To all our friends at HOCKEY-L and INFO-HOCKEY-L:
 
If Mike Machnik and Wayne Smith will permit me, I'd like to welcome all of
you to the debut today of USA TODAY's new college hockey World Wide Web site.
 
You can access it through your Web browser at:
     http://www.usatoday.com
 
You can find the college hockey pages in a number of ways:
     Go to the What's New feature off the USA TODAY front News page.
     Go to the Sports front page and click on either the College Hockey icon
or the College Hockey headline.
 
From there, just point and click away. We hope you'll enjoy what you find:
     All the polls, including the new USA TODAY/College Magazine poll.
     Individual pages for the ECAC, Hockey East, CCHA and WCHA featuring
standings, team and individual statistics, schedules (league composite and
team) and rosters.
     A very special weekly feature called COACHES CLINIC, this week featuring
Michigan's Red Berenson (thank you, Red!). We promise even more impressive
graphics on this page in the very new feature.
 
We'll have results, too, although not as quickly as all of you and we would
like. That's because college hockey is not a priority for the national wire
services. If they were, and we could automate those results as we do for
other sports, you would get the results instantly. Let's hope that's in the
future. Until then, we'll update scores as quickly as possible.
 
These pages are the result of some very hard work by Cindy Paavola (Northern
 Michigan '84, then 11 years in the Sports Information Office at Western
Michigan) and Jon Barkan (Northeastern '91; Barkan Bash). Also, we'd like to
thank Mike, Jeff Weiss, Doug Spencer, Tim Burton and Joe Bertagna for all
their help. We couldn't have done this without their help.
 
As always, we invite (and expect!) your comments and feedback, either on
HOCKEY-L or through the feedback feature offered by USA TODAY. We want this
to be the best single-site source of college hockey on the Web, a fun and
useful complement to your discusssions on HOCKEY-L. This site has the
potential to be the best because of the people involved, who really know and
care about college hockey. Your suggestions will help us do better and
improve the site. It won't be perfect, but it's an extension of the coverage
of USA TODAY (the newspaper).
 
So tell us what you think and help us make it better.
 
Thanks.
Steve Klein (Wisconsin '70; Notre Dame hockey beat writer 1970-74; Lansing
State Journal Sports Editor 1986-1995)
 
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