On Frozen Blog

We’re now solidly into the college hockey season, and I’m keeping an eye on week-to-week movements by Top 10 teams, trying to gain a sense as to whom might emerge as likely visitors to our fair city when it hosts its first-ever Frozen Four in just a few months. How would this be for a storyline: a service academy comes to the nation’s capital to compete for the national championship.

It could happen. 

On Monday, the Air Force Academy earned a no. 10 ranking nationally among the major college polls. In one computer poll, at CollegeHockeyNews.com, they’re no. 1. Over the weekend the Falcons played their in-state betters, highly ranked Colorado College and Denver. On Friday night the servicemen hosts thwacked 3rd-ranked CC, 4-1, to go 13-0 on the season. The next night, on the road, they suffered their first defeat of the season against the Pioneers, 4-1. The Falcons defeated Denver last season, snapping a 19-game losing streak against DU. Friday night’s win over CC snapped a 25-game losing streak against the state’s other traditional hockey power.

After last season’s defeat at the skates of the Falcons, Denver head coach George Gwozdecky acknowledged Air Force’s recent ascension in the college hockey ranks: “They were a far better team than we were.” He heaped more praise on them this past weekend.

“I can’t say we’ve played a better team all year,” Gwozdecky added. “That game could’ve gone either way. If we play a seven-game
series, it goes seven games.”

“They should be a top 10 team, probably a top five team.”  

The Colorado Springs Gazette earlier this year first captured the Falcons’ remarkable rise:

“Air Force isn’t supposed to be able to compete with hockey’s elite.
The Falcons are slower, smaller and not as skilled as the stereotype
goes. In some minds, that label cemented itself with the loss [last season] to
Minnesota. Others thought the Falcons were on the verge of breaking
through.

“The others were right.”

Air Force first caught college hockey’s attention in a national sense in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 2007, when it led Minnesota 3-1 with less than 10 minutes to play. The Gophers squeaked by with three late goals, but the Falcons’ program seemed to take flight from that confidence-building moment. In the first round of the NCAAs last season the Falcons took no. 1 seeded Miami to overtime before falling 3-2.

There’s been clear progression in Head Coach Frank Serratore’s program: 19 wins and the near-upset of the Golden Gophers in 2006-07, 21 wins and the postseason thriller with the Redhawks last season. This season Air Force will easily pass 21 wins — indeed, in their uber weak Atlantic Hockey Association conference they’re unlikely to lose a single game. They may well enter the NCAAs with just Saturday’s lone loss on their record.

This a wonderful storyline at a time in contemporary intercollegiate sports, when the service academies are commonly thought of as schedule padding. Back in the days of my youth, George Welsh’s Midshipmen in Annapolis were a perennial top 20 program, capable of knocking off the heavies each week. But as linemen in college football regularly reached and exceeded 300 pounds, Navy’s 250-pounders just couldn’t compete. David Robinson grew some 7 inches after his admission to Annapolis, or he’d never have been commissioned. Navy and Air Force have to try and win basketball games with wingman-sized pivots.  

But it’s the commitment aspect that truly sets the service academy athletes apart. At Air Force, there’s typically a five-year commitment to serve as a commissioned officer. That’s not going to sit well with most kids with pro hockey aspirations. In a very real sense scores of big state college sports programs have become development systems for pro sports leagues, with student athletes far more athlete than student in far too many instances. Meanwhile, the young men and women who earn commissions at our service academies necessarily forsake any hopes of million-dollar contracts in pro sports.

For the old fashioned like me, they seem to represent what college sports once was, rather uniformly, and of which we could use a good deal more of now.  

I will watch all four quarters of this Saturday’s Army-Navy football game, knowing that I’m necessarily not watching the nation’s most gifted football players and teams. I will also root hard this winter for the hockey players skating their hearts out at the Air Force Academy. I wish there were a few thousand more student-athletes just like them.