March means a few things in the sports world. Conference tournaments are underway for winter sports, league champions are crowned and, of course, madness. While NCAA men’s and women’s basketball gets a majority of the eyes, there is one more tournament that often flies under the radar, men’s and women’s hockey.
The men’s tournament began March 26, with the University of Michigan, North Dakota, Denver and Wisconsin making the Frozen Four, which starts next week in Las Vegas.
ESPN anchors Jeremy Schaap and John Buccigross previewed the upcoming tournament on “Game on: Journey to the NCAA Championship” which aired March 25 on ESPN 2. While they briefly touched on the matchups, a majority of the show centered around the storylines, for which Quinnipiac men’s ice hockey had two.
The first went through the rise of Quinnipiac’s program from Division III to Division I national champions and how three-decade veteran head coach Rand Pecknold guided the team to hockey immortality.
The segment began with Pecknold’s start as a Bobcat and how he was offered a contract of $7,000, practicing with his team at midnight and moonlighting as a Greek mythology teacher at a local high school.
After touching briefly on the teams’ 2013 and 2016 national championship appearances, the program turned to arguably one of the biggest decisions Pecknold has ever made, pulling goaltender Yaniv Perets with two and a half minutes on the clock and down a goal against Minnesota in the 2023 Frozen Four.
If you know the story, you know what happens next. Forward Colin Graf ‘24 finds the back of the net and the game is headed to overtime, where forward Jacob Quillan ‘24 buries the puck past goaltender Justin Close ‘23 to win Quinnipiac its first ever national championship.
“That was the culmination of so much hard work,” Associate Vice President for Facilities Operations “Tenth Second Podcast” host Keith Woodward said. “It was every single emotion that came upon his face. Because he finally accomplished it.”
All of this, while Pecknold walked the audience through the locker room in between the end of regulation and overtime.
“It still chokes me up,” Pecknold said.
The Bobcats have looked to capture that magic ever since, falling in the prior two tournaments to Boston College in the regional final and UConn in the regional semifinal. In its seventh straight tournament appearance, Quinnipiac fell in the regional final to North Dakota on March 28. But leading that postseason push was the nation’s leader in points and the subject of the second Quinnipiac related segment, freshman forward Ethan Wyttenbach.
“For Ethan, the game of hockey is much more than a game,” Schaap said. “It’s a calling.”
Like most player stories, the segment started at Wyttenbach’s roots in Long Island, N.Y., and how Quinnipiac’s latest star started his love for hockey. At the root of that love is his family and his father, Andrew.
“He didn’t wanna force it, but when he saw how much I loved the game, he wanted me on skates as soon as possible,” Ethan said.
While you know Ethan’s highlight reel goals and the 58 points, the casual viewer doesn’t know a lot about Andrew’s sacrifice of leaving his nine to five job in New York City to own and operate a sports complex, home to, of course, a hockey rink.
The episode further explains how that luxury has helped Ethan develop all the way from the Eastern Junior Elite Prospect League with the Long Island Gulls, to the NCAA and the ECAC with Quinnipiac.
With a sport that doesn’t attract as many viewers as some of its predecessors, it’s important for shows like this to exist to draw new eyes on the tournament.
Overall, the show achieves its purpose and serves it well. It informs the casual fan about the biggest stories surrounding this year’s NCAA Tournament teams, while approaching them with different angles that keep the die-hards locked in and entertained.
