned out. The first game of each season is the “South Omaha Classic,” connecting to the Latino population’s passion for the sport.  

Caniglia Field is a gem.  It remains the picturesque setting on fall afternoons that it was as a gridiron.  It features FIFA-blessed artificial turf designed (unlike Creighton’s generic FieldTurf) for soccer.  The stadium’s repurposing feels like a metaphor for UNO’s transformation from second-rate townie school to an institution with international appeal and international stature.

Like the first hockey teams, the roster is a salad of cultures.  I sat next to a relative of Fazlo Alihodzic at the Hastings game; he spoke to his mates in an eastern European language, but addressed me in English to ask who scored the first goal.  Even the domestic players seem exotic.  Their razor-fade haircuts and urbane bearings bespeak participation in worldly sport. Jacob Weiler’s man bun and artistic sensibilities suggest more of Berlin than his native Fargo.  

They are genuinely grateful for the support they get.  They emerge from what had been Pat Behrns’s locker room through a tunnel in the grandstand, high-fiving their way on and off the pitch.  Speak to a player after a game, and he will unfailingly thank you for coming.  As games conclude, they offer overhead applause to the crowd like retiring Premier Leaguers.

At the root of all of this is Mims, whose enthusiasm and standards infuse everything the program does.  Where his colleagues wear polo shirts and track pants on the bench, he wears a coat and tie.  He writes detailed letters to boosters, breaking down the last game and analyzing the next one.  After a rigorous road trip, he brought a yoga instructor to practice to stretch and relax his battered players.  He is disciplined.  Before the Hastings match, Weiler told me “We’ll have a lot of the ball today because we’re fitter than they are.”  He was right.  You cannot spend a half hour with Mims without being energized; even at rest he seems kinetic, competitive.  

I suspect it is a matter of time before Mims gets an offer somewhere else, perhaps at a school with a bigger brand name and a bigger budget for soccer.  His squad bubbled into the polls last year after a couple of eyebrow-raising victories - a shootout exhibition win against Washington, and a regulation victory over Cal-Northridge, both of whom were ranked at the time.  He’s clearly got deep connections with other coaches and programs.  Here’s hoping support program grows with Mims’s success and Athletics can beat back his suitors, because they’re coming.

Mims and Walters tell me they like this team.  From what I saw against Hastings, and what little I understand of the game, I do too.  They won that night 3-1, and on a full-size soccer field Hastings would have been run out of the park.  They’ve added a spectacular national-caliber true freshman from Des Moines named Elvir Ibisevic, and a back named Seth Rinderknecht, who Walters says is the best athlete in any sport at UNO.  (He scored against Hastings). No team in the Summit is obviously better than they are.  This could well be the first non-hockey sport in a Division I NCAA tournament.  

On April 23, they’ll play Creighton, a championship-caliber side who spent much of last year ranked first in the country.  Where Creighton’s basketball team continues to duck UNO, and Bluejay baseball is as likely as not to cancel a midweek game with the Mavericks if the weather is not gorgeous, Creighton’s scheduling of an exhibition against UNO (after a few years off) is something of a recognition from glowering Creighton skipper Elmar Bolowich, a highly successful soccer coach.  And so Omaha prepares for a true derby (football term - look it up) at Caniglia Field, and like Mims was on the day I met him, I’m excited.  I’m totally pumped.  

This is a beautiful game, played beautifully in a beautiful setting.  You won’t regret watching it.  I suspect those of us attracted to the game now will one day soon get to claim we were there at the beginning.  

See you on April 23.  

[redarmyuno]

Leaving Baxter Arena

(This post is the work of Rick Jeffries (@fourtotheside) and does not necessarily represent the opinion of any other member of the Red Army.)

A Confession

On Saturday night against North Dakota, I did something I had never done before, in 19 years of watching Maverick hockey.

I left.  In the middle of the second period.  On senior night.

Go ahead.  Feel smug.  Here I am, a founder and former leader of the most die-hard fan collective anywhere, and with the Mavs trailing 3-zip and aimlessly wandering the ice, I just left.  You’re a better fan than I am, or at least you were that night. The Thundering Bums, of course, stuck it out to the end.  One of the reasons Ryan (@PyromonkeyUNO) has the helm is that I perceived that he is a better man than I, and certainly he’s demonstrated that down this awful stretch.

Due to my own failings, I no longer had confidence that I wasn’t going to rough up the inebriated North Dakota fans (though I repeat myself) in my section, as though I have some right to be surprised by how North Dakotans act. For the same reason, I deleted Twitter off my phone as I walked down 67th Street alone.   I had a thousand ugly things to say that would not have enhanced the credibility of the program, the Red Army, or of me.  I managed not to say any of them.

I’m not proud of any of this. “I just can’t” is not an acceptable mindset for a grown-ass man.  I just didn’t want to.  But I also didn’t want to wind up in the paper as a grown-ass man throwing punches in the parking lot, either.  I have weaknesses, but to my modest credit, I know what they are and occasionally take action before they get the best of me.

On Weaknesses, and the Willingness to Confront Them

I write to suggest that the Maverick hockey program do likewise.   It needs to take stock and recognize its weaknesses before they get the better of our program.  Trev says, quite rightly, that success in hockey is not negotiable.  It is time to put that mandate into action.

During the Dean Blais era, UNO has attracted the talent, coaching and resources to beat top teams and look good doing it.

Until Christmas.

Yes, UNO went to the Frozen Four last year.  And yes, that stands to Dean Blais’s credit.  But that too was after a season-ending skid and losing in the playoffs in the first round.  Again.

The sheer magnitude of this year’s collapse is unspeakable.  It is nearly statistically unprecedented.  It has had an enormous emotional toll on the fan base.  Anybody with an interest in whether people buy season tickets (like the Baxter bondholders, for example) ought to be concerned.

I wish to hell someone had popped one in during 2OT last night, given us one more day, and maybe ended Denver’s season in some sport for a change this year.  There are blessings, however, in an unvarnished horrible end to the season: There is no fig leaf for the late season fade, like there was last year.  

The program has an opportunity to take a hard look at itself.

Let’s get something straight: I don’t advocate getting rid of Coach Blais or anybody else.  To the contrary, I think everything is obviously in place for great success with just a little tweaking and some honest willingness to change.  

Dean’s got to be the first one to have the humility to say “Something I’m doing isn’t working quite right.  I need to take stock and fix it.”  

Right now we’re not a program that should expect to be in the NCAA tournament every year.  We can and should expect to be contending every year. We should absolutely aspire to be a perennial powerhouse.  There’s absolutely no reason that can’t be.  Facilities, coaching, leadership and city are all in place.

We are right to expect the program to progress in that direction, and we’re sophisticated enough to recognize that progress will sometimes be uneven. When we have the talent and the health, which we apparently did this year, we can and should expect teams that CAN make the NCAA tournament actually DO.  

When that doesn’t happen, we can and should expect the hockey program, and Athletics generally, to take a hard look at itself.

Here are some thoughts about how UNO might go about that:

Talk to players.  Not returning players, who must think about playing time next year, but alumni. Dominic Zombo.  Avery Peterson.  Guys that got cut.  Don’t cherry pick.  Call the guys who didn’t leave on the best terms.  Listen to what they say.  Write it down.  What did they remember about February and March?  How did it compare to other teams they’ve been on?

Look at the players.  There’s extensive fitness data from testing at the beginning of the season.  Ask them to test again.  Are they worn out?  Is there such an emphasis on season-opening fitness that players cannot sustain the workload for six months?  Overtraining is a thing.  Is their nutrition appropriate?

Get in players’ heads.  I’ve never quite bought the “team psychologist” concept, but hockey is an emotional game.  How is the emotional health of the players?  If there are “locker room issues,” which is probably on the table in a season like this, someone needs to ask why in a way that players will answer honestly.  What part of that could have been addressed by coaching?  

Get a second or third set of eyes on this stuff.  Mike Kemp has been around championship hockey, and his role in Athletics is as a coaches’ coach.  Trev has played at the highest levels under the harshest scrutiny.  He knows what it is like to be a Division I athlete.  Dean should welcome their participation.

Most of all, have the humility to change.  One senses Dean has developed a recipe for success to which he adheres fairly strictly.  His ruthless attack on on-ice and off-ice distractions (resulting in a merciful abbreviation, for example, of the Parents’ Night festivities) or his insistence on overnight busing from road venues stand as examples. Has something gotten baked into his cake that shouldn’t be there?  All the data in the world are useless unless they result in some kind of outcome.

It should be clear from the above that I don’t know what the answers are.  It should be clear from the data compiled since 2009 that nobody does. Questions are, however, appropriate, and as long as we’re looking for solutions and not scapegoats, I think we should press them.

This is an awful morning to be a UNO fan, and the end of an awful few weeks.  I can’t think of what it’s like for Coop, Pearce and Lane.  I’m grateful, at least, they’ll have a chance to remember their time here included a trip to Boston.

On the other hand, today represents an opportunity to look at a good program and plot the map to making it a great one.  I have confidence that all the pieces are on the board.  Your move, Coach.

Not that you were, but don’t worry about me. I’ll re-install Twitter someday soon.  Spring is here, softball and baseball are being played, and the spring soccer season is at hand.  Did you guys see Creighton is playing at Caniglia on April 23?  

Ole’.  

[redarmyuno]

Coop

It has been a while since I have allowed myself the luxury of a favorite player. Impermanence is the currency of college sports; by rule, everyone must move on.

As I've aged, I have grown increasingly conscious that I am not merely old enough to be biologically capable of being players' parents, but that I am probably older than a good number of their parents. I've recoiled at the middle-aged fans who fawn and cling at the autograph tables, and I've tried not to become one of them. Unless I have a specific purpose, and then at the invitation of someone else, I don't mix much with student athletes. They deserve their youth and their privacy. Maybe a nod or a handshake as the soccer players climb the stands at Caniglia, or the hockey players as they filter through the Village for food after a game. Otherwise I keep my distance.

It's for my own good. My heart broke the night we said goodbye to David Noël-Bernier, to Jeff Hoggan, to Mike Lefley. Guys who lived and died for their teams, whether or not they were good teams.  Maybe if I stand off just a bit, I think, I can smile and wish them well as they pass through UNO and head out into the world, maybe for a few years as hockey players, then as bankers and salesmen, then as husbands and dads. And when a Kendall Sidoruk or a Mike Skogland turns up around town - particularly at an ice rink - that feeling that everything is so fragile dissipates for a minute, and I feel like the cycle will go on forever. I won't have to experience the loss.

I didn't notice Brian Cooper when he got here. I suppose my hockey knowledge, still crude after twenty years, doesn't readily appreciate a freshman defenseman with a reputation for being "steady."

He was one of the first players to react to the stream of @RedArmyUNO's inane humor and game time wisecracking, so I started to pay attention to him.

My wife became a stepmother in her 40s and got a crash course in Little League baseball. She didn't understand the game at first, but when my kid, a nimble infielder with a live arm, would snag a grounder and fire it in a fluid motion to his buddy Ray at first base, she says she felt "safe."  The certainty of a solid play, well made, with no apparent effort, let her relax for a moment.

That's the best analog I can think of for Cooper. When he got the puck in our defensive end, the constant stress of watching hockey abates for just a moment: for the next few seconds there won't be a harrowing turnover or bad decision. He just creates little pockets of relief in the delirious 2-hour ordeal of hockey.

We all think we know what goes on in a locker room, and that we know who should be a captain, and we're almost certainly wrong. But when he took a patch we knew it was right. We all suspect his teammates also feel a bit better with him around.

I can't claim to know him terribly well but what I do know stands up to our assessment from the stands. He generously assisted my daughter with her social studies project on Alaska; our few brief conversations reveal him to be humble but intense. I suspect he is everything I believe him to be.

Do I really have to lose this senior class of athletes?  I saw soccer player Logan Mendez the other night, and when I forgot he didn't have one year left he looked like a string broke inside him. How will we get along without Kimberly Bailey and Kelley Wollak, who got me paying attention to volleyball and hoping my daughter would grow up to be just as fierce and multitalented?  Who will bring the basketball to the frontcourt at top speed without Devin Patterson, or cool off a hot opposing shooter without Kyler Erickson shouting "Yessir, yessir, I got help side!"

And who, for the love of God, will make Maverick hockey safe if we don’t have Brian Cooper?

Another year, every other year, I would have been fine. Part of the game. Part of the beauty of college sports. And besides, baseball season is weeks away and watching my kid, who has modeled his toughness after the players he's grown up watching, is my favorite thing in the whole world. But I'm not ready this year, damn it.

I can't stop it. I can't prevent it. I don't like it and won't pretend to. All I can do is yell, one last time as a hero half my age takes a lap around the rink.

Coooooooooooooop.

[redarmyuno]

The Witching Hour

Let’s just get it on the table:

Was this weekend the beginning of that horrible sixty-day month on the Dean Blais calendar known as Swoontober?  We’ve literally been here before, riding high in the Pairwise at Christmas, only to tumble out of the postseason after a painful winter and an abrupt weekend loss at the hands of an “upstart” team that loses their next game in the Twin Cities.

Confront that fear.  It’s real.  We all felt it this weekend - a seemingly invincible team suddenly sinking in quicksand - outshooting Denver but not getting anything to show for it.  But you shouldn’t worry - much.

Blais made it pretty clear that he was dissatisfied with the attitude of several of his players, and that they sat late Saturday as a result.  You can exclude Guentzel, Cooper, Spinner, Morelli, Randolph and a few others from Blais’s ire; Guentzel’s desire in particular was visible the whole weekend. (He’s a pretty emotional departure from his fairly stoic father.)  

The injury to Weninger is of course a major hit to the team.  Kirk Thompson is a great team guy, and he is capable of wonderful games, but he didn’t get a chance to get his rhythm this weekend.  He got little help. The defense corps that blocked 28 shots in a game against UMD blocked nine - which you can pretty much do by accident - against Denver Saturday night.  And Blais’s Soviet approach to disclosing injuries means we won’t know when Evan is going to return until shortly before he does.  

There’s a meaningful difference between the swoontastic teams of recent years and this year - depth.  Look who is on the ice on the third period goals: Morelli, Spinner, Klehr.  The teams of yore seemed to burn out from two lines trying to win every game in the third for the last two months. We don’t have that problem now.  

To be sure, Blais needs to make good on his press-conference threat to his team - not only to inflict a hard week of practice, but to be absolutely non-discriminating in doing so.  The “passengers” he referred to were players we like to think of as infallible, but were floating uselessly in the circles, drifting aimlessly back when the puck left the zone, fruitlessly passing the puck back and forth high in the zone for the entire 5-on-3, and generally refusing to take the abuse of standing in the killzone with their sticks down.  No matter who they are, if they won’t do what’s asked, they need to sit.  We can afford it, and more to the point, we can’t afford not to. We’ll take losing to North Dakota if players who “do the little things right” are out there and players who do spectacular things, but only when they want to, are watching from the stands.  Of course, the best thing would be for the passengers to get with the program

The mental letdown is completely understandable. The weeks leading up to this weekend’s debacle were pretty easy - Ohio State, Arizona State, Trinity - all of them essentially showcases of offensive dangleocity - and so what if we didn’t play defense against Ohio State and they chipped a couple of dumb goals in?  It is virtually impossible to maintain focus for an entire season, particularly when the living is easy for a long time.

So Denver may have served a valuable object lesson.  This may be the beginning of a long, painful slide to oblivion, but it may have given the lads an opportunity to kick-start their work ethic.  Blais can help, but he must be absolutely fearless.

We’ll know more after Grand Forks.

[redarmyuno]

The pivotal minute of UNO’s first conference playoff game, the legendary “Tuesday Night” game played on March 14, 2001.  Greg Harrington’s play-by-play opens this clip with the memorable “It’s the heat of the evening, and the dealing’s gotten rough,” and concludes with Jeff Hoggan’s GWG.

[redarmyuno]

A Postcard from the Promised Land

Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling; the poor boy’s on the line.  ~ Elvis Presley

You’re going to love it.

Friday was my third visit to Baxter, my first in substantially complete condition.  By virtue of the great kindness of some generous UNO officials, I was able to see some non-public areas.    The place took my breath away.  After eighteen years of following this team, I was completely unprepared for one part of it.  

It’s a home rink.  It’s our home rink.  

You’re greeted by the wall of donors as you encounter the monument staircase at the public entrance, and it bears the names of the donors, many of them household words, who put up half the money for the thing.  So far, so Omaha.  

But you step up to the concourse, and you see Crimson and Black everywhere.  There are murals dedicated to UNO sport.  The concession stands have names like “Nineteen 08” (the year of UNO’s founding) and “67th Street Grill.”  The suite seats have O logos embroidered in.  One wall has “We will fight for U-N-O,” the last line of the Fite song, in subtle shadow letters.  The windswept official Omaha font appears here and there.  Signs point the way to the STUDENT ENTRANCE.  Let that sink in for a minute.  You get your own door.

As you top the stairs and sweep to your left there are windows overlooking the Holland Ice community rink.  It looks like a very nice, new public rink, but with big beautiful windows that face the Village.  Face-off dots and curling houses speak to the waiting list that has already formed to use it.  You’ll be able, I imagine, to watch drop-in games or figure-skating lessons during intermissions of UNO events.  

The arena bowl is bigger than I thought it would be.  I kept expecting it to look smaller when it was closed in and finished, but it still looks big.  The openness of the bowl to the concourses is something that you’ll recognize from the XCel Center, if you’ve been.  The upper deck seats are truly terrific.  We sat in our family seats (when I’m not bucket-banging with the boys) low in the upper deck and felt like we can breathe on the players.  

The student section is huge.  It wraps from one end of the goal line to the other.  There will be no excuse for sitting, for failing to intimidate the opposing goalie, or for not being awesome.  Its listed capacity is 750; I suspect on big nights it will creep much higher than that.  UNO tells me that is more students than Section 113 at CenturyLink provided and I can believe it.  The Thundering Bums will occupy one of the back benches, surrounded by the ranks of The Red Army.  We’re so looking forward to being with you.  

The locker rooms are phenomenal, especially hockey’s.  I know the University wants to surprise the hockey team when all the finish work is complete later this week, but if you get a chance to tour, do so. I won’t spoil the details too much.

I am told volleyball already brought a recruit and showed her jersey hanging in a locker, even though finish work continues below decks.  I bet she was impressed.  The massive training, weight room, hockey equipment and player lounge facilities will be an immediate upgrade in recruiting. Home players will have all they need to work out, get their equipment tuned up, get some attention on bumps and bruises, and practice in comfort.  The days of riding a bus dressed in hockey pads are over.

The suites are nice, but they are not opulent.  The list of owners won’t surprise you: Union Pacific, First National, Tetrad Corp., Control Services, and of course Baxter Auto - all generous benefactors to UNO.  They seem to have more “outdoor” seating than the CLCO seats.  

The Press level sits atop the suites.  It is a wide open 3000-foot space, save for the glassed-in Production room at the shoot-once end.  I’m told it’s essentially a full TV control room and can even run the soccer stadium’s massive scoreboard from a mile away.  The rest is essentially a big room with a counter running the length of the ice.  There are no partitions for broadcasters, which I think will be interesting - they’ll either have to tune their microphones carefully or be spaced intelligently to prevent cross-talk.  But the view from the press level is absolutely phenomenal.  I toured it with Terry Leahy in July and he said he was out of his mind with excitement.  

The Club lounge looks pretty swanky - you can see the multicolored LED wall from Center Street, and it provides a beautiful glow to the room.  While the traditional carving-station type food may be available, the lounge also backs up to the 67th Street Grill, so patrons can get a hot dog and popcorn, which you can’t do in the club at CLCO.  We have a more grounded class of rich people, evidently.  

My traveling party and I stepped out into the cool evening to see the Village shimmering across Center street.  I think we’re going to want to walk over from the Village most nights - the lot across the Papio Creek is not materially closer, but the walk from the Village will probably be more animated.  We’ll probably revisit this decision in January.  But to have what amounts to UNO’s own entertainment district as a pre- and postgame hangout simply adds to the feeling that we’re home.  

I think you’re going to be thrilled.  I am sure there will be wrinkles and foibles as they get the place running.  But this shouldn’t take long.  Mike Cera, the General Manager of the facility, is a seasoned pro who ran Stockton, California’s public facilities for a contractor when the city was in bankruptcy.  The operations guy most recently ran the ice at Colorado College’s rink. And we’ll have to get used to density again. We won’t have an seat for our coats, and lines for the restrooms will necessarily be longer.  We’ll figure it out.

We’re going to find out that there is a whole other level of the college hockey experience that we never knew we always wanted.  We’re going to feel something that none of us has ever felt as a UNO fan.  

We’re going to know what it’s like to be home.  

[redarmyuno]

A Channel 7 news story from we presume the 2002-2003 season at the Civic Auditorium,  Bridget Brooks (@Mavpuck) and I discuss the future of Maverick Fandom.  

[redarmyuno]

Any league, any time, any reason.  Beating Michigan is the best.

[redarmyuno]

Dreams

The last time UNO lost its exhibition game, it went 8-24 and was one of the worst teams in college hockey. So anyone who would have said that the team being skunked by Northern Alberta Something Something was destined for the Frozen Four would have been taken in for observation. And yet we poured into Boston by every means, even the laughably crazy student bus caravan that took more than 24 hours to get here. The party we had Thursday afternoon, stomping, singing and hooting through the late winter mist was one for the ages. Hope for a championship, yes, but mostly it was an unhinged celebration of what had already occurred. The Chancellor bellowed down from the Fan Fest stage at the wild celebration - students, a boogie-infused Durango, the band, and Maverick lifers - a sentiment that crystallized the moment: "Dreams really do come true." The unlikeliest chain of events got us here: After the initial shine of UNO wore off, UNO plunged into incompetence, corruption and chaos, culminating in the awful Belck/Buck affair with its layoffs and bumbling graft. They were rightly run out of town. UNO found Dr. Christensen at his desk, made him the Interim Chancellor and then took away the adjective. Just when we thought his modest bearing, decency and thoroughness would save us, he hired Trev Alberts. Trev had acrimoniously parted ways with his former employer; he was a football talking head - a Cornhusker, for God's sake - with not a particle of administration experience. It seemed like a starry-eyed, wholly impractical hire for Christensen, who seemed not to crave these things. Alberts moved Mike Kemp out of coaching without a replacement and asked, without having seen a college hockey game, who would be the best guy to replace him. Told it was Dean, Trev was simply too naive not to give the forbidding coach a call. One of Dean's conditions was a new rink, which Trev was too uninformed not to ask for. Great turbulence enveloped the Division I announcement, and the awful timing of the World-Herald story that required football and wrestling to get the hard news right after the latter got a national championship. The understandable anger gave way to a bitterness and ugliness that left neutral observers with the sense that maybe we were better off this way. Alberts and Christensen never hit back. The new arena rose out of the ground, fueled by capital donations from those who now found UNO credible. But hockey seemed to break our hearts ever more cruelly each year, going deeper into the calendar with the regular-season championship within reach, only to leave us baffled and crushed. Even this year, injuries and upsets bumped the Mavs into a dangerous first round matchup with St. Cloud, which, right on cue, they dropped in two games. Who can say what pulled the Mavs out of their power dive? A crafty coach who knows when to whip his horses? Dominic Zombo, a hero with a bottomless heart, hitting opponents with furious abandon and his lower-body musculature in tatters? The sorcery of the once-infuriating Ryan Massa? All of it, probably, plus a wink from the Hockey Gods who have had their boots on our necks for long enough. Through it all, the University executed flawlessly, on message and on task. It caught the national and the long-awaited local attention in stride, constituted a pep band who showed wonderfully, shipped a well-supplied legion of lunatic students across the country, and coyly made itself the darling of the weekend, if not all of college hockey. The same university that once printed thousands of pocket schedules spelling our Hobey candidate's name "Scott Arse" strode onto the national stage with confidence and grace. So here I sit on Championship Saturday, proudly Crimson and Black. Do I wish the boys had just one more game, one more outrageous comeback? Sure. But those of us who walk the streets of Boston in our Omaha gear do so as representatives of something we could not have imagined in the dark times. Move aside Gopher. Make room, Eagle. Sidewalk's mine, Wolverine. We are hockey royalty. Enjoy the championship game and the warm days ahead. We'll toast these days in the fall and pick up the dream where it left off.

[redarmyuno]

We're the UNO Mavericks.  Who are you?  12/3/14, Lincoln, NE

[redarmyuno]

What's it like to pick up the fish, run down the stairs, throw it on the ice, fall down, and stumble back up the stairs?  Watch!

[redarmyuno]

Picking up the fish - the Mavboni's point of view