Two Teams, Two Regions To Collide at Ridder Arena on Sunday

With three minutes left in the second period of the Frozen Four semifinal for women’s hockey between Minnesota and Wisconsin, the spelling bee begins again.

“M…I…N…”

Each letter erupts from maroon-and-gold stands, and the noise vibrates through the Ridder Arena in Minneapolis, reaching the highest rows of the press box.

“N…E…S…”

With each sound, Gophers fans shove their fists in the air. The choreography is impressive: hands move up and down in perfect unison, row after row. The capacity crowd forms a stadium-sized piston.

“S…O…T…A"

And with that final A, fans yell out their home state—“Minnesota, Minnesota!”—before lapsing into a prolonged, “Yeaaaaah Gophers!”

Predictably so with the Frozen Four being hosted by Minnesota, a Gopher-friendly crowd has filed into Ridder Arena for the final between Harvard and top-seeded Minnesota. By Sam Danello

For someone who has never seen a game in Ridder before—indeed, for someone who has never seen a live college hockey game in Minnesota—the chant seems militaristic and unusually involved. The level of excitement is just foreign.

“These are the kind of crowds that our women that play this game deserve to play in front of,” Harvard coach Katey Stone said. “We talk about that a lot. The bigger the crowd, the better it is.”

In this Frozen Four, the traditional chant celebrates a traditional event: the Gophers scoring another goal en route to another national championship berth. Counting this year, Minnesota has made four straight NCAA title games.

The Gophers’ success fits into a larger narrative of the Midwest’s hegemony over women’s hockey. The Frozen Four has existed for women’s hockey since 2001, and in 14 years, only one team not named Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth, or Wisconsin lifted the trophy. That was Clarkson, a college from near-Canada, N.Y., that toppled the Gophers in 2014.

However, Minnesota-Wisconsin is not the only small area that holds disproportionate power in the world of women’s college hockey. If you are a world-class high school player who doesn’t want to go to college in the Midwest, then you have one alternative: move to Boston.

A quick look at the NCAA’s official RPI standings confirms this regional duality. Heading into the Frozen Four, the top five college teams were, in order: Boston College, Minnesota, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Boston University.

This distinction has rarely been more apparent than at this year’s Frozen Four, which pitted the Crimson and the Eagles on one side of the bracket and the Gophers and the Badgers on the other.

“The big thing is there’s pride in each region,” Stone said. “Minnesota is the state of hockey. Women’s hockey was born in New England. There’s tremendous pride in both regions of the country.

When Harvard meets Minnesota for the national championship, the game will mean more than clash of two highly talented teams. It will also symbolize the clash of two hockey cultures.

One is a world of Minnesota Rouser chants, a culture in which area newspapers grant front-page attention to Frozen Four developments. The other is a place with perhaps as much hockey history but certainly not as much hockey saturation.

The two worlds are different and sometimes distrustful, and on Sunday afternoon, they will collide in a miniaturized version, small enough to fit onto a hockey rink for a 60-minute reckoning.

ICE HOCKEY CENTRAL

It’s a Friday night at Joe Senser’s Restaurant & Sports Theater in Minneapolis, and the room is packed. Structurally, the walls are wood-paneled; in reality, they’re television-paneled.

Three separate March Madness games play on three separate monitors, but these contests don’t attract the full concentration of all customers. The rest of the sports world may be fixated on the closeout of a Villanova-NC State basketball upset, but a majority of monitors displays a different event: Minnesota men’s hockey is playing Michigan.

In case commercials ever interrupt that matchup, other televisions provide an alternative game. This one’s Michigan Tech against Minnesota State.

It’s a generally understood truism that the further north you travel, the more hockey fans you find. And in Minneapolis, the largest city in one of the most northern-situated states in the country, you can’t turn around without bumping into a family wearing hockey jerseys.

The looming presence of the University of Minnesota concentrates this fandom on a single object, namely the Gophers. In a town that loving refers to its local college as “the U,” Minnesota’s hockey teams enjoy high profiles.

“I think it’s the culture of our program [that allows for success],” Minnesota coach Brad Frost said. “If you lived here, you hear a lot about that and our values.”

The Gophers encourage this attitude with lavish spending on facilities. Ridder Arena is one of two hockey rinks on campus. The other, Mariucci Arena, seats 10,000 and exclusively caters to the men’s team.

While Ridder has less than half the capacity of its bigger and older sibling, the arena, advertised as the first facility intended only for women’s hockey use, sports enough high-tech features to make less specialized venues look downright shabby.

There are the box seats that line one side of the arena, overlooking sections of maroon bleachers. There are the 11 locker rooms and complete weight room. There are even smoke machines that accent every team entrance and goal.

The emphasis on luxury has clear returns, as the Gophers draw nearly 2,000 fans per game, which is almost always more than what opponents draw to their home arenas when Minnesota comes to town. Chants and all, the home environment of Ridder Arena is intimidating, and the crowd will reach fever-pitch intensity on Sunday afternoon.

“It makes a difference when the crowd is really into it and pumping the team up,” said Harvard senior forward Hillary Crowe. “We talk about that sixth man. There’s a little bit of envy [as a Crimson player].”

Crowe, a Minnesota native on the Harvard roster, has a unique perspective on this regional divide. Growing up in Eden Prairie, Minn., a city 12 miles outside Minneapolis, she was as infatuated by the Gophers as any other local.

“As a Minnesota hockey player, I grew up always wanting to go to the U,” Crowe said. “Later on in the process, doors opened up out East, and I fell in love with the culture out East.”

She may have fallen for the culture of the East at large, but Crowe ended up in a specific city. Like scores of other talented hockey players, Crowed found herself in college in Boston. Or, more specifically, at a college across the river from Boston.

RISING IN THE NORTHEAST

Renovated this past year, the Bright-Landry Center is impressive in its own right. The arena is light, clean, and open, and a four-sided video screen hangs above center ice, providing video replays throughout the game.

But a hockey arena can only look so impressive when, in the 2014-15 season, the home team fills an average of 793 seats out of 2,800 available ones. A video screen can only give so much information when many of the fans that do come can’t tell an offside call from an icing call.

Maybe this is the best way to put it: there is no Harvard women’s ice hockey equivalent to the Minnesota Rouser.

The comparative lack of spirit in Bright-Landry is not a result of inferior on-ice talent. The Crimson has consistently ranked among the best teams in the nation over the past few years, posting upwards of 20 wins in each of the last four campaigns.

But the lack of popular support is so apparent that earlier the season, a Harvard student and Crimson sports editor wrote a column lamenting the lack of student dedication for the Harvard men’s ice hockey program. Mind you, this is a team that once stood at No. 1 in the national standings.

The imbalance between quality of venue and student popularity is not limited to the Crimson. Since 1910, Boston has housed Matthews Arena, the oldest hockey stadium in perpetual use. Northeastern teams still use the stadium, but an average of 302 people—less than a sixth of the Gophers’ average totals—come to see games.

It’s difficult to pin down the origin of this hockey apathy without a general invocation of culture. This sort of logic argues that the Midwest prioritizes hockey because it always has. That’s that, end of story.

A more concrete explanation has to do with the way that hockey players develop in Minnesota instead of Massachusetts. The majority of players on the Gophers’ roster arrive on campus after playing at a public high school.

Cultural attitudes can be subjective and difficult to pin down, but the level of public school hockey talent is not. By providing free access to high-quality competition, Midwest high schools open up hockey to an entire population.

In order to find an equivalent level of competition, Massachusetts-area high school players have to migrate to prep school leagues, which comes with obvious costs.

However, this limitation has not obviously hindered the Harvard program, which won its fifth ECAC tournament championship since 2000 and returned for its ninth appearance in the Frozen Four, capped by a third championship appearance.

“Certainly here in Minnesota, they’ve had great success,” Stone said. “Teams out east have had great success. You don’t get caught up in ‘Who’s better.’ Let’s have an incredible event…to showcase the game of women’s hockey.”

Frost strikes the same tone. Although hockey might have different cultural weights in the Midwest and the Northeast, the Gophers coach hopes to train focus on the game that will happen inside Ridder on Sunday.

“As I look at Harvard, I see a lot of us in them and vice versa,” Frost said. “[I’m] looking forward to playing a team from the East and having that opportunity to have a great game of sixty minutes or more."

—Staff writer Sam Danello can be reached at sdanello@thecrimson.com.