Hi all,

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hockey-L!   Twenty years ago,  Mike Machnik
and a great team of fans from around college hockey, having created the
aptly named the College_Hockey mailing list a couple of years earlier,
turned hosting over to "maine.edu", later to be "lists.maine.edu".
"college_hockey" grew out "news"/"NetNews" hockey groups that had more than
a little childish ranting and was dominated by pro hockey discussions.

With Listserv as the distribution software and lots of energy from many
people, Hockey-L grew rapidly from the several dozen core contributors to
many thousands of readers at its peak.  Hockey-L had about 3000 subscribers
and half a dozen or so redistributions, mostly on various campus NetNews
groups. At this peak, we had hundreds of posts per day in-season.  I'd spend
a couple of hours per day putting together a daily compendium, leaving out
the crud ... that was the only way to keep many of the readers we were
trying to attract (movers and shakers, administrators, coaches, players).
My secretary would put together a weekly compendium of posts she thought
Shawn Walsh might want to see, and whenever we played a team we didn't know
much about, I'd put together a packet on them for Shawn.  He'd read them on
the bus/plane a week ahead of the game.  For other stories and
recollections, see the Hockey-L archives at
http://lists.maine.edu/archives/hockey-l.html

Today, the redistributions are gone and Listserv creates its digests
automatically for those that want it, and in several formats ... but with
the decrease in volume of posts and with the filtering enjoyed by most
people's e-mail client, it's hardly needed.

Some of the college hockey web sites of today have writers that once wrote
on Hockey-L.  It's great to see they found a way to make some money while
exercising their talent for writing and passion for college hockey.  There
probably isn't a D-I rink in the land without a few current or former
Hockey-Lers in attendance. ;-)

Cheers, Wayne