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The Best Tournament You (Probably) Didn't See

By Bill Berg, 03/08/11, 1:52PM CST

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And a suggestion to get you there next year.

 What a tournament! Wausau West beats Eau Claire Memorial in overtime in the semifinals for the second straight time. The girls’ championship game goes into a fourth overtime before a winner is decided. And judging by all the empty seats in the Coliseum, most of you missed it. Where were you?

The WIAA State Hockey Tournament is the culmination of four months of work by 92 boys teams and 33 girls teams. It represents the crowning achievement of what our sport has to offer. And most of you missed it. Seriously, where were you?
 
 I grew up in Superior, where the hockey culture is heavily influenced by Minnesota. There are a lot more hockey teams within easy driving distance in Minnesota than there are in Wisconsin, especially when I was a kid. And the local TV stations are based in Duluth, so we see a lot of Minnesota programming. Like the MN State High School Hockey Tournament, which was must see TV for any young hockey player back in the day.
 
The purpose of this article isn’t to get into the differences between Minnesota hockey and Wisconsin hockey, but rather to point out that their arena is full for their tournament. And it is a much larger arena than the one that we use over here. It is also newer, has better seating, better ice, and a working scoreboard, but that also is not the point of this article. I just want to talk about the attendance. 
 
You don’t fill an 18,000 seat arena just with fans of the two high school teams that are playing. You fill it with fans of high school hockey. We played our games in an 8,000 seat arena that was only more than half full a couple times all weekend. The semifinal game between Wausau West and Eau Claire Memorial probably had the largest crowd. It is hard to tell because I don’t recall them announcing attendance figures at all during the tournament. Even for that game, there were almost as many empty seats as full ones.   
 
Since moving back to Wisconsin, we made our first trip to the State Tournament when Antigo qualified in 1993. Woo Hoo! State Champs! We came back down again in 1997 with another Antigo squad. Ack! Five seconds from another title. And that is when we got the bug. We have been to every tournament since then. Each fall my wife asks me the dates of the tournament so she can schedule the time off work. This was before we started Wisconsin Prep Hockey.  
 
There are people that we see down in Madison every year. There are a handful of families from Antigo that go down every year. As I’m sure there are from other cities around the state. The question is, why aren’t you there every year? If you like high school hockey in Wisconsin, let me tell you, it doesn’t get any better than what we just witnessed last weekend. So really, where were you?

update - march 10

I have just learned that there is a tiny window of opportunity open now. The WAHA State Tournament dates are in their Bylaws and Rules and Regulations. Proposed changes to Rules and Regulations need to be submitted by March 15. Our local association doesn't have another meeting until March 16th, so I don't know if I can get anything submitted this year.

I have included the forms that need to be submitted below. The first form has all of the information filled out and moves the dates to the second and third weekend in March. The second form proposes dropping Mites and having the other tournaments on the second weekend. The third form has the rules information with the changes left blank for you to fill in your ideas. if we can get one association to submit one, it will be a first step.

I just found out that there will be no more Mite state tournaments after this year, so only the second form, putting them all on the second weekend is needed.

One possible excuse for missing the action was having to attend a youth team state tournament in another city. Our own Michael “Trasher” Trzinski missed the championship games because he had to be at his daughter Emily’s tournament. I missed the championship games two years ago because the Peewee team I was coaching was in a state tournament in Sheboygan (we won).

 
An idea that I heard tossed around in Madison was to get the WIAA and WAHA to agree to have their tournaments on separate weekends. This would eliminate a lot of conflicts among hockey fans, and give more kids the opportunity to see how good high school hockey can be. We like that idea.
 
In our local associations, most of the young skaters have visions of putting on that high school uniform. On a regular game night I would guess that at least half of the  youth association skaters here are in attendance at the high school games. Yet last weekend our Bantams and our Squirts had their own state tournaments to go to. My grandson Brett was going to come down with us this year, but he is a Bantam and had to go elsewhere. 
 
I have heard that the Coaches Association has asked WAHA in the past to try to schedule things differently, and got nowhere.  I think we need to start this at the local association level. WAHA is a much easier organization to work with than the WIAA. It is really run by the local associations and their regional directors. There is a state meeting coming up in May. Talk to your local associations. Find your regional representative. It is probably too late for next season, but we should target the 2013 Tournament. Let’s get a grass roots campaign started to get the tournaments isolated so that our kids can go watch the high school teams play.
 
Please post your ideas and suggestions below for further action. We want to make this happen.
 

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