Back To Hockey

It's that time of year when the leaves start to change colors, windows are frosting over in the mornings, and freshly sharpened skates meets freshly made ice to begin my favorite time of year. That's right, hockey season is here, and in a mere 5 days the annual Blue/Gold scrimmage will draw an eager crowd to the Patty Center to catch the first glimpse of the new team. And that's just the culmination event of a full weekend of Nanook Hockey events.


Friday night will be the annual Face-Off Club Kick Off Banquet at the Fairbanks Princess Hotel. This is always a great event, and one of the highlights of the season for me. It gets everyone together, and you get a good look at the new team for the first time. Plus the infamous roasting of the freshmen is always good for quite a few laughs. It's a good way to initiate them into the Nanook family, while allowing folks like myself to have a few laughs at their collective expense. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that yours truly will be putting on the shirt, tie, and my emcee hat and have a little fun with the crowd this year. So if seeing the team wasn't enough to entice you to come to the event, hopefully that should! If you would like to attend but have not yet made reservations, get a hold of Sharon NOW at 474-9081. The cost is $35 for adults and $18 for kids 6-12.

Also taking place this weekend, the Alaska Nanooks Hall of Fame Induction ceremony will take place this Saturday. Quite possibly the best scorer to ever put on a Nanooks sweater, Steve Moria will join Tavis MacMillan in the Alaska Nanooks Hall of Fame this Saturday. Moria, the all-time leading scorer for the Nanooks who notched a single-season high of 109 points in 1984-1985 which still stands today as the second-most all time in NCAA history. Now, I've never seen Moria play. I wish I were even alive, let alone in Fairbanks back in the early-mid 80's to see Steve play. Now I've heard from quite a few stories from some long time residents over the years of how impressive it was to see him take over a game. And if the 271 points in just 86 games isn't any indication, that guy just had the ability to straight up put the puck in the net. Adding to that, Moria has notched 10 career hat tricks as a Nanook, and has 3 seven-point games with his name on them. What's even more impressive, he's still playing! If you want to know more about what he's doing, come to the banquet! I'll fill you in...

Now I want to go back and touch on something I slipped in to the second paragraph; the new team. Each year, players come and players go, and each season presents itself some unique challenges. I want to share the roster for this year with you, sorted by class...

From that roster, you'll notice the largest class on that roster is freshmen with 9 players, just one fewer than the sophomores and juniors combined. You might also note that the roster is devoid of 2 returning players, Colin Rundell and Erik Slemp, but nevertheless, the season moves on. But the incredible thing here is the quality of these underclassmen that Coach Ferguson and his staff have brought in should make for some interesting hockey. Each of these guys have some unique things that they bring to the game, and they're all going to play integral roles in the systems that these coaches are instilling in these guys. They are all, as we say, here for a reason.

At the first practice today, a lot of these freshmen impressed me with their skating. Now I'm not saying they're all ready to be perennial starters just yet, but seeing the guys with their legs under them and keeping up with the upperclassmen is impressive on its own. Coming into the Blue/Gold game, I'm intrigued to see how they perform in live playing situations.

This is shaping up to be another great season. It was great today to see the players and coaches getting back to business on the ice, but while putting a great deal of work into it its very apparent that they're all having fun. All smiles coming off the ice, and you can tell the players are ready to get things going. Even Coach Ferguson cracked a smile, despite losing to his players in the finals of a passing game at the tail end of practice... (You asked for it, coach...). I want to say it was Enders that won, but its hard to tell who's who without numbers from quite a ways away. I may have to be corrected on that.

But anyway...

Back to Hockey!

--B

UPDATE:

As a commenter pointed out, as well as several other news sources around the web, St. Cloud and Western Michigan will depart their respective conferences to join the National Collegiate Hockey Conference beginning with the 2013-14 season. I don't think this will impact the Nanooks program very much, each of the other schools are quite viable in their own right. There will be a lot of negotiating to be done later anyway about scheduling and travel, so we don't even know yet what the implications are. And with Notre Dame still undecided about where they are headed, there could be still a lot more movement to talk about later. As for me, I'm still watching for everything to unfold, and kind of keying off of what Notre Dame decides to do...