Re: 2012 Midwest Regional: Michigan, Ferris, Denver and Cornell
My final review of the regional: Lousy location away from all teams. Ice and boards themselves played pretty well, much better than debacles like Fort Wayne. The arena is decent, nothing special or awful, with fantastic sight lines--I would enjoy seeing more games there. However, the lack of fans kinda hurts the feel of the place.
If the Resch had a list of the top 6 teams to play here to help attendance, they would be: Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Minn-Duluth, Northern Michigan and Michigan Tech. None of them made it.
Last year, NoDak and Western Michigan brought nice crowds. Ferris & Michigan did OK this year. Michigan's loss (from a purely attendance perspective) didn't help tonight's crowd any.
I agree it would have been nice to have bigger crowds. The Gamblers won another USHL regular season title and have three home games next weekend, so maybe some folks were saving $ for that. There were also six high school teams from the area playing the state girls basketball tournament in Madison this weekend - including four today. Not that there's huge overlap, but still a big enough event that it likely drew some fans away from the Resch, either in person or on TV.
Only two Gamblers alums were playing this weekend in the regionals, so that wasn't a huge help either.
Not making excuses, but some thoughts as to factors. As I said, I wish more locals would have shown up.
It's not as if the problem is uniquely Green Bay's. I attended regionals at the XCel a few years ago when Wisconsin, Vermont, etc. were there and the lower bowl was nowhere filled, much less the rest of the building.
