Not Exactly a Vacation

The Bulldog hockey team will travel over 6,600 miles this weekend

“It’s kind of like your whole body changes. That’s why you have to leave a cou­ple days early because oth­er­wise you will never catch up,” said Wietecha.

The ice rink, often referred to as the sheet, is an Olympic– size rink. The sheet is the same length, but is 15 feet wider than the one in Ewigleben Ice Arena. Daniels said the penalty-kill and fore-check can­not be as aggres­sive due to the extra space.

“We have the small­est rink in the CCHA and they have the largest rink in the CCHA, so that’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent too,” said Wietecha. 

Alaska is also darker than the con­ti­nen­tal U.S. dur­ing the win­ter months. Daniels said when the team trav­els there between November and February, it feels like they landed on the moon. Fairbanks loses about five to 10 min­utes of sun­light each day until December 21, on which it will have less than four hours of sunlight.

Ferris has been unsuc­cess­ful against the Nanooks in recent years, both at home and on the road. Ferris is 0−12−2 against Alaska in the pre­vi­ous 14 meet­ings and has not won since the 2003–2004 sea­son. Their last vic­tory at Alaska came in 2002–2003. Wietecha said the time change and trav­el­ling are not excuses for their struggles.

“We can’t really use that as an excuse,” said Wietecha. “They do it when they come down here, so we can’t use that as an excuse ever.”

Ferris takes 21 play­ers, two coaches, an ath­letic trainer and an equip­ment man­ager on the trip. Daniels takes one less player to Alaska than other road trips because he does not want them to miss any more classes than they absolutely have to, espe­cially when not every­one will play as it is.

“We only take 21 play­ers to Alaska because I don’t feel good about tak­ing play­ers that far and then not dress­ing them,” said Daniels.

Players miss three days of school and must do either extra work before­hand or make up the work upon return­ing. Junior defense­man Zach Redmond said he does not take any school­work on trips.

“I try and get it all done before so I don’t have to worry about it,” said Redmond. 

The trip to Alaska is actu­ally finan­cially ben­e­fi­cial for the team. One stip­u­la­tion that the CCHA put on the University of Alaska Fairbanks is the school is required to pay for the air­fare and lodg­ing for all con­fer­ence oppo­nents. In order to join the CCHA, the league required them to finance all travel expenses.

“Our only cost for the trip is our meals and our bus from here to the air­port and back,” said Daniels.

In addi­tion, Ferris ben­e­fits finan­cially because they are allowed to sched­ule two extra games. The NCAA allows teams to play up to 34 games dur­ing the reg­u­lar sea­son. However, all games played in the state of Alaska are exempt. Therefore, Ferris can sched­ule two addi­tional home games and receive the ben­e­fit of ticket sales, park­ing fees, and con­ces­sion revenue.

“Financially, it makes sense for Alaska to be in our league know­ing that we get two extra home games,” said Daniels.