There is virtually no overlap between CCHA and WCHA officials. My understanding is that there is some overlap between HE and ECAC officials. This might put western teams at a disadvantage when playing eastern teams with a crew from the "other" eastern league. One team comes in being much more familiar with the officiating style than the other. I think bill fenwick said this... > Which brings up a question I have. Clearly, in an NCAA tournament game between > teams from different leagues, you can't use officials from either league. For > example, a CCHA ref or a Hockey East ref could not have done the UNH-MSU semi. > But for an all-Hockey-East championship game (or for that matter, the > all-Hockey-East semi between Maine and BC), why didn't they have Hockey East > officials, who would at the very least have been somewhat familiar with the > styles of both teams? As I recall, Frank Cole, who was largely a Hockey East > ref at the time, did the '95 final between Maine and BU. and this is from greg ambrose > Frank Cole, who is now director of officiating for the ECAC, is a friend > and insurance client of mine (we're from the same home town) and happened > to be on the same shuttle bus when we dropped off our rental cars on > Sunday. I asked him this very question, "if it was OK for you to ref the > NCAA final between two Hockey East teams in 1995, why did it not happen > this year?" My reasoning is that it is better to have someone reffing the > game who knows the players, knows the coaches, knows what to look for > rather than having some guy (like Noeth) who may have reffed one game for > one team. Frank explained to me that the NCAA decided for this tournament > that they would go with officials from the two conferences not involved in > the Frozen Four (ECAC and WCHA). The reasoning, of course, was that if a > MSU-BC/Maine matchup happened you could not have the game done by a ref > from either the CCHA or HE. Thus, no HE officials were on site. > > The kicker to me, however, is that he felt if the same scenario had > occurred in an eastern venue - Boston, Providence, Albany - that there is > no question that the NCAA would have brought in a HE official to do the > game. He was basically saying that the NCAA did not want to spring for the > money to fly someone out to do one game. Nice, eh? charlie shub University of Colorado at Colorado Springs [log in to unmask] -or- [log in to unmask] -or- [log in to unmask] (719) 262-3492 (fax) 262-3369 http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~cdash HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.