College Hockey Update:  Last weekend two top-twelve teams collided as #4 Providence travelled to #5 Quinnipiac.  The two battled it out, trading goals back and forth, and it ended deadlocked at 3-3.  Both teams won games Saturday night as Providence beat Brown and Quinnipiac beat UMass-Amherst; they each retained their #4 and #5 spots in this week’s poll.  #1 Minnesota swept Wisconsin, dominating the Badgers Friday night, but edging them out in a close game on Saturday night.  With #2 St. Cloud State idle, Minnesota strengthened its grip on the #1 ranking, and St. Cloud held its ranking.  #3 Michigan took a close game from Ohio State, and also held its position in the poll.  Ferris State took a dominating win, and then managed a tie against Northern Michigan, and held it’s #6 ranking.

With no movement in the top six, the next six did some shuffling.  A big-news loss by Boston College to Holy Cross got things stirred up, dropping BC a couple of pegs to the #9 ranking.  The vacuum was filled by an idle UMass-Lowell (how is this different than UMass-Amherst?  See below) moving up to #7, and Yale moving up to #8 after beating Merrimack.  Clarkson held on to the #10 spot, having beaten Queens in an exhibition game, Union jumped up four spots to #11 on the strength of its sweep of power-house Penn St., and Miami of Ohio moved up to #12 after managing a tie, then a convincing win against Bemidji State.

A quick look at UMass-Lowell, which has turned it around lately after having dropped one game to Sacred Heart, and then a pair to Quinnipiac, all within the first four games of the season, and finds itself again highly ranked.  You might well be aware of, and familiar with, UMass-Amherst — UMass, which gave the sports world basketball sensation Dr. J. Julius Erving, who brought the horizontal game into basketball’s vertical game, creating a sphere of play above the rim.  Well, this isn’t that UMass.  UMass-Lowell was founded thirty-one years after UMass-Amherst, in 1894.  It has 17,000 students and is located in Lowell, a town at the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers.  The UMass-Lowell campus is in three “chunks” and it straddles the Merrimack river.  It sits five miles under the New Hampshire border, fourteen miles west of Merrimack College, a Hockey East foe, and about thirty miles north of all the schools it plays in Boston.  Lowell is a town of 109,000 people that was designed in the early 1800’s as a purely industrial town, taking advantage of the power of the rivers, and constructing many canals for many factories.  The canals are still there today.  During the 1850s, Lowell was the largest industrial center in the U.S.

The last couple of years have been great for Lowell, winning the Hockey East regular season and tournament titles, and making it to the Frozen Four last year.  They are coached by Norm Bazin, who played for Lowell from 1990-94, and scored twenty goals his senior year, helping the team make it to the Hockey East championship game, and into the NCAA tournament.  He worked as an assistant coach there from ’96 to 2000, and then as an assistant for eight years at Colorado College.  He became the head coach at Hamilton College for three years, with winning season the last two years.  This is his third year at Lowell, and he has been an instant impact force from the start.  Lowell had only a 5-25-4 season in 2010-11.  In 2011-12, Bazin’s first year, they improved to 24-13-1; this nineteen win improvement is the most ever by a first year coach in college history, and it earned him the Hockey East coach of the year award, as did his teams 28-11-2 record last year in the 2012-13 season.  His roster is loaded with upper classmen experience, as it has six seniors, six juniors, ten sophomores, and five freshmen.  Of the twenty-seven players, twenty-five are from junior league teams, only one is straight out of high school, and two transferred to the team; one from Hamilton College (of all places, shocker, right?), and one from RIT.  Lowell has won six straight games, and nine of its last ten.  This Sunday they will travel to play one at Maine, then they have three weeks off, and they’ll come back and play in the Catamount Cup at the University of Vermont, where they will play Canisius and #10 Clarkson on the 28th and 29th.  Get a load of this — they will play three straight games against #10 Clarkson, as they will then open 2014 play by hosting the Golden Knights for a pair on January 3rd/4th.

This weekend provides a great top-twelve matchup as #5 Quinnipiac travels to play one game against #11 Union College on Saturday night.

This provides the top twelve teams, rankings, records, and last weekend’s results:

[table id=73 /]

That’s all for now.  Stay tuned, and go Terriers!

— Tom