Some may find this interesting, some may find it anal retentive,
some may find it to be both. :-)
 
Geoff Howell writes:
>According to the American Hockey Coaches Association, the Yale/Hopkins
>game took place on Feb. 14. The AHCA's source is a Feb. 18, 1896 article
>from the Yale Alumni Weekly.
 
Well, with through no apparent thanks to the NCAA...other than
publicizing the findings...AHCA and ECAC executive director
Joe Bertagna and Mike Klingaman, a reporter for The Baltimore
Sun, did some research on the origins of college hockey in the
US.  Their source for placing the Yale-Johns Hopkins at Baltimore
game on February 1, 1896 is a blurb which appeared in the Sun
on February 3, 1896.
 
Douglas Peterson writes:
>There were also some college teams playing hockey prior to the "Anniversary
>Date" although strictly speaking they weren't playing other college teams.
> From _Gopher Hockey by the Hockey Gopher_, and from the section on hockey
>history by Donald Clark, "It appears that John Hopkins University of
>Baltimore may been the first college in the United States to play hockey,
>having tied the Baltimore Athletic Club at the dedication of the newly
built
>North Avenue Rink in Baltimore on December 26, 1894.  The University of
>Minnesota may have been the second college in the nation to play the game.
> Although students from Yale and other eastern colleges visited Canada
during
>Christmas vacation of 1894, Yale did not play the game until January of
1896
>when they met John Hopkins.  Columbia started hockey competition during the
>winter of 1896, while Brown and Harvard continued to play ice-polo through
>the season of 1896-97."
 
Bertagna and Klingaman have located some accounts of the
visit to Canada in December 1894.  The US team featured:
  Malcolm Chace (Yale)
  F H Clarkson (Harvard)
  A C Foote (Yale)
  Bill Jones (Brown)
  Billy Larned (Columbia)
  George Matteson (Brown)
  Alexander Meiklejohn (Brown)
  Byron Watson (Brown)
The Americans and Canadians played a series of ice hockey
and ice polo, which was popular among the Eastern US schools.
The Canadians won the hockey series, 4-0-0, with the Americans
winning the polo series, 2-0-2.  Meiklejohn recollected that, "It was
pretty generally agreed among us, as a result of the trip, that the
Canadian game was better than ours.  Having learned the rudiments
of the game, we brought back with us flat skates and pucks and
sticks and proceeded to try to forget old habits and take on new
ones."
 
 
John H ([log in to unmask])
 
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