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RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

M

MGoBlueHockey

Wolverine Devotee
A lot of talk around here about the next varsity sport at Michigan being Women's Hockey. It already has received club varsity status at Michigan, which is basically saying it is on deck to become NCAA D1. Men's and Women's lacrosse were added last year after being club varsity sports for over 10 years.

Michigan adding Women's Hockey would certainly shake up the landscape. Maybe even possibly a B1G Women's Hockey division.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

MGoBlueHockey said:
Michigan adding Women's Hockey would certainly shake up the landscape. Maybe even possibly a B1G Women's Hockey division.
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You'd have to bring State with you for that to even enter the realm of possibility, because it wouldn't make sense to form a five-team league.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

ARM said:
You'd have to bring State with you for that to even enter the realm of possibility, because it wouldn't make sense to form a five-team league.
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That's quite a stretch for them adding anything. They are making a big deal just because they updated their football stadium scoreboards. Don't think they are in the right financial situation to be adding any varsity sports at the moment.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

Even if the administration wanted to the big road block is Munn Arena. There is no way it can be re-configured to fit a second varsity team there.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

OneTimer said:
Even if the administration wanted to the big road block is Munn Arena. There is no way it can be re-configured to fit a second varsity team there.
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That's another big problem. That place is a dump. It's depressing, dark and gloomy. They need a new building, but again, don't have the funding for it.

Michigan has 3 arenas they could use really. Yost, the Ann Arbor Ice Cube (home to the US NDTP, 1,000 seat arena, 3 miles away from Yost) and the old Coliseum. Formerly Weinburg Coliseum. The original home of Michigan Hockey. It's currently an intramural building, but would be a good candidate if Michigan wanted their own Women's Hockey facility like minnesota has.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

Whenever it happens (not IF, WHEN) Michigan and Michigan State will come in together and there WILL BE a Big 10 women's conference.

Follow the money.

Many will know that I have made these observations before, here we go again.

Big 10 men's hockey conference is all about money. Decision on whether or not to add women's hockey is being made by the same athletic directors who have already decided to abandon current men's conferences (WCHA and CCHA) for business reasons. The money trail is the same money trail, it seems obvious that eventually women's hockey will follow. The real reason women's hockey will come to the two Michigan universities is not gender equality, the real reason is that more programming for the cash cow Big10 Network provides more money to the hugely successful businesses that are the Michigan and Michigan State athletic departments.

Follow the money.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

"Follow the money" and "women's hockey" have no business being anywhere in the same vicinity.

It's certainly sad -- I'm a firm believer in gender equity -- but seriously... the Big Ten network would likely lose money from having to produce the women's hockey broadcasts.


Powers &8^]
 
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Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

Check out the tv ratings for ANY women's Olympic hockey game in the USA. I would be surprised if any rating for any game was in the top 100 rated shows.
 
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Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

LtPowers said:
"Follow the money" and "women's hockey" have no business being anywhere in the same vicinity.

It's certainly sad -- I'm a firm believer in gender equity -- but seriously... the Big Ten network would likely lose money from having to produce the women's hockey broadcasts.
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With the exception of the big money football and men's basketball the network does ZERO production of minor sports, they run the programming as produced by the universities. Do you receive the Big10 network in your cable package? I do. Women's field hockey is on there any time there is a women's field hockey game. Ice hockey will be there too. UMinnesota and UWisconsin already webstream all of their games, I don't know but I think OSU does as well, and I suspect that PSU will be doing so as well. The network will provide whatever minimal additional support is necessary to assure that the quality of the video feed is up to network standards and the games will be on. Most often they will be on tape delay, only very rarely live. But they will be on. There are only so many times you can run the football and basketball coach's 30 minute weekly shows.

The network needs the programming.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

One more thing, the network already owns the rights to games between teams representing the member universities. Games between UMinn and UWis have already been on as well as occasionally a game or two featuring one of those teams against another WCHA opponent.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

ManBehindTheCurtain said:
There are only so many times you can run the football and basketball coach's 30 minute weekly shows.
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That's true only because there are only 24 hours in a day. BTN seems to be perfectly fine with showing umpteen different flavors of FB and MBB analysis shows in lieu of actual sporting events and rerunning those as many times as necessary. For variety they show us "classic" games from these sports from 30 years ago.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

You are absolutely right in that most women's college sports televised on the sports network channels will never have enough viewers and advertisers to pay the cost of production by a professional staff. I think the one thing that could possibly help get more women's games televised though would be if school mass communications departments played a more active role in video taping sports. The productions could be edited and provided to the sports networks to be televised during odd hours during the weekdays or late at night. I think most people with cable or satellite TV service now have the ability to easily record shows, so they watch the recorded show later at their convenience.

I have watched the internet feeds and my opinion is that it is just slightly better than nothing. Paying $5 .00 or so for an amateur production with really crappy video quality sucks.

Lets hear some more comments. Maybe some of the other readers in this forum have some other ideas.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

Mountain_Hockey_Dad said:
You are absolutely right in that most women's college sports televised on the sports network channels will never have enough viewers and advertisers to pay the cost of production by a professional staff. I think the one thing that could possibly help get more women's games televised though would be if school mass communications departments played a more active role in video taping sports. The productions could be edited and provided to the sports networks to be televised during odd hours during the weekdays or late at night. I think most people with cable or satellite TV service now have the ability to easily record shows, so they watch the recorded show later at their convenience.

I have watched the internet feeds and my opinion is that it is just slightly better than nothing. Paying $5 .00 or so for an amateur production with really crappy video quality sucks.

Lets hear some more comments. Maybe some of the other readers in this forum have some other ideas.
Click to expand...

NU has a free online feed that is filmed and edited mostly by work study students. There is a decent sized professional staff that does a tremendous job. I typically don't watch the feed since I am at home games, but most people say the feed is very good.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

OneTimer said:
Now we know when Red Berenson is retiring.
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The whole thing probably goes the other way around. Red just recently signed a three year contract extension through 2014-15. That produced rumors that he plans to retire after that. My guess is that the rumor that they plan to start women's hockey in this time frame is nothing more than speculation based upon the speculation about Red's departure. I'd love to see Michigan add women's hockey and think it will happen at some point. However, I put almost zero value in anything more firm or time specific than that at this point.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

NUWH DogHouse said:
NU has a free online feed that is filmed and edited mostly by work study students. There is a decent sized professional staff that does a tremendous job. I typically don't watch the feed since I am at home games, but most people say the feed is very good.
Click to expand...

Better than very good, and in HiDef to boot.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

ManBehindTheCurtain said:
Whenever it happens (not IF, WHEN) Michigan and Michigan State will come in together and there WILL BE a Big 10 women's conference.

Follow the money.

Many will know that I have made these observations before, here we go again.

Big 10 men's hockey conference is all about money. Decision on whether or not to add women's hockey is being made by the same athletic directors who have already decided to abandon current men's conferences (WCHA and CCHA) for business reasons. The money trail is the same money trail, it seems obvious that eventually women's hockey will follow. The real reason women's hockey will come to the two Michigan universities is not gender equality, the real reason is that more programming for the cash cow Big10 Network provides more money to the hugely successful businesses that are the Michigan and Michigan State athletic departments.

Follow the money.
Click to expand...

After hearing "women's hockey" and "cash cow" in the same sentence, I've now heard everything.
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

It is about time!!!!! There is a huge pool of players in the state of michigan alone as well as the multitude of
skilled canadian players that michigan would have to recruit from. If a qualified staff is put in place, michigan
would very very quickly become a contender and a threat to several top programs
 
Re: RUMOR: Michigan to add Women's Hockey in 2015-16

That is absolutely true - Michigan could dominate D1 in a hurry. It would not be very hard to do correctly either.
 
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