Maine caught a break, in a sense, by starting its team later than several other schools in New England.

Maine’s current league (ECRHA) has a history dating back to 1994 or 1995, when schools across the Mid-Atlantic reagion began recognizing teams. By 1997, officers of several teams got together and formed the league.

Two years later, a New England group of schools, including Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, the University of New England in Biddeford and Boston University formed its own league, the New England Collegiate Roller Hockey Association.

That group almost included Maine, but the school chose to hold off.

“I remember Maine being involved in those discussions at the time,” said Brian Scully, who along with Kevin Whalen founded Boston University inline hockey. “There were some rumors at the time that they would in fact join up with us, but those never materialized.”

The New England league lasted on its own for three full seasons, twice crowning Northeastern its champion and once giving the nod to Boston University.

“It was important at first to have our own league,” said Scully. “That made New England roller hockey matter. It would have been a different story if the teams in the league weren’t that good, but we ended up with a very good, competitive league. We had some elite teams and some that were average. Over the three years, some of the teams that started out slowly caught up.”

Both BU and Northeastern advanced to the final sixteen at their first national tournament in 2001, and the Terriers went a step further in upending two-time defending national champion Michigan State to advance to the quarterfinals.

“The better we did, the better it was for our league,” said Scully.

Last summer, the NECHRA merged with the ECRHA, forming an alliance that should only serve to make the league stronger.

The larger governing body of collegiate roller hockey, the Collegiate Roller Hockey League, was officially formed in 1998.

Each region that built a network of teams, five in all, joined together to create the Collegiate Roller Hockey League. CRHL was created to “unify, regulate, expand, and positively promote collegiate roller hockey” in the United States.

The CRHL has since grown to include seven active regions and two additional regions in their final stages of development. CRHL currently encompasses over 130 member universities in 25 states and 3,500 participants. It holds a national championship tournament.

What is it, really?

Thanks to a well-publicized and widely televised sport called Pro Beach Hockey, there are several misconceptions about inline hockey itself.

For example, while many teams may practice with a ball on certain drills, games are actually played with a puck. The hard plastic pucks are usually covered on both sides by rubberized beads that make sliding easier. The surface on which the players skate is a kind of rubberized tile. There are no banked corners or two-point shots from scoring from beyond the red line, and the teams skate four-on-four. There are no blue lines, no offsides and no icing calls. Most importantly, perhaps the most difficult transition for an ice hockey player to make is that there is no checking.

“It’s a much more offensive-minded game,” said Maine skater Matt Karpovich.

“Nothing like you see on TV,” added Justin Doyon, a former Lewiston High School skater and current mamber of the Maine team. “Actually, if anything, we’ve been called for too many penalties this year because most of us actually played ice hockey. (Not checking is) tough to remember.”

The style of play in the Midwest and in the West is also very different to that found in the East. There, inline hockey has been alive and well for a number of years. Not having been akin to ice hockey, the play in those regions developed into a slow, patient game. When BU, Rochester Institute of Technology and other Eastern teams started making regular appearances in the national tournament, the Western teams had a hard time dealing with the concept of the forecheck.

“You can tell a team, where they come from, by how they play,” said Doyon. “The ice hockey guys here in the East go into corners more. They forecheck. They’re aggressive.”

The Maine connection

Even though the Maine team has only been around for a little more than a year, other New England teams have been drawing Maine skaters for a few years.

Eric Potvin and Derek Nadeau both played hockey at Lewiston High School and graduated in 1999. Potvin started the inline hockey club at Wentworth Institute of Technology during his freshman year.

“I saw another player out on the tennis courts,” said Potvin. “I went down to join him, and eventually there were enough of us to be able to form a club. After two years, we petitioned to the league and got accepted there. Now we play with Maine in the ECRHA.”

Nadeau ended up at Northeastern, but instead of playing for that school’s team decided to join his roommate, Potvin, at Wentworth. Since rules prohibit playing on a team other than that of the school which you attend, Nadeau became the team’s coach.

“It’s not the same. You don’t get the rush of playing,” said Nadeau, “but at the same time you actually have more control over what happens in the game. It’s great to be able to stay involved.”

Then, of course, there are the Maine athletes. Doyon and John Boucher both played at Lewiston High School, while Jake Adams skated for Leavitt for four years. Several other Maine team members skated for high schools elsewhere in the state, and all of them found a way to continue competing by replacing their metal blades with wheels.

Building a team

None of the aforementioned players would have any place to play at all had it not been for some aggressive individual efforts by a few key members of each team.

Some of the more established teams in the conference, such at Boston and Wentworth, jumped through several hoops four years ago to make their programs work.

“We had to start with word of mouth,” said Scully of his BU team. “We practiced on an old cement rink in the shadow of Harvard Stadium for over a year, and people just kept bringing more people.”

By the second year, the inline team applied to the school to become a club team. With former player Rob Mariano (who later became a castaway on “Survivor: Marquesas”) as a coach, the team pushed forward, received funding from the school and started to build a program.

“It can go both ways,” said Scully. “You get recognized by the school and people start to know who you are, but the funding sources become different. It’s tough.”

At Maine, the student newspaper did an article about the team this spring, the first recognition of the kind the team had received since forming. Money for trips had been scavenged from several student groups on campus, but much of the cost was deferred from the players’ own coffers.

“We had to live tournament to tournament,” said Doyon. “Every fundraiser that we did was catching up to bills from the last tournament. We had bake sales (and) pot luck suppers. We even went to the mall with an autographed Maine ice hockey jersey and auctioned it off. It was a tough road.”

Maine also was able to get money from the student government.

“Our coach, Frank Urich, was awesome,” said Doyon. “He went to all of the meetings and fought for the team. That helped a lot. Now hopefully it becomes easier with the bit of success that we have had.”

Next stop?

After toiling for two seasons, BU and all its hockey tradition made it to the final eight of the national tournament in Division I. Since this was the first year Maine had a program, the team competed in Division II.

All Maine did this season was finish third in the national tournament, barely losing to SUNY-Binghamton.

“A lot of the schools, when we shook hands after the games, told us how impressed they were that we could pull such a team together in the first year,” said Doyon. “By the end, they knew that we had a decent team, and that was really one of our biggest goals this season.”

Next season, Maine graduates very few skaters, and will again look strong in their division on a national scale. The CRHL may realign things and actually develop a classification system, something it has never done, which might push Maine up to Division I.

“As of now, we’re still D-II,” said Doyon. “That might change, but I think we could be competitive anywhere we went. We will definitely be good if we come back to D-II, though.”

The one thing that may hamper the development of roller hockey in Maine in a general sense is the lack of playing areas. There are no rinks left in the state of Maine at which people can play the sport. Howard Sports in Saco was the home of UNE and the NECRHA championships for three years, but it has since redone the building and no longer offeres roller hockey.

With the birth of the Maine team and the growth of the sport at the regional level, there may once again be a call for an indoorr surface on which to play.

For now, though, a tennis court behind the field house at the University of Maine will have to do.

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