UM hockey finds slots during sweeps

WABI still has one University of Maine home football game left to televise, but this week, the Bangor TV station will take to the ice.

WABI – in conjunction with Lewiston’s WPME (Ch. 35) – will televise the Black Bears’ Hockey East opener with the University of Massachusetts-Lowell at Alfond Arena Friday night to kick off the first of 11 Maine winter sports telecasts that will continue through February.

This is the second year of UM broadcasts for WABI, but is the first in a new three-year deal signed last May. It represents a heavier commitment to Black Bear broadcasts.

“We really are making a big commitment to this,” said WABI program director Steve Hiltz. “Being in the middle of November sweeps, we normally wouldn’t pre-empt network scheduling, but we felt the programming was important enough to warrant it.”

WABI will also pre-empt CBS programming during the February Nielsen ratings sweeps period to air two other games – one men’s and one women’s basketball game.

Although it’s a gamble to interrupt network feeds on Friday or Saturday, Hiltz and other WABI officials feel it’s one worth taking.

“We were avoiding prime time pre-empts early on, but we decided that we needed to get into the hockey season earlier than usual for the viewers,” Hiltz explained. “It came down to which was the most popular night. We opted for Friday since Saturday is much more popular locally.”

The move will also allow WABI to more accurately gauge the popularity of sports telecasts through exact ratings data for the three games airing during sweeps weeks.

“Hockey’s extremely popular with viewers and local advertisers alike, but now we’ll have something to show advertisers with these ratings numbers,” Hiltz said.

Joe Carr will handle play-by-play and former Maine player Scott Smith will be the color man for hockey telecasts.

Bangor television station WVII (Ch. 7) will debut Maine Hockey Monthly Sunday at 6 p.m.

The first of five planned shows (six if Maine advances into the NCAA Tournament) will be co-hosted by Maine hockey coach Shawn Walsh and WVII sports director Rich Chrampanis.

“It was something that coach Walsh had approached me about in the past and I wanted to do it, but the timing didn’t work out until now,” Chrampanis said. “We didn’t want to make it a typical coach’s show with a couple of talking heads and highlights from the last game. We’re going to have more features, informational stuff and other things to set it apart from typical coaches’ shows.”

The Boston Red Sox and the Fox Network are very close to a new broadcast deal worth as much as $24 million over two years, according to reports in the Boston Herald.

The deal, which would be worth $2.7 million more per year than the recently concluded two-year deal with Boston University-owned WABU (Channel 68), could be finalized as early as this week.

New England football fans can have their Patriots and Flutie, too, this weekend.

At 1 p.m. Sunday, local Patriots fans can watch the Fox Network telecast of Atlanta at New England on either Bangor’s WBGR (Channel 33) in Bangor or Portland’s WPXT (Ch. 51). Then at 4 p.m., they can switch their channels to the second game of CBS’ NFL doubleheader – Doug Flutie’s Buffalo Bills at Bill Parcells’ New York Jets. CBS will air the Bills-Jets game in 52 percent of the nation’s markets.

Time to break out a bowl of Flutie Flakes, Pats fans.