The official tipoff for Eastern Maine Tournament basketball action is still a bit more than a week away, but local television stations are in fast-break mode to prepare tourney preview shows.

Three Bangor TV stations – WVII (Channel 7), WFVX (Ch. 22), and WLBZ (Ch. 2) – are airing tourney preview shows next week.

WLBZ’s will tip off first at 7 p.m. Thursday followed by a joint WVII/WFVX live show on WFVX at 10 p.m. and repeated at 11 p.m. on WVII. The second WVII-WFVX show and WLBZ’s show are half-hour, prerecorded programs. The 10 p.m. WVII-WFVX program will be a half-hour live.

“The discussion and the idea kind of first came up during football season. [WLBZ general manager] Judy Horan asked how hard it would be to put together a show and we talked about possible dates to do it,” said WLBZ sports reporter John Smist. “I’ve been really pleased with the way it’s come about. At times it seems overwhelming, but it’s actually been really fun to put together.”

It also marks a first for WLBZ, at least during Horan’s 12-year tenure at the Bangor NBC affiliate.

“I don’t think we’ve ever done a tournament preview show since I’ve been here,” said Horan. “It was also because over the last three or four years, we’ve been putting our tournament coverage at the top of our newscasts so this is another way to emphasize it.”

The show will also be available for viewing on WLBZ’s Web site at www.wlbz2.com after the show airs on TV.

There won’t be any shortage of game film to use for the WVII/WFVX program as sports reporters Elgin Traylor and Evans Boston have been out all over northern and central Maine covering various games this entire season.

“We’ve been planning this for over a month and we’ve covered more than 150 games this year already,” said Boston. “Elgin has been thinking about doing this for awhile.”

The project is an ambitious one for WVII and WFVX as it will essentially be two shows on the same night, both of which could be live.

“The plan is for the first one to be live and the second one a replay, but if we don’t like the way the first one goes, we may do the second one live as well,” Boston said. “And it’s not just going to be a breakdown of the teams. There will also be some features on certain players and teams.”

Ironically, the station that was synonymous with tourney preview shows for many years – Bangor’s WABI (Ch. 5) – is not airing a tourney preview show, which usually aired on the Sunday that the final Classes B-C-D Heal points were released, and hasn’t since 2001.

“I believe there was some problem with getting the Heal point information on time and it was tough to get it translated into graphics in time, so we moved to a new format,” said WABI program director Steve Hiltz. “But with the growth of our news format and CBS’ sports coverage, it just became more and more difficult to do that show, scheduling-wise.”

Although the last year WABI aired the live Tournament Countdown show was 2001, the Bangor CBS affiliate did air tournament specials in 2002 and 2003 on Eastern Maine tournament finals Saturday to serve as a Classes B-C-D wrapup and Class A tourney preview show.

Since 2003, WABI’s tournament coverage has been incorporated into its afternoon and nightly sportscasts.

Revisiting 1993 on DVD

The University of Maine is selling copies of “Maine Hockey – A Tradition of Success,” a two-disc commemorative edition DVD set which includes the entire “Out of the Woods” documentary on UMaine’s 1993 NCAA championship hockey season.

The set features additional footage and player tributes to former Maine coach Shawn Walsh, features on Jim Montgomery and Hobey Baker Award winner Paul Kariya, and never-before-seen, behind-the-scenes footage of UMaine hockey from all-access interviews to a tour of the White House as national champion.

The set is available for $26.95 at the UMaine athletic store as well as online (plus $4.95 shipping and handling) at goblackbears.com.

Super TV ratings

Super Bowl XL delivered a 37.7 rating among viewers ages 25-54, which was a 6 percent increase over last year’s numbers, according to an ABC press release. Rating is the percentage of total households in a market (in this case, nationally) tuned to a specific program.

Andrew Neff can be reached at 990-8205, 1-800-310-8600 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net.