Weekly Roundup: What UMass' national championship means for UConn
Should the Minutemen's title put more pressure on the Huskies' program?
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What does UMass’ national championship mean for UConn?
On the night of Dec. 5, 2017 at the XL Center, UConn men’s hockey walloped the UMass Minutemen 8-2 — a scoreline that doesn’t really reflect how much the Huskies dominated.
UMass was coming off a miserable 5-29-2 season in head coach Greg Carvel’s first season. UConn, in just its fourth year in Hockey East, would go on to have its best season in the conference to that point.
Four and a half years later and the Minutemen are national champions with a roster that includes a handful of players from that lopsided defeat. In just five years, Carvel took UMass from being a perennial Hockey East doormat into the best team in the land.
Meanwhile, the Huskies have yet to win a postseason game — let alone make the NCAA Tournament — with head coach Mike Cavanaugh set to enter his ninth season in charge of the program.
If UMass — UMass, a school with a single national championship across all sports prior to its hockey title — can win it all, a school like UConn with much more resources certainly should be able to.
So what helped UMass reach the top of the mountain and can UConn follow that blueprint?
UMass is not a historic hockey power. The Minutemen made the NCAA Tournament just once in 2007 and had never won a Hockey East championship before Carvel arrived. When he took over, the program was in shambles, finishing last or second to last in the conference the five years prior.
Still, UMass had a foundation to build off. When the Mullins Center opened in 1993, the school revived its men’s hockey program which meant that the Minutemen already had a quality home ice and practice rink.
When Carvel took over in 2016, UMass began to upgrade its facilities. It renovated the athletic training room and video room to start. Then, it opened a new weight room in 2018 that was four times larger than the previous one in the practice rink exclusively for the hockey team. In a video tour, Carvel described the project as “a priority” and said the entire process took roughly a year.
There are also plans to redesign the player facilities, which will add a dry locker room, nutrition center and lounge.
"We strongly believe that when this project is completed, Massachusetts Hockey will own one of the most coveted college hockey facilities in the nation," UMass athletic director Ryan Bamford said in a release. "It will position us well to attract top recruits to our university and provide our players with a home to develop and enjoy a first-class student-athlete experience."
In comparison, UConn’s facilities don’t belong in the same league. Freitas Ice Forum is barely a Division I rink with a single locker room for players that also doubles as a film and meeting room. Though Cavanaugh has his own office, the assistants and director of hockey ops all share one small room which is used for coaches’ meetings and game planning.
The training room is a barebones setup, crammed into a room that’s way too small. The teams have to stretch in the lobby before practices and games because there’s no other space for them to do so. The closest thing to a player’s lounge is a small room off the lobby. Notice how little time this UConn women’s hockey virtual tour actually spends inside Freitas Ice Forum.
While UMass has spent the last five years or so upgrading its hockey facilities — though much of the renovations have been privately funded — UConn has spent seven years dragging its feet on a new hockey rink for the program. Construction is expected to begin sometime this summer (with expected being the operative word) which will be long overdue.
That facility will give UConn a bigger dressing room along with a dry locker room, individual offices for each coach, meeting rooms, a strength and conditioning facility exclusively for the hockey programs and other team spaces that don’t currently exist inside Freitas. The arena will be completed around roughly Dec. 2022 if all goes according to plan.
Unsurprisingly, UMass’ better facilities have resulted in better recruits. After Carvel’s first year in 2017-18, he brought in a 13-player freshman class.
During that class’ sophomore season, UMass won its first Hockey East regular-season title and reached the national title game. When the remaining players were seniors, the Minutemen won the conference tournament and national championship. Three of the players from that class are now in the NHL with another in the AHL.
UConn added a similarly large freshman class entering 2018-19 — the current seniors on the roster. After two seasons, the Huskies finished fifth in Hockey East and set a program record for total points before the playoffs were canceled. Two players — Ruslan Iskhakov and Tomas Vomacka — are playing professionally while another — Jonny Evans — is already an All-American.
While UConn has recruited well given its facilities and lack of history, it still can’t quite get those elite, top-tier talents such as Cale Makar, the fourth overall pick in the 2017 NHL Draft who went on to win the Hobey Baker Award in 2019.
UConn certainly has the talent to compete with any team in the country on any given night and should be able to make a run in the postseason. That would require a degree of luck, though, and isn’t necessarily sustainable year-to-year.
At this point, it’s more than fair to criticize Cavanaugh for the Huskies’ total lack of success in the Hockey East Playoffs — but UMass’ national championship really doesn’t change much.
Until UConn gets a facility that’s at (or at least near) the level of UMass and the rest of Hockey East, the Huskies are probably bumping up against their ceiling as the fourth or fifth-best team in the conference every year.