Why it’s time to move NCAA men’s hockey regionals to home sites – Grand Forks Herald

GRAND FORKS — The 2022 NCAA men’s hockey tournament should have been the last straw for neutral-site regionals.

It started with a game between Minnesota State and Harvard in Albany, N.Y. The crowd was sparse enough to count by hand — in a venue that seats more than 10,000. Pandemic-restricted crowds were larger.

Up the road, Minnesota played Western Michigan to go to the NCAA Frozen Four in Worcester, Mass. That game drew the smallest crowd to watch the Gophers all season.

In most sports, the big games have packed stadiums and the best atmospheres. In college hockey, they often have the worst.

This issue has been going on for more than a decade now with regional flops spanning from St. Paul to Cincinnati to South Bend to Toledo to Grand Rapids and more.

Yet every year when the topic comes up at the American Hockey Coaches Association meetings in Naples, Fla., a segment of coaches and administrators argue that this is acceptable — necessary, even — and excuse what’s been happening.

You’ll hear:

“We just need to pick better sites.”

“It wasn’t bad in (insert year here), so it’s OK.”

However, even the “good” years aren’t that good. Attendance has been bleak so often that if a regional fills 70 percent of the seats and has any semblance of an atmosphere, it’s celebrated.

There’s also a big lesson college hockey never learns: The next regional disaster is right around the corner. It always is.

I began writing columns on this topic a decade ago. Neutral-site regional proponents always pointed to average years as proof that it was working and improving. But the disasters always returned.

Ten years later, they haven’t fixed it. It’s time to try something new.

The NCAA has locked in neutral-site regionals through 2026. It has opened a portal for bidding for 2027 and 2028. The bidding portal closes next month, and if the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Committee doesn’t make a change this spring, they’ll award them in the early fall and we’ll be stuck with neutral sites for two more years.

The solution isn’t complicated.

It’s bringing regionals to the home buildings of the higher seed.

Here’s how it would work: The 16-team field would be selected. The top eight…