Glen Keeney writes: >I believe Western Mich hosting West Regionals is for 1997. The 1996 West >Regnl is at MSU, East Lansing. I don't know anything about the Grand Rapids >Arena, but they have had pro hockey teams in Grand Rapids. Western Michigan >is located in Kalamazoo, so the Grand Rapids arena is not their home rink. >However, their home rink has relatively small capacity (don't remember >exactly but in the 3000-4000 range. I'd think the Grand Rapids arena would have to be bigger than Lawson (otherwise, why not host it there). Capacity of Lawson is 4,000 from the TeamInfo file. >And I think Grand Rapids has pretty decent >Air Service for those teams farther away. About two months ago, I was looking into flights to the Kalamazoo area for a possible trip Heather and I were going to take there this summer. (to visit family - hers - although I have been to K'zoo once before in 1992 when Merrimack opened at WMU.) Anyway, Grand Rapids was one of the airports I looked into, and if I remember correctly, it was not easy to find a flight there from *Boston*. In fact, we had all but decided that if we were going to go (we did not), we'd probably fly to Detroit and then rent a car to drive to K'zoo. I don't understand why someone like Minnesota-TC :-) hasn't offered to host the West at Mariucci with its ~9,000 capacity. It seems to me that the most attractive sites are the ones where the host team tends to always draw a seed in that regional (like BU in the East) and where the area has a strong tradition of supporting college/amateur hockey. Minnesota certainly fits those criteria and more. Does anyone have any history behind the WMU bid? I was a little surprised and hadn't even considered them as a host until seeing Wayne's message. --- --- Mike Machnik [log in to unmask] Cabletron Systems, Inc. *HMM* 11/13/93