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2023 NCAA DIII Championship Tournament

Scott_TG said:
I will say this has been my favorite non-Plattsburgh championship weekend in terms of ancillary things. The Amherst rink is objectively bad and I'm personally disappointed with the outcome but nearby Springfield has been great for the newly added off day. Local restaurants, a museum, some pregame gaming at the slots at MGM Springfield and now an AHL game.

Amherst should not host until they build a nicer rink but I wouldn't be mad if WNEU was ever good enough to be the #1seed and host...
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Glad you enjoyed Springfield. Spend some time in Northampton 10 minutes or so down Rt 9, if you get a chance. Fun main street with plenty of restaurants and things to do. In Amherst, you have to either have a couple slices of Antonio's Pizza or have some burritos at Bueno y Sano.

Orr Rink is not great from a spectator perspective, but it used to be worse. Unless alumni step up, I don't think an upgrade is in the near-term capital improvement plans.
 
Scoreless after one. It's been fairly back and forth. I think Amherst had a slight edge in time of posession but GAC was more efficient in getting shots in their time with the puck.

Gustavus killed two penalties in the first. They've been able to get a puck or body positioned in the right place and time to stymie Amherst's attempts at creativity.

I think Amherst needs to play less cute if they want to pull ahead but I'm not sure the Gusties will allow that if they keep this up.

The Amherst student section is very impressive in their number and enthusiasm. I've never seen a student section sing the anthem together in a game I've been to (maybe y'all have, idk) and they have a few chants and songs.
 
VTpucksouteast said:
GAC up 1 after 2. Gusties are really coming hard now. Mandate should be coming on the officiating post-game though. Perhaps the most one-sided playoff contest officiating-wise I’ve ever seen at the D3 level. Mammoths getting away with murder.
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That is what you said about Plattsburgh on Friday !
 
Congrats to all teams. Gustavus got it done...props to all the Gusties and coach Carroll! Well over-due... a much deserved western program!
 
Made it home from Amherst.

I hope the NCAA saw what went on this weekend and takes note and doesn't award the championship weekend to Amherst until Orr is replaced. Numerous issues for both fans and participant athletes. The Amherst staff did the best they could with what they had and this isn't a shade at them. I don't even fault the committee for letting Amherst try this year as they earned their seed but now that they have seen it the committee needs to not repeat this.

Congrats to Gustavus on making it as the first western region team to take home the national championship trophy. Certainly fitting that one of the original programs is the one to do it. Gustavus owned large chunks of this game starting in the 2nd and onward, only Stott's play made this a 3OT game!

What a great season of hockey! Looking forward to what 2023-24 brings!
 
That's unfortunate. Sounds like the facilities were far inferior to the level of play this weekend - the NCAA has a lot of things to figure out.
 
4and20 said:
I will take Gustavus.
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Anyone know or heard what Coach Matthews was asking for in the review immediately after the game? The officials didn't seem to take much time in looking at the replay video. The only thing I can think of is he was questioning if the puck had come out of the zone and was not called offside before the goal. From the angle of the camera it did not look offside to me but I could understand from the Amherst bench it may have appeared close. Not trying to start anything here just curious what he wanted reviewed.
 
My understanding is he argued goalie interference, which if that is the case was a huge hail mary
 
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If interested, below is the link to a pretty interesting interview from the winning players from GAC. I think "the west" was said, or referenced by them possibly 6-7 times in the short post-game interview. There is a burning desire within that league and that program in particular to show out and acknowledge the regional disparity. On the broadcast I saw a massive "East Coast Bias" sign the Gustie fans brought with. The powers out west seem to be fed up. That looked to be the case at least. Cranston from River Falls mentioned it multiple times as well in his pregame and postgame interviews in the quarterfinal, which I also believe are up on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0OrCzv__Mo
 
4and20 said:
Anyone know or heard what Coach Matthews was asking for in the review immediately after the game? The officials didn't seem to take much time in looking at the replay video. The only thing I can think of is he was questioning if the puck had come out of the zone and was not called offside before the goal. From the angle of the camera it did not look offside to me but I could understand from the Amherst bench it may have appeared close. Not trying to start anything here just curious what he wanted reviewed.
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Didn't come up in either press conference.
 
I watched it and it sounds like Gustavus is using the "west vs east" as part of their larger "us vs them" narrative every sports team uses to unify themselves against an other they have to prove wrong. Every team does it even if it sounds absurd. In the height of the 4 straight titles for my alma mater one of the captains dropped a "no one thought we could" type line in an interview or conference and I had to laugh.

The Gustie player talking about showing the west deserves to be there every year, I don't know anyone from the East who thinks the top West schools don't belong. There were a lot of predictions for Amherst yesterday but I chalk that up to the Mammoths not having given up a goal all playoffs and being on home ice than people thinking GAC had no shot because they are in the west region.

I was directly across the rink from the East Coast Bias sign yesterday. I don't get it. If there was a bias against the west region St. Thomas would have been passed over as host in 2019 since it was at Adrian in 2017. St. Thomas got what was due to them and even before that the 2019 bracket was set to guarantee at least two western semifinalists (they ended up with 3).

If its about 4 NESCAC teams being in, that's a function of math since they are using PWR. If they were to eliminate the PWR based system and use the old way we'd actually see real human bias come into play selecting the field.

What's the happy medium? Funding inter-region play from somewhere? Adjusting PWR somehow? Putting a cap on at-large bids per conference?

I would like to see something constructive where the western schools, if they feel as aggrieved as it is suggested, make specific complaints/requests so action can be taken instead of their being bad feelings about it.

The reason each bracket often gets whittled down to only one team from the opposite region of the 1 seed is driven by the travel/budget constraints imposed by the NCAA forcing matchups to be within those limits. The eastern schools are not the enemy here
 
VTpucksouteast said:
The parking was a complete liability. They have maybe 30 parking spots at the rink and half are coned off. Locker rooms were brutally small and dated. No seating/angles to watch the game were horrible. Sad that both fan bases had people quite literally cramping for space with having to turn their shoulders to fit more people in. Not to mention people having to stand on the ends of which were tight. Watching on TV would have been a much better experience I was told, but the camera quality was pretty shoddy. Orr does not have the athletic training materials/equipment/space either for the players. Girls were waiting so long for training. I agree with the above post, the people working were great and did their absolute best. Just not enough resources for them.
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I went to Amherst. Orr Rink will be 70 years-old next year. Cinderblock interior, basic wood bleachers running parallel to the side boards (making it easy to discretely drop your empty beer cans), i.e. your generic post-war, no-frills rink that you might find in any number of local communities at the time just trying to get steady ice. It's also disconnected from the main athletic facilities and I am not sure it was originally designed to accommodate 4 locker rooms in use at the same time (Amherst didn't admit women until the mid-70s and didn't have women's hockey until the mid-90s), so not hard to see why space for ankle taping and pre=game treatment were at a premium. Believe it or not, Orr used to be worse, but I'm not surprised that it receives unfavorable reviews. Wouldn't be my first choice rink for much other than having home ice.

That said, I am guessing that the NCAA might be willing live with these issues as a trade-off to have a rink at full capacity at the highest seed. I say this because the situation at Orr is well-known to the NCAA. Some regional rounds have been held there over the years and Amherst hosted the NESCACs on the same weekend on both the men's and women's sides this year. Maybe it would have been better to see if the Mullins Center was available down the street, but the packed atmosphere at Orr looked and sounded great on the video feed (The feed itself was largely fine and the commentators were good, but there was an auto-focus issue with the main camera that caused momentary blurring as the puck entered the left-side offensive zone later in the game).

Amherst has been updating its athletic facilities in recent years, but the single-sport facilities, which Orr essentially is, really need to be almost totally driven by a targeted alumni gift.
 
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