Re: "Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
R.I.T the Bemidji State of 2010
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Re: "Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
excellent summary! thank you.Leave a comment:
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Re: "Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
This Maine fan will be cheering for RIT!! Good luck in the Frozen Four....hopefully our seats will not be 100 miles from the ice surface!
I would love to add an RIT puck to my puck collection - if anyone out there would like to add a Maine puck to their collection, I would love to swap one with you....I will not be able to get back to Maine before Tuesday morning so please respond to my email address and we can arrange a swap then.
jgabarra@aol.com
Thanks! Go RIT!!!!!Leave a comment:
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Re: "Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
I heard you like Canadians?Leave a comment:
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Re: "Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
RIT's men's hockey team began in 1962 as a club team in the most basic sense of the phrase -- the players even had to raise their own funds to hire a coach! But success was immediate, and the team was granted varsity status in 1965.
With the move to the Henrietta campus came a new ice arena -- the old campus' ice rink was too small for hockey, so the team had been playing at Genesee Valley Park. F. Ritter Shumway (former president of U.S. Figure Skating) offered a donation to build a ice arena on the new campus, with the stipulation that it be named after his grandfather, Mechanics Institute co-founder Frank Ritter. Opened in 1968 with the rest of the new campus, the Frank Ritter Memorial Ice Arena has a capacity of 2,100 fans and an ice surface measuring 185' x 85'; it sits smack in the middle of RIT's campus.
The hockey team saw some success but records are, sadly, spotty until the 80s. In 1983, the team won the Division II national championship over Bemidji State. With the establishment of the Division III hockey championship, RIT was forced to drop down to Division III play, where they won the Division III national championship in 1985, also against Bemidji State (who played D-III after the D-II championship was eliminated the first time).
RIT's best season to date may have been 2000-01, in which the team went 26-0-1 and was granted hosting rights for the D-III Frozen Four. Unbelievably, they lost in the championship game, at home, to SUNY Plattsburgh, 6-2, the most devastating loss in team history.
RIT entered a period of decline after that, reaching the tournament only once more before the big announcement in 2005 that the team would be moving up to Division I. This brings the Institute in line with several other schools it considers to be its peers, like RPI, St. Lawrence, and Clarkson, as D-III schools with D-I hockey programs. RIT also planned to move its women's team up to Division I but the moratorium was put in place just weeks before the application was finalized.
Although RIT went 9-22-2 in their first D-I season (including a 3-2 home win over St. Lawrence), since that time they are 91-47-11, including wins against Cornell, Minnesota, and (of course) Denver and New Hampshire.
Past RIT players of note include 1997 Division III Player of the Year Steve Toll (now a defenseman with the Rochester Knighthawks of the National Lacrosse League), 2001 Division III PotY Jerry Galway, Niagara Purple Eagles coach Dave Burkholder, UMass-Lowell River Hawks coach Blaise MacDonald, Hershey Bears forward Steve Pinizzotto, and Hobey Baker finalist Simon Lambert.
Any questions?
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"Who *are* these guys?" - Your RIT Primer
Chances are, even if the average college hockey fan knows of Rochester, New York (home to the AHL's Rochester Americans and the hometown of Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox), he or she probably had never heard of the Rochester Institute of Technology before this season. (Or, barring that, before 2005.)
RIT is a private, coeducational, non-denominational university located in the suburbs south of the Rochester city limits, a stone's throw from the banks of the Genesee River. It was founded in 1829 as the Rochester Athenaeum, a society of the burgeoning city's foremost intellectuals. It merged in 1891 with the Mechanics Institute, which was founded in 1885 to train skilled workers for Rochester's factories.
The merged Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, or RAMI, gradually evolved into a more collegiate institution, establishing a campus in downtown Rochester not far from where the Erie Canal once flowed. In 1944, it was renamed the Rochester Institute of Technology, and in 1950 it granted its first degrees.
A move to the suburb of Henrietta, New York, was necessitated both by the expansion of the Institute's enrollment and by the construction of Interstate 490 through the middle of campus. The move to the new 1,300-acre campus was completed in 1968, the same year Congress named RIT as the location of the federally funded National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
Today, RIT has over 14,000 undergraduates and almost 3,000 students working on graduate degrees, including those working in one of six doctoral programs. RIT continues to maintain its focus on career preparation; research is a growing but still secondary priority. Classes are small in size and are predominantly taught by professors, not TAs.
RIT was the first university to offer a bachelor's degree in information technology, and its other flagship programs include microelectronic engineering, software engineering, photography, imaging science, printing, and sign-language interpreting.
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