Re: UNO @ tUMD: So many scenarios so little time
Red cows:
Why would Hastings leave MSU unless UNO paid him a lot more? He is already doing well at MSU and if he takes this team into the WCHA they can make the NCAA almost every year.
Hastings has spent a goodly chunk of his adult life living in Omaha (18 years). Until they moved to Mankato, both his kids were born here and had lived their entire lives in Omaha (although both he and his wife
are from Minnesota). He is a household name in Omaha known by everybody in the hockey community, and then some, by virtue of his legendary career with the Omaha Lancers. He was designated the "Head Coach in Waiting" by Coach Blais when he hired Hastings to be the Assistant Head Coach after he took the reigns at UNO. See this July 2009 interview by then KETV (Omaha ABC Affiliate) sports anchor Matt Schick, who is now the in-studio host of ESPNU:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsOTMP2NgRA
Here's a CHN interview with Hastings from last fall on taking the MSM job:
http://www.collegehockeynews.com/news/2012/10/10_qa_with_minnesota_state_coach.php
What he
didn't say here is that when Coach Blais took the job here he
had been saying that he wasn't going to hang around a terribly long time, maybe 5 years, before he was going to retire and turn the reigns over to Hastings. Then, during the 2011-2012 season, in December of 2011, Coach Blais was quoted (in the North Dakota press) as saying to a North Dakota booster luncheon in Grand Forks while UNO was there to play the Fighting Sioux, when asked about his plans as to how long he was going to coach, he gave an answer that the Omaha World Herald followed up on in an article they did on the topic. In that article he completely reneged on what he'd been saying and gave a very ambiguous answer to the Omaha World Herald about how long he'd be around. Take a look at the article:
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120111/MAVS/701119780/-1
Which then led to this:
http://www.omaha.com/article/20111228/MAVS/712289830/1001
I think these events turned Dean Blais and Mike Hastings into the functional equivalent of Mack Brown and Wil Muschamp. Since Coach Blais made his retirement timeline so unspecific, and took a turn from what he had been saying, initially, when he took the job, I think Coach Hastings took a job he might not otherwise have taken. He is 47 now, after all.
Conversely, I think, unless Coach Blais is still here in another 5 years, I think Hastings jumps at the chance to come back here if it is offered to him. Besides the ties he has to Omaha I've already pointed out, there are a number of reasons I think he comes back here.
1. Blais is being paid more than Hastings is, currently, and UNO can afford to pay more than Mankato would (and this will be particularly true when UNO moves into their new arena). Even though Mankato has a few hundred more students than UNO, UNO has a vastly larger budget, a difference of more than 50 million dollars.
2. UNO is going to be playing in a brand new, state of the art, dedicated facility (I think Coach Blais is gone after the first year in this new building), that will be sold out every night we play in it.
3. UNO will playing in a more prestigious conference with many of the big name teams in college hockey.
4. Omaha (population 865,000) is a far bigger and nicer town than Mankato (population 53,000)--sorry, Purple Cows.
All this makes for
far more to recruit to here than there. Is the allure of being "a big fish in a little pond" enough to keep Mike Hastings in Mankato? Not if he is the competitor I think he is. I think he jumps at the chance to come back here, particularly if the chance comes sooner rather than later. This was a big concern of the Mankato fans I sat next to when they were in town to play us back in December when chatting with them.
