Luiz Valente wrote:
 
> Tradition seems to be dying at RPI. According to a post in Info-Hockey-L,
> attendance at the ECAC preliminary round playoff game was 1,600.
> Considering the size of Houston Field House, that means there were
> more than 3,600 empty seats.
 
I wondered about this myself.  In my ten years at RPI from 64-65 to
73-74, RPI never had a home playoff game, but it is hard to believe that
I wouldn't have gone had there been one.  All that I can think of is that
years ago there often were midweek games, but now people have become
accustomed to only watching college hockey games on Fridays and
Saturdays.
 
Whether tradition is dying at RPI is impossible to judge.  It does not
take long for a tradition to be born or a tradition to die.  This is
probably a consequence of the fact that most people are at a school for
only four years.
 
The concept of a hockey line (recently discussed on Hockey-L) only started
in my last year or two in Troy, and was not a "tradition" with people
camping out for a couple of more years.  It grew out of a change in the
way that hockey tickets were distributed because of the perception that
certain fraternities got the better seats for the more important games
under the old system of rotating the sections that preformed groups were
seated from one game to the next.
 
Ralph Baer
RPI '68, '70, '74
 
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