WCHA Commish Fends off Slings and Arrows

                                              Robertson: WCHA opp. will have hands full

During last Sunday’s NCAA hockey selection show, WCHA Commissioner Bill Robertson was tucking in to a well-deserved feast at his favorite steak house. He was celebrating his 60th birthday, surrounded by friends and family. At 6 pm Minneapolis time he beamed ESPN onto his mobile device. Somewhere between his appetizer and his ribeye, he got the best birthday present imaginable: three WCHA teams selected into the national tournament, a first for the WCHA since the 2013 realignment.

“I’m ecstatic, a great present” said the man known as Billy Rob. “A great way to cap off a very unusual year in athletics overall.” 

The tireless efforts by Billy Rob and his WCHA staff had a direct impact on getting three teams—Minnesota State, Lake Superior and Bemidji—into the NCAA tournament. Through diligent testing and constant tinkering with league schedules, his eight WCHA teams averaged over 27 games played per team, seven more than Hockey East, who also had three teams selected.

New England hockey writer Jeff Cox was outraged that both the WCHA and Hockey East had three entries in the national tourney. “It was absolutely unconscionable that the WCHA gets the same amount of teams in the NCAA [tournament] as Hockey East,” Tweeted out Cox.

Robertson begs to differ. “Anybody who has not seen Lake State, Bemidji or Minnesota State are foolish to think they don’t belong in the tournament. They are legitimate.” Cox laments the fact that there was not enough interleague play to warrant the pair wise ranking system to select the teams. But the WCHA had a stellar out-of-conference record, including Bowling Green’s road sweep of tourney-bound Quinnipiac in December. 

Actions speak louder than words, and the WCHA’s final entry, Bemidji, leads off the NCAA tournament. The Beavers will take on Big 10 power Wisconsin at 1 ET in Bridgeport, and the entire hockey world will see how the WCHA stacks up with college hockey’s iron. Bemidji’s strength of schedule, including six games versus 5th ranked Minnesota State, makes them a very tough out in single elimination play. Tom Serratore’s club also plays a style that translates well to playoff hockey: tight defense, long swaths of puck possession, and supreme penalty killing. They don’t have the firepower of the Badgers, but they may not need it. Senior goaltender Zach Driscoll could provide the winning edge

WCHA tournament champ Lake Superior has also shipped out east, where they will play the formidable Minutemen of UMass. This should be of great interest to pundit Cox and commissioner Robertson: a Hockey East-WCHA matchup. The 2019 NCAA finalists from Amherst should be careful not to overlook the Lakers who have been surging of late.

“If you look at Lake State’s record in the second half, it’s exceptional,” said Robertson, whose Lakers are 12-2 in their last 14 games. This intriguing Round of 16 matchup will probably be settled by an elite international goaltender, either the Finn Filip Lindberg of UMass or Latvian Mareks Mitens of Lake State. National oddsmakers may have been reading Cox; they have made UMass a prohibitive favorite in this game. 

The WCHA’s flagship hockey program since realignment is Minnesota State, the winningest team in all of Division I since coach Hastings arrived eight years ago. Those wins have only come outside the NCAA tournament, however, where the Mavs remain historically winless. If there were ever a year for Minnesota State to reverse the trend, this would be it. They open the 2021 NCAA’s Saturday evening in Loveland Colorado, where Quinnipiac awaits. The Bobcats lost their automatic bid by losing the ECAC championship game to Saint Lawrence, but ultimately replaced their conquerors when the SLU was forced to withdraw from the NCAA’s due to Covid protocol. 

MSU coach Mike Hastings has had his troops’ undivided attention for nearly a week of practice following the Mavs’ disappointing semifinal loss on home ice to Northern Michigan. They will resemble a wounded animal in this tourney, looking to avenge decades worth NCAA frustration dating back to 2003.

For the next day or two, optimism abounds in WCHA circles, as dreams of a Bemidji-Lake State regional final has Billy Rob dreaming of a Frozen Four appearance for at least one of his clubs.

“Anybody that plays a WCHA team in the NCAA tourney is going to have their hands full.”

 

Requiem for a (light) Heavyweight

                                            Requiem for a (light) Heavyweight 

                                                           New York’s Favorite Smurf

Star-crossed hockey enigma Mark Pavelich died last week. He follows Bobby Suter as the second Miracle Man to have passed, and with it, yet another baby-boomer icon is gone. Unlike the gregarious Suter, Pavelich was understated, lurking in the shadows, skating into the light only when the puck was dropped. 

To your average hockey fan, Pav’s offensive gifts were unappreciated until he after the Miracle on Ice, when he joined the New York Rangers. He spent five years playing at the World’s Most Famous Arena, averaging close to a point-a-game in five years with the Blueshirts, a 5’8” center in the rough and tumble NHL. The soft-spoken kid from Minnesota’s Iron Range couldn’t be ignored after his five-goal game for the Blue Shirts, one that splattered his name on the back cover of the Gotham tabloids.

Dixie Hockey Problems 

 

@HockeyProbSouth

· Mar 6

Mark Pavelich once scored 5 goals in a game for the Rangers in a win over the Whalers. #RIP

11:55 AM · Mar 9, 2021·Twitter for iPad

But to Minnesota hockey lifers, Pav was “The Show,” long before he made it to the Miracle on Ice and the NHL. “He was the Gretzky of Minnesota minor hockey,” said John Burke, a Duluth native now coaching in Sun Valley, Idaho. Another Sun Valley skater knew the Pavelich youth hockey legend firsthand. “I was on a very good bantam team with [future Olympian] Phil Verchota in Duluth,” said Tim Jeneson, who starred at Division II Saint Scholastica in the late 1970’s. “We went up to Eveleth and played Pavelich’s team, when he was an underage bantam. We lost 21-1, and we were a good team. Pav had nine goals.” According to both Burke and Jeneson, that was business as usual for Pavelich. 

Hi college numbers his final year at UMD are also breathtaking: over two points per game, 31 goals in 37 games. It was a no-brainer for Herb Brooks to slot Pavelich onto a line with fellow Iron Rangers John Harrington and Buzzy Schneider in Lake Placid, where they picked up the nick-name “cone-heads.” 

In the NHL, Pav was one of the Rangers beloved “Smurfs,” a line of undersized clutch scorers. It was always more convenient to lump him within a group, because as an individual, Pav kept to himself. His death has generated more stories than actual fact, Homeresque tales of the man’s outrageous scoring, his isolation, and his mental health challenges. Pav’s Duluth pals who moved on to Sun Valley shared stories both first and secondhand, like how he received a blow to the head so hellacious on the pre-Miracle tour that Herb Brooks thought Pav would never play again. Pav started the next night. 

Another classic tale emerged from the pre-Olympic tour took place in November, 1979, just after the opening of firearm hunting season in Minnesota. Team USA was scheduled to play Pav’s old team Minnesota Duluth, a happy homecoming at the old DECC Center. Coincidentally, presidential candidate George H.W. Bush would be making the trip to glad hand the fresh-faced U.S. Olympians. The only problem was that Pav went AWOL, missing all the photo ops the day before. USA Hockey officials were justifiably distressed, though Herb Brooks was not shocked when Pav showed up at the rink an hour before game-time.

Pavelich had no problem entering the old Auditorium with a familiar wave to his pals in the Zamboni entrance, but he was immediately accosted by George Bush’s Secret Service detail. They were understandably freaked out from the sight of Pav in his blood stained jeans with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Just Pav being Pav.

He was always more comfortable deep in the Minnesota bush than in the company of fellow man. His best buddy in college was Mike Jacques, who transferred across town from UMD to play at St. Scholastica. The UMD guys always preferred partying at Scholastica; it was predominantly female, having recently transitioned from an all-girls school to co-educational. But Pav wasn’t really into chatting up the co-ed’s, he would stand around with Jacques and Jeneson, studying the label on his beer. 

Minnesotans marvel at how Pavelich could make himself disappear in the off-season, portaging his canoe north from lake-to-lake, getting further and further away from any semblance of civilization. He was pure Minnesota: a guy who acquired his hockey creativity in the free space of outdoor ice; a hunter/fisherman who became one with nature during his lengthy forays into the land of 10,000 lakes. 

His life was also an example of a square peg in a round hole: a Minnesota loner thrust into a starring NHL role on Broadway. He was intensely loyal to his Olympic Iron Range line mates, but balked at the high-profile Miracle on Ice reunions. He never felt comfortable embodying the team that pulled off the greatest victory of the 20th century. 

One final insight courtesy of the Sun Valley puckers from Minnesota. Multiple sources were aware that Pav was preparing to live out his final chapter in northern Idaho. He had located a plot of land near Couer d’Alene, where he was going to build a refuge away from strangers and their prying eyes. Jeneson and Burke shared the anguish with so much of the Minnesota hockey community when they heard the news of Pavelich’s tragic passing. To this day, they remain in awe of the undersized Pavelich’s prodigious talent, one that dazzled on hockey’s grandest stages: the halcyon days of the WCHA, the Miracle on Ice, and at the World’s Most Famous Arena. R.I.P. Pav.

Generation III: Charlie, Tim and Bill Rappleye

Unlike his old man or his younger brother, Bill Rappleye requested that he have his ashes spread in the woods, not the water. It only makes sense.

While his five dynamic daughters may be water creatures during the long summer days up at the family compound in Maine, Bill—like his two brothers and two preceding Willard Rappleyes—is a man of the woods, emphasis on the word "man."

The Mountainy Pond Club is a bit anachronistic when it comes to gender; testosterone is a vital asset when it comes to felling trees, splitting hardwood, and filling the gaping woodsheds. The electricity-free Rappleye camp, aptly named Sawbuck, runs on wood, and plenty of it. If you're not burning the precisely-measured stove pieces in the archaic wood burning stove, you'll be eating uncooked food.

That's been the norm since 1930, when Dean Rappleye of Columbia, the original Willard Rappleye, began stacking freshly hewn stove-length pieces into orderly rows.

His bulging woodshed became the pride of the lake—the subject of a Henry Sargent oil painting—for most of the 20th century.

The legacy of those cords of oak, birch and beach may not have been haunting to the Dean's three grandchildren, but they were daunting. As society sped up, days off the grid chopping wood became a luxury, and the once proud woodshed hit hard times. Siblings Bill, Charlie and Tim spend more time raising families in the woods than they did replenishing their stockade. In recent years, supply has barely kept pace with annual demand.

The recently departed W.C. Rap III and his bro's were groomed to appreciate the gratification of a fully processed tree: combing it for fireplace logs, starter brush and vital stove pieces. Both Willard Cole Senior and Junior taught the three lads to safely master the heavy tools of the woods: the two-man saw; the maul axe, the wedge and the sledge. But after becoming grownups, the ratio of workdays to play days while up north on vacation listed towards the latter.

With the tragic passing of both Bill and Charles within barely two years of each other, there was genuine cause for concern. Bill's daughters are competent campers, but they don't swing an axe. Entering 2021, Camp Sawbuck needed an influx of eager woodsmen to keep the fires burning.

Enter Mike and Matt. They are a father-and-son team that has just entered the Rappleye clan. In Bill's final grand act (in a life that contained plenty), he gave away his oldest daughter Georgia to Michael Boyer.

Proud Papa with his "Pentagon"

Michael was fortunate enough to have shadowed Willard Rappleye III through a fortnight of woodsy chores this past summer at Sawbuck. He first lesson was how to start the fires, and the next was how to keep them burning with a full wood box. Check and check. These were lessons pulsing with unspoken urgency; it would prove to be Bill's final summer in Maine.

It turns out that Michael had a hidden agenda: he has an ten-year-old son from a previous marriage, a spirited lad  who coincidentally summers in Maine with him mom. Mike wants to partake in the patriarchal tradition of Mountainy Pond, where fathers teach their sons how to safely split up a tree, to master the art of the sawbuck.

Next wave: Mike 'n Matt

The new men in the Rappleye camp join 32-year-old Dexter, the 6'4" son of the late Charlie Rap, a rail splitter just like his old man. And don't forget the "Three T's," Tim and his two sons Tom and Ted. Together, they split enough hard wood last summer to keep pies baking for all of the 2021 season.

Ted and Tom with fruits of their labors

The primary passion of the recently departed Bill Rappleye was his beloved camp, ground zero for his daughters and extended family. This recent addition of Mike and Matt should help fuel Sawbuck for the next generation.

Glowing