Re: Come Back With Your Shield, Or On It: MSU Spartan Hockey 2010-11
As a former UAH Charger player (and current supporter) having read this forum, I wanted to add my thoughts to the thread. Sorry for standing on the "soapbox" here!
Prior to this past weekends MSU-UAH series, I had listened to audio of Coach Comley comment on the BGSU-UAH series stating that BGSU was lucky if they had 1000 fans at the games vs. UAH. To correct, the attendance for the games was 1750 for friday and 2630 for saturday. As my family and I attended the saturday game (drove down from Ontario, just the other side of Detroit border) I can attest to the saturday attendance as being accurate. Of note, two weeks earlier BGSU hosted Michigan and had attendance of 1500 and 1800. I do not know if there were outside influences on attendance that weekend, but come on, it was the almighty Michigan. For MSU's first 6 home games they have had attendance of 5174 and 5679 for Maine, 5963 and 4198 for UAF, and 4829 and 4886 for UAH. Certainly attendance vs. Maine is higher than UAH, but the average for UAF games is only about 223 higher than for UAH.
Now I read in this forum that Coach Comley did not appreciate UAH's style of play, will likely not look to schedule games with them moving forward and likely won't support any further efforts by UAH to join the CCHA. Coach Rick, you are a highly decorated and seasoned coach...... do you not have the skillsets to work with your team to adjust to different styles of play??? I was not able to attend either game in this series, but did follow on internet and the penalty calls seemed pretty even. Certainly the CCHA officials did not see things the same way as Coach Comley!
Coach Comley, in my opinion you are nothing more that a past his prime, long standing hockey snob!
Perhaps you should focus on getting your team to play to their ability. Or better yet, here's a novel idea, get them to play above their ability like UAH did against you! That way you will win the games you should, win some games you probably shouldn't have, get back the the success that MSU is accustomed to, fill your arena like MSU did before you arrived and compete annually for national championships!
Or, I guess the other approach you could take is to support the attrition in the number of programs and the demise of programs at smaller schools like UAH. Then the strong can survive and there will be fewer teams competing for talent and success. It is a **** good thing that the issues that UAH faces (nationwide economic issues, school athletic program budget constraints and conference affiliation) were not issues for you back when you were at NMU. Otherwise the program might no have lasted long enough for you to be around to have the opportunity to coach one of the "historic elite" programs like MSU!
UAH's struggles have been discussed in detail on other forums and I won't get into them here.
I truly appreciate the opportunity that UAH had to play vs. MSU this past weekend and can only hope that we are able to schedule more games in the future. Obviously, I would love to see UAH accepted into the CCHA as well. I only hope that most of you on this forum and most MSU fans as a whole don't support Coach Comley's views on this issue.
Thanks for letting me rant!
Charger #2
