Nye Classic Report: The Art of Killing Power Plays

Many of you might not realize that it is time for hockey. Another season of Seawolves Hockey is upon us. After last year's accident prone season, UAA is looking to have a good season.

The Nye Classic started off with a win for the Vermont Catamounts (yes that's their real mascot name) over Michigan Tech. We got there just to see the end of the game, so I don't have much to say about it.

Then it was time for the RPI Engineers to play the beloved Seawolves. It was Friday night, but I believe the show started with Spirit the Seawolf being pulled on a sled behind Martin Buser (Iditarod legend). The big spectacle of the night though was...the UNIFORMS! UAA wore instead of their Nye Classic Yellow jerseys, grey and green jerseys! The socks even matched.

UAA appears to have started their season about where they left it last year...in a strange mixture of great defense, ineffective offense, and a great talent for power play killing. I'm no hockey expert, but when the opposition has only four people on the rink, and you have five, you would expect an advantage. In the case of the Seawolves, power plays appear to work the opposite way -- they let two goals into the net on their own power plays! This is a problem that needs to be solved. Somehow, though, RPI was even worse, and let UAA get six goals, mostly by defensive players, through, so the final game score was 6-3. Because Vermont beat Michigan Tech, this meant that Saturday's game of Vermont vs. UAA would determine who won the classic, which is cool.

In other stadium news, we got the joy of sitting behind "Mr. Oakley". Mr. Oakley wore Oakley glasses and apparently had too much to drink which caused him to act silly. He would stand after goals holding up a Satan sign facing us -- I think he was looking for someone, but they were apparently ignoring him. The problem was, he wasn't sitting back down when play started. He also really got into the stadium rock music, and would stand up at play stoppage and dance badly for everyone. Not good. Just for the record, Mr. Oakley was completely sane and normal at the Saturday game, and seems like a generally pleasant person in most cases.

On the other hand, a very nice young man handed me a free tournament t-shirt that he caught from the guys who were throwing them out on the ice from the back of very large pickup trucks. So now I have a relatively cool Nye Classic T-Shirt!

Let's fast forward to Saturday night. The game spectacles started out with a disco ball-induced swirl of little dots, reminiscent of roller skating rinks, accompanied by "Enter Sandman" by Metallica. Given my record with roller skates, I made sure to keep seated. I thought the song choice was a bit odd, especially since they decided to play the entire song! I mean, even the Bulls knew better than to play just a few riffs of the "Rock and Roll Part 2" (i.e. the "Hey!" song). To emphasize the dreamlike qualities of "never never land" , I guess, they applied dry ice to the rink. Spirit the Seawolf, the skating mascot, entered the rink waving the US Flag. After one swizzle around the rink, we are treated to the UAA fight song while Spirit waves the flag around. About the same time, all the free noisemakers in the entire place (thank goodness they were made to be relatively breakable) were clapped to create an impressive ruckus.

We were all ready for a good game between the Catamounts and Seawolves. The college kids started their favorite cheer -- "See what? SEA-WOLVES!" for us. This cheer does not make sense to me since the players are not invisible, but to the kids, this was very funny and cool to shout.

Now that I think about it, they could be making a funny poke at the "invisible" offense of UAA during the game. At the end of the first period, UAA only had like 5 shots on goal. Once again, I'm not a hockey expert, but when the other team has more than twice the amount of shots to score than you do, things are looking awfully bad for your team. The final score was 2-0 and it was a relatively frustrating game.

I'm really hoping that UAA does do better next week against UAF. They certainly have flashes of brilliance that, if chained together into an entire game, would be really awesome. The UAA/UAF matchup is kind of like the Cross-town shootout, except that the other town is Fairbanks, which is quite far away. Last year it was really rowdy, and we were the only mythical sea creature supporters in a sea of blue. Apparently all the people around us that know something about hockey feel that UAF will be really hard to beat.