Top 4 seeds to play at 4 regionals

The NCAA Division I Men’s Hockey Tournament has been expanded from 12 to 16 teams this season. There will be four, four-team regionals, two in the East (Providence, R.I., and Worcester, Mass.) and two in the West (Minneapolis and Ann Arbor, Mich.).

Will the NCAA continue to regionalize as it did last year in the fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks? There were six eastern teams in the East regional and six western clubs in the West regional.

University of Massachusetts athletic director Ian McCaw, the chairman of the NCAA’s Ice Hockey Committee, said the answer is “not necessarily.”

“We will seed the top four teams, regardless of region, and send one to each regional as the top seed,” explained McCaw. “Then we will seed the next four and they will be the second seeds at each regional and so on.”

So it is conceivable that a team from the East could be sent to a western regional as a top seed and vice versa. However, there are a couple of guidelines.

“Teams from the same conference won’t meet in the first round,” said McCaw. “And we want to place teams in the regionals they are hosting to maximize attendance.”

So, if Providence College makes the tournament, they will play at the Providence Civic Center.

Boston University is the host school for the Worcester Centrum venue and the University of Minnesota’s Golden Gophers and University of Michigan’s Wolverines would be the hosts at the western regional sites.

Minnesota and Michigan will be playing at their home rinks, which is unfair.

“We’ve talked about it, but the problem is all the viable rinks in the West are home rinks,” McCaw said.

The neutral rinks in the West are 17,000- to 20,000-seat NHL facilities which would be hard to fill while the East has a lot of AHL rinks in the 8,000- to 12,000-seat capacity.

What do host schools do at the regionals?

“We run it like it’s a home game. We run the press conferences and the media room, we take care of the statistics, and we make sure the strict NCAA rules are abided by,” said Boston University sports information director Ed Carpenter, whose school has had a healthy partnership with the Worcester Centrum since 1993.

The Worcester and Minneapolis regionals will be March 28-29 while the Providence and Ann Arbor regionals will be March 29-30.

Donation for Jordan facility

It is the one-year anniversary of the death of beloved 32-year University of Maine trainer Wes Jordan, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

Former Black Bear defenseman Art Demoulas, who played in the program’s first two seasons (1977-79), will make a $50,000 donation to the Wes Jordan Athletic Training Education Complex in the Lengyel Gym on campus.

Demoulas, whose family owns a chain of grocery stores throughout Massachusetts, will also donate a check to the university’s Alfond Arena renovation project.

Both donation presentations will take place between the first and second periods of Friday night’s Maine-Boston University hockey game at Alfond.

More than $270,000 has been raised for the Jordan Complex, so the project is expected to get started soon. The facility will include state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories along with multi-media equipment.

Larry Mahoney can be reached at 990-8231, 1-800-310-8600 or by e-mail at lmahoney@bangordailynews.net.