AUBURN — Last weekend, the University of Denver won the men’s NCAA Division I ice hockey national championship in St. Paul, Minnesota.
But the college hockey season isn’t quite over. The National Collegiate Roller Hockey Association is holding its national tournaments this week at Norway Savings Bank Arena beginning on Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. and running through Sunday afternoon.
To get ready for the event, Norway Saving Bank Arena has spent the past week installing a sports court floor over the ice surface on both rinks.
“We are happy to bring it to Auburn,” Rob Coggin, the Director of League Operations for the NCRHA, said. “This is our collegiate championships, and so to bring a bunch of college kids up here to get the true Maine experience — I think is going to be great for them.”
Spencer Morrison from Dearborn, Michigan, checks out the floor of the roller hockey rink at Auburn’s Norway Savings Bank Arena on Tuesday. Morrison came to Maine with Henry Ford College’s Division 1 team to play in the National Collegiate Roller Hockey Championships, which run from Wednesday through Sunday. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal
Auburn and Norway Savings Bank Arena became a target for the NCHRHA to host the national championships a few years ago after they spoke with the Maine Sports Commission.
That’s when Marc Gosselin, the Executive Director, Community Partnerships & Sport Tourism for the city of Auburn got involved.
“Believe it or not, Sheila Brennan Nee from the Maine Sports Commission got it on my radar because she speaks with Rob Coggin, one of the executive directors,” Gosselin said. “They started having a conversation and started looking into it. With the city of Auburn, we are trying to have a bigger emphasis on what we can bring to the area, that’s not just (ice) hockey. It’s sports; it’s about recreation and the impact it can have on the community.”
Forty-seven teams from across the country will be in Auburn this week to compete for four national championships. There are Division I, Division II, and Division III national tournaments, along with an AA division. The AA Division is for schools that bring a second team.
“Division I is supposed to be for our well-organized clubs, and some of them have been around for a real long time and are really organized,” Coggin said. “You see a talent difference from Division I to Division III. Division III is for newer clubs that are really developing to figure out how to get going. Sometimes they are from smaller schools that don’t have the ability to draw a lot of players. Many of our Division II teams are as competitive with our Division I teams. They are just working on their organizational level to take the jump to the next level.”
Coggin said the teams to keep an eye out for are Lindenwood University of St. Louis, Missouri, in Division I, and Northeastern and Boston University in Division II. Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish school in New York City, is one of the top teams in Division III.
Ruben Gonzalez of Grand Canyon University in Peoria, Arizona, leads Division I in points with 56, while Michael Luzopone of Cortland University in Cortland, New York, leads Division II with 68 points. Eddie Dahdah of Montclair State in Montclair, New Jersey, is Division III’s top scorer with 100 points.
There are many differences between roller hockey and ice hockey — other than ice vs. no ice and ice skates vs. inline skates — the biggest being roller hockey is played 4-on-4 instead of 5-on-5. Roller hockey games last less than an hour, with three 12-minute periods and one-minute intermissions. There’s no icing and offsides, and there’s not nearly as much physicality as in ice hockey.
“Roller hockey is a very wide-open game, it’s very free-flowing; a lot fewer whistles than an ice hockey game as well,” Coggin said. “It really gives players the freedom to have time and space to move with the puck.”
When there’s a power play, teams will play 4-on-3 or 4-on-2.
“It’s great when you are on the power play, you have so much room to walk and shoot,” Jarrett Tomazich of Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said of the 4-on-2 power play. “When you are killing, it’s awful.”
Games Wednesday through Saturday will begin at 7 a.m. run until midnight — two games at a time, one on each of the two rinks.
On Saturday, Division I and II will hold their semifinals and championship games. The Division III and AA semifinals are Sunday and the final game is at 3:30 p.m. There’s also an alumni division, which begins play on the weekend, and a free youth roller hockey clinic at 4 p.m. Saturday.
There are single-day, week, and weekend passes available to purchase at the arena.
Gosselin said there will be different musical and entertainment acts performing at the arena throughout the week while games are going on.
“It’s good timing with school vacation week too,” Gosselin said. “We are hoping people will take the time to come in.”
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