AMHERST — No cupcakes for the champs.
The UMass hockey team will face one of the nation’s most challenging nonconference schedules as it defends the national title.
It includes three ranked teams, a former national champion and a nascent program.
UMass will open Saturday with a two-game series against No. 5 Minnesota State.
After a weekend off, the Minutemen then have a home and home with No. 20 AIC, which has made the past two NCAA Tournaments, Oct. 15-16.
The Minutemen travel to Union, the 2014 national champions, over the New Year’s holiday then to No. 2/3 Michigan on Jan. 8 and 9. The Wolverines have four of the top five picks in July’s NHL Draft on their roster. Two home games against Long Island University, which joined Division I last year, close the nonconference slate Feb. 4 and 5.
It wasn’t originally going to be this way. UMass lost an opponent in the schedule shuffling following last year’s conference-only season. The Minutemen didn’t back down when filling out the dates.
“We had to scramble. We lost one of our opponents that was a lot lighter than Minnesota State. My AD (Ryan Bamford) was giving me a hard time for my nonconference schedule, now we might have the toughest one in the country,” UMass coach Greg Carvel said. “We’ll have our hands full. That’s what we’re here for, though.”
The Minutemen have been willing to play just about any of the 60 Division I teams anywhere during Carvel’s six-year tenure in Amherst. They’ve visited Denver when the Pioneers were in the top-10, faced then top-ranked Ohio State in Columbus, gone to Arizona State and hosted high-end regional opponents like Quinnipiac and Yale.
“No one’s going to accuse him of ducking anyone. A lot of coaches would try to go the other route,” Hockey East Commissioner Steve Metcalf said. “I give kudos to coach Carvel. “It’s what he said in the past of he’ll take on all comers, and that’s exactly what he’s done.”
Carvel recognizes that just because the team is ranked No. 1 in the preseason doesn’t mean they’ll end that way.
“Last year, we were a good team because we had something to prove,” Carvel said. “This year, we’ve got something to prove again that it wasn’t a fluke, that we deserve to be where we’re at.”
STAFF ADDITIONS — Matt Lindsay joined the UMass coaching staff in May after nearly a decade at Penn State. Carvel expected a larger candidate pool when the job became available after Ben Barr left to be Maine’s head coach, given the Minutemen were coming off a national championship and the resources available to them.
“I hate the search process. I don’t enjoy it. It was different than I thought it was going to be,” Carvel said. “(Lindsay) sold himself. When I hire I want to see you really, really want the job. I appreciate when people are proactive. I liked how he carried himself. Even though the pool wasn’t huge, I probably would have hired the same guy.”
Steve Trachtenberg received a promotion within the program when he was named the Minutemen’s director of hockey operations. The 2018 UMass grad previously served as a hockey operations assistant while working on a sport management degree.
“That’s a role that nobody on the outside would understand that it’s really important. We try to be really structured, organized, no gray area in anything we do,” Carvel said. “There’s a lot of details in what he does. He makes sure that everybody is on the same page, everybody’s aware of everything and we need somebody really organized, detailed, and that’s Stevie. He also needs to be a problem solver for me. You have all these different software programs, and Stevie has to be my personal support.”
BARR ADJUSTING TO BEARS — Now that Maine is on the ice, former UMass assistant coach Ben Barr feels normal. He and his family moved to Orono, Maine, following the national championship season with three young children over the summer.
“It was a crazy year last year. That was a turbulent couple months,” Barr said. “The last couple months have been learning about things you don’t deal with as an assistant.”
Some of that has been adjusting to a roster that he largely didn’t recruit and getting those players to commit to his vision for the program.
“You try to speed that process along as fast as you can. The student-athletes have embraced me and our new staff. It’s a credit to them,” Barr said. “(Former coach) Red (Gendron) and his staff recruited some phenomenal human beings. It’s nice as a coach that you know you’re going to get the most out of them.”
Barr is tasked with returning Maine to the standard it established from the late 1980s to the beginning of the 21st century, appearing in 11 Frozen Fours and winning two national championships.
“The success in the past here is fantastic. I’ve never been anywhere that the tradition is as rich as it is at the University of Maine,” Barr said. “The other side of it is we need to bring our program into the here and now a little more as well. That success makes you feel like success is going to continue and you lose an edge in this area or that area.”
FROM THE COMMISSIONER — Hockey East commissioner Steve Metcalf said the league learned that it could be more flexible after scheduling nearly every game on the fly last season. That led to more games on different nights or in other time slots to accommodate TV coverage. More than 100 Hockey East games will be broadcast regionally on NESN this season. The specific schedule hasn’t been released yet but will be out in the next day or so.
“The delay in releasing is primarily caused by the size of the package of games we have this year,” Metcalf said. “It’ll be the biggest, most comprehensive package we’ve ever done.”
All games will also be streamed on the CBS Sports live platform for free like last year.
“This is in part a thank you to all the fans that stood by us last year in a difficult year,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf also said only a “handful” of men’s and women’s athletes remain unvaccinated, and they have medical exemptions. All Hockey East officials are vaccinated.
“We’re more excited to launch into a more normal-seeming year from every perspective,” Metcalf said.
ZEBRAS — The NCAA has made a point of emphasis on second faceoffs to keep enforcement in line with the first face off. They noticed that the second attempt was often less fair because officials were less willing to call a violation two times in a row.
There are also committees working to standardize rules and enforcement across leagues so there’s an NCAA standard and not individual conference standards.
“Our theme this year is don’t look for something that’s not there,” Hockey East Director of Officials Brian Murphy said.
The league’s officials are also looking forward to the return of fans to arenas despite their occasional live performance reviews.
“Obviously we’re all about fans and we want them back. You live in a fishbowl. The fans are not even a factor. You’re out there with the players and coaches,” Murphy said. “They embrace the action with the fans.”
I’M ON A BOAT — Providence coach Nate Leaman conducted his media day availability Wednesday from his boat. He had to remove a sea gull with a broken wing on it in the morning when his time slot came up.