Last weekend’s exhibition games for No. 20 Colorado College and fifth-ranked Denver were looked forward to by many college hockey fans across the region, wanting to get their fix after the holiday break.
I include myself among that number, but those games meant more to me than they probably did to most.
Minot State, which fell 7-1 Friday at Colorado College and 9-3 Saturday at Denver, fields an American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA) Division 1 team that has three national championships to its name. The Beavers reached the ACHA national title game twice in the past three seasons, including last year. The Beavers won it all in 2023, finishing 35-3 in coach Wyatt Waselenchuk’s second campaign at the helm.
I can already just about hear the reader comments of “So what,” and so forth, and to be fair, there’s a small part of me that gets it. Week in, week out, you come here for coverage of one of the best NCAA Division I conferences there is. And the league is as good as it is because of its level of competition, as well as the caliber of talent that these NCAA teams attract. But, we’re also here to grow the game.
There’s generally a gulf in talent between NCAA Division I and ACHA teams. It’d be hard to find anyone who disagrees with that, but I should know as well as anyone. That’s because I cover ACHA teams in my day job.
The ACHA Division 2 men’s and women’s hockey teams at Dakota College at Bottineau make up a healthy percentage of the winter coverage at the Bottineau Courant, a weekly newspaper in North Dakota where I work as a reporter. DCB usually schedules Minot State for both men’s and women’s games. It’s easy to see why, given that Bottineau and Minot are only around an hour and a half apart. DCB’s men’s team isn’t playing the Beavers this season, but they have for most of the nearly 10 years since I’ve been in Bottineau.
I don’t see much of Minot State when the Beavers aren’t skating with DCB — I’m our whole sports department, and I have 11 teams to keep track of over the winter months — but I was very excited to find out that MSU would be heading out to face CC and DU at the end of December.
I didn’t have especially high expectations, as NCAA Division I teams usually don’t have too much trouble against ACHA foes when those games are scheduled. But, I knew that these games would be beneficial for everyone involved, and CC coach Kris Mayotte hit the nail on the head at the start of his postgame press conference Friday.
“It was about the habits and getting back to it,” Mayotte said of Minot State’s first-ever game against a NCAA Division I team. “I thought we were OK, but it’s good to play another team that, when they’re angling and they’re coming to finish their hit, they’re coming to finish their hit, and you can’t replicate that in practice.
“It was good for us to get hit again, quite honestly, and I really want to give a ton of credit to Wyatt and Minot State. The job they are doing there and what they’re building, he’s done a great job since he got hired. That was a fun team to play against. They play hard, they play with pace, they make you earn what you get, and there were stretches there where we didn’t want to earn it, and we didn’t.”
Last season, I mentioned in a story for USCHO.com that both Denver coach David Carle and Alaska-Anchorage’s Matt Shasby had recently scheduled UNLV with a view toward helping a school with an ACHA program see what could happen if they were to make the move up to the NCAA level. That doesn’t currently appear to be the case with Minot State. Rob Beer from The Rink Live recently wrote an excellent explainer on this.
If last weekend’s exhibitions inspire Minot State to explore the possibility of launching NCAA hockey programs, it would certainly be a welcomed move across the sport’s landscape. It would increase the profile and reach of a NCAA Division II university that is primarily a commuter school while improving what is already a competitive product.
But that doesn’t matter so much in the short term. What does is that Minot State tucked four goals on the weekend against a pair of ranked NCAA Division I teams and didn’t roll over. The Beavers will remember that, and as Mayotte suggested, so should those games’ favored teams.
