{"id":1938,"date":"2013-04-12T13:45:08","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uscho.com\/frozen-four\/?p=1938"},"modified":"2013-04-12T13:45:08","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T18:45:08","slug":"yales-maricic-is-no-stranger-to-the-big-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/2013\/04\/12\/yales-maricic-is-no-stranger-to-the-big-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"Yale’s Nick Maricic is no stranger to the big stage"},"content":{"rendered":"
PITTSBURGH<\/strong> — The opportunity to play for a national championship is a big deal, but to play for a world championship? Arguably bigger, even when the game is played on a plastic surface instead of ice.<\/p>\n Yale senior goaltender Nick Maricic was one of the two starters for the U.S. National Inline Team in last year’s IIHF Inline Hockey World Championships in Ingolstadt, Germany, last June. He split time in net with former Western Michigan goaltender Jerry Kuhn (2008-11) and went 3-0 in the tournament.<\/p>\n “We were upset by Finland in the championship,” said Maricic, a native of Alta Loma, Calif., a suburb of Rancho Cucamonga, about 45 miles east of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n “In Southern California, the inline skating was a really big fad after the ‘Mighty Ducks’ movies came out,” Maricic said. “It was the cool thing to do. Everybody was playing street hockey. It exploded in Southern California in the mid-’90s.<\/p>\n “There aren’t as many rinks in Southern California as there are in the northeast, but there are a lot of parking lots.”<\/p>\n