Bangor television station WABI will be passing, tackling, skating, and dribbling with the University of Maine for a seventh straight season.

As the Bangor CBS affiliate heads into the second year of a three-year pact with UMaine, the early sports broadcast schedule is out and, although it’s down one game from the 2002-03 season, it’s still packed with Black Bear telecasts.

Hockey gets the bulk of the spotlight with 10 of the 14 games on the schedule. Football is next with three broadcasts, and men’s basketball has one game.

“Maine games are among our most popular programming overall, honestly. The prime-time hockey games usually win their time slots,” said WABI program director Steve Hiltz. “We have more hockey because of that, but also because basketball is so up in the air and it’s harder to schedule than hockey.”

Hiltz cited recent ratings to attest to hockey’s broadcast viability.

In the third week of November on a Friday last year, WABI garnered a rating of 8 and a share of 15 during the first half hour of a 7 p.m. hockey game. The comedy “Seinfeld” was 6 and 11, respectively; the popular game show “Jeopardy” led the timeslot with 10 and 19.

“Demographically, we did a 5 rating for people ages 25-54 while ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Jeopardy’ each got a 4,” Hiltz explained. “In the 18-49 group, we did a 5 for hockey. Seinfeld was 4 and Jeopardy 2.”

WABI also broke the ratings bank for a Friday February game at 7 p.m. The rating was 12 and share was 19. At 7:30 p.m., the numbers were 11 and 18, respectively.

“That would be among the highest rating we’ve had for a sports broadcast and then, even though we ran up against “Providence” at 8 p.m., we had 11 and 16,” Hiltz said.

At 9 p.m., the numbers were 13 and 21. Demographically, among ages 18-34, the game drew a 14 rating.

This is the fifth decade UMaine and WABI have teamed up to air Black Bear sports.

Hiltz said WABI has the option to add, subtract or do both to the schedule and may add a game or two if the opportunities arise.

WABI’s Maine sports schedule kicks off September 13 with Maine’s football game in Portland against Florida International University.

“Football is solid,” said Hiltz. “We had four games last year so we’re one short this time around, but we were trying to keep prime time pre-emptions to a minimum and this won’t hurt us too badly.”

WABI officials were looking into doing Maine’s season-opener against Division I-AA powerhouse Montana, but the TV rights to that game are held by College Sports TV (CSTV), a new network primarily available on satellite TV.

“We also had a conflict on that date already because CBS is going into a prime time [football] game starting at 6 p.m. [USC at Auburn] and the U.S. Open [tennis] coverage starts at 11 a.m. and is scheduled to run until 6 p.m., but that often runs over,” Hiltz said.

So CSTV’s coverage is a blessing, except for the fact the network is not yet available on local cable companies’ channel lineups. One possible remedy might be CSTV allowing another local station to pick up the game for a fee. Stations like Bangor’s WVII (Ch. 7), WBGR (Ch. 33) and WSVX (Ch. 22) would be the best bets to air a game like that since WVII and WBGR have made similar arrangements like that in the past and WSVX, which specializes in sports programming, is operated by WVII.

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