Hockey Columns
Parity for Players
Every young athlete dreams of lifting a trophy at the end of a championship game. It takes years of hard work, dedication, and determination to prepare themselves to have that opportunity. Only a few are able to fulfill that ultimate dream. The NCAA has made the responsible and correct decision to cancel all remaining winter and spring championships. It was, and still is, unprecedented territory for all of us. They were left with no other choice, as the health and safety of everyone involved… Continue Reading
2017-18 Senior CLASS Award Highlights
Another year. Another 10 outstanding student-athletes honored as Senior CLASS Award winners. We love it! From fall to spring, the 2017-18 academic year gave us some incredibly memorable winners. So, to recap this season, we’d like to recount three of our internal highlights from this Senior CLASS Award year. Take a look! 1. Okay, let’s be honest here. Football winner Shaquem Griffin had one of the most amazing stories in all of sports this year, and we were thrilled to be able to honor… Continue Reading
Senior CLASS Award Year in Review
Every spring when the academic year comes to a close, we get a chance to look back on the “year that was” in the world of the Senior CLASS Award (SCA). It’s always inspiring to remember the student-athletes who were honored and recall what they’d done to deserve the honor. This year was certainly one to remember for the SCA staff, as it featured several firsts in award history. We saw our first set of twins make it to the round of finalists when Minnesota volleyball stars Paige and… Continue Reading
Hockey Candidates Share Common Link
Every season the Senior CLASS Award honors the commitment and success of those student-athletes who are on track to graduate and have exhausted all of their athletic eligibility. However, getting a glimpse of these athletes before their collegiate careers even begin does not happen often. It is even more rare to see the paths of multiple SCA candidates cross before they ever step foot on a college campus. On the border of South Dakota and Iowa lies a town by the name of Sioux City. Home of the… Continue Reading
Time management not a problem for hockey winner Cheyne Rocha
Cheyne Rocha is a master of time management. Somehow, this extremely bright overachiever has recorded outstanding grades, fashioned a solid collegiate hockey career, scored an interview for the Rhodes Scholarship and introduced a charity to both his school and its hockey conference. It should be mentioned that he’s doing all this as a member of the United States Military Academy, where discipline heads a list of characteristics of the student body in general. An engineering management… Continue Reading
Connolly brothers bring hard work and hardware to hometown Duluth
For some, sports are about competition, fitness, the thrill of victory, and those moments where you put everything you have to give on the line. Jack Connolly has always taken a bit of a different approach to sports – hockey, in particular. For the 2012 Lowe’s Senior CLASS Award winner, heading to the rink to chase a puck up and down a sheet of ice was always about family and community. As a kid growing up in Duluth, Minn., Jack and his older brother Chris became the first generation of… Continue Reading
Connolly calls it “puck luck” but Minnesota Duluth’s star has skills
Minnesota Duluth coach Scott Sandelin looked past Jack Connolly’s size when he recruited the hometown center. He was playing for a small private school nearby. “[Jack] had skills, a head for the game,” Sandelin said. “I thought he could be a player for us for four years and I hoped we could build around him.” Five years later, Connolly, who spent one season in the USHL, is a senior at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is still only 5-8, 170, but Sandelin’s hopes have turned… Continue Reading
Hockey award winner Lamoureux puts the wraps on a “storybook career”
In a perfect storybook world, Jacques Lamoureux would’ve spent sunny summer afternoons in his family’s backyard in North Dakota, watching the jets and bombers from the nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base fly overhead. He would’ve dreamed from a young age of using his skills as an athlete and an airman. And he would’ve skated from the pancake-flat prairie directly to the foot of the jagged Rocky Mountains to play for the Falcons at the U.S. Air Force Academy. But life, as we know, has a… Continue Reading
Hockey star Chase Polacek plays big despite his early critics
Throughout his youth hockey career and into high school, Chase Polacek kept hearing that he was too small, that he would never succeed at the next level of hockey. He never made an A team in any age group his first year of eligibility. He always had to wait a year. Even in his one season immediately before high school, Polacek was placed on a B team. Polacek’s last rebuff came before his senior season at the Academy of Holy Angels, a Catholic prep power in Richfield, Minn. After tryouts… Continue Reading
The fog of injury has lifted for North Dakota’s Chay Genoway
Ice hockey, especially at the college level, is a game played with the hands and the legs and the body. But mostly, it’s a game played with the head. The lightning-fast on-ice action requires the reflexes of a cat, and the ability to think fluidly, and make decisions that can change the nature of a game in seconds, and mean the difference between winning and losing. So what is a student-athlete to do when the doctors tell a thinking man’s hockey player to stop playing hockey, and, for the… Continue Reading
