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| Steele Hall will be the site of a weeknight road game next season. |
TYT has confirmed that next season's rematch with NCAA Division III Fredonia State will take place on Tuesday, October 30th. This becomes the second known game with a firm date, after the matchup with RIT for their Brick City Homecoming game on October 20th.
If the game with the Blue Devils last Saturday was any indication, we're in for a treat come next October. The Icers, of course, rallied twice from two-goal deficits to win 5-4 - PSU's first win in four attempts against FSU.
There are several other known games at this time as well, just without dates attached to them. As reported by the Daily Collegian's Christine Newby, PSU will play two games each at Wisconsin and at Michigan State and will be involved in the Robert Morris University Hockey Showcase over the holidays. Joe Battista hinted during an interview with Steve Penstone last Sunday that in addition to Penn State and Robert Morris, Miami and Ohio State may be the other two teams involved. Previous to that, we learned about four games with the U.S. National Team Development Program (I'll assume two home and two away there until I hear otherwise).
Of course, speculation about possible opponents (just to toss more out there, I wonder if a similar deal was made with Neumann) beyond those is limited by Battista's statement - see the Newby piece link - that PSU will only play 20-22 Division I games next season. That, by definition, means 12-14 non-Division I games, so....
DI: Wisconsin (2), Michigan State (2), RMU Hockey Showcase (2), RIT (1) = 7 total
Non-DI: USNTDP (4), Fredonia State (1) = 5 total
* Technically, the NTDP games don't count against the game limit, but I still think it's helpful to use that as a starting point for the potential composition of the schedule.
Kyle -- first great job with the blog. On the schedule, just wanted to clarify that you are allowed to exempt one game each year against the "US National Team", meaning that if four games will be on the PSU schedule vs the USNTDP, one can be exempted from the 34-game limit, but the other three cannot. This would in effect allow PSU to play 35 games total pending other possible exempted games. The USNTDP games would be considered exhibitions and the results and stats would not be counted on their overall record nor towards NCAA tournament consideration.
ReplyDeleteMike - Thanks for the compliment and the insight! Still playing the "I'm new here" card on things like that, so any little thing that helps me learn something is sincerely appreciated. In ACHAland teams play wildly varying numbers of games, with no standardization (beyond a minimum) necessary because a ridiculously-flawed coaches poll decides the teams that go to the championship tournament.
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