TALENT AND PERFECTION DID NOT CHANCE HOW UNIVERSITY HOCKEY IS VIEWED AT THE U CUP - AND THAT’S A SHAME

Mario Russo

For four days, it ran arbitrarily in the middle of Toronto’s downtown core. Taking centre stage in arguably hockey’s most iconic venues (Maple Leaf Gardens), last weekend’s U SPORTS men’s hockey National Championship simply acted out of habit - a routine followed for 61 consecutive years - and discretely co-existed with both professional and semi-professional hockey leagues across the nation. 

Hockey icons to the likes of Brian Burke - former president of hockey operations for the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins  - and hall of famer Eric Lindros made guest appearances on the weekend, briefly splintering the action to perform a pair of ceremonial puck drops. 

Their presence was greeted with a solemn round of applause and nothing more, perhaps to let the student-athletes participating in their version of the Stanley Cup playoffs garner the biggest share of attention on the weekend. 

Those players - split across the top-eight university programs across the country - put on a show, as if purposefully waiting for what would be the final weekend of their seasons, and some careers, to string together the greatest performances of their university tenures. 

Goaltender for the tournament hosting TMU Bold - Kai Edmonds - opened his U Cup debut with a career-high 50-save performance to help his side edge out the Calgary Dinos for an emphatic double-overtime win on day 1. 

Less than 12-hours later, OUA East MVP Simon LaFrance catapulted his UQTR side to a 5-1 win over Moncton with a five-point effort to blast his hat into tournament’s MVP talks. 

Even an upset creeped its way into the picture to help solidify the weekend’s final four teams, with the six-seeded McGill Redbirds staving off the three-seeded UBC Thunderbirds to give themselves a shot at a podium finish for the first time in over a decade. 

Storylines draped themselves along the walls of the MAC (formerly known as Maple Leaf Gardens) before a medal was even handed out to the podium finishers. 

Then of course came the biggest story of them all - one that ultimately defined the tournament from all prior competitions - and saw the top-seeded UNB REDS dust off their weekend opponents handsomely to secure a second-straight title and put a bow on an unprecedented 43-0-0 season. 

The team did not allow a single puck to cross their goal-line through all three of their competitions over the weekend, becoming the first team to ever do so in the tournament’s current format. 

All of the action, history and parity from last weekend was conceived in a matter of days, ending with a feat that has never been done before in not just university hockey, but professional playing of the sport entirely across the nation. 

Yet even unexpected upsets and unparalleled domination couldn't draw a crowd in what is widely considered the mecca of the hockey world. Attendance for Sunday’s national final drew a crowd of 1,456 in a venue that seats upwards of 2,400. 

That attendance looks even worse when matched up against the last national final to have been hosted in the building, which came in 1997 in front of a crowd of 5,733 - the lowest in a five-year span at the building. 

The crowning of a champion, one that will likely go down as not just the best university hockey team of all time, but perhaps the greatest accumulation of seasonal success for a team regardless of sport through the nation, went unnoticed, unvalued and widely unseen. 

But attendance isn't the only means of viewership -  especially at this junction of the digital age of streaming. Broadcasting the tournament on both CBC Gem and CBC Sports’ Youtube page, the National Championship was viewed by over 2,600 people on Youtube alone. 

That figure, although it may look on the surface as a silver lining for the tournament’s biggest moment - is actually put into better perspective when stacked up against other streamed U SPORTS events in the last few weeks. 

March 9th’s opening day of the U SPORTS Track & Field National Championship fielded 19,000 viewers, albeit double in length of the U Cup final, on CBC Sports’ Youtube page. 

Even the bronze medal match of the U SPORTS men’s volleyball championship, streamed on the same platform, tabbed nearly five-times the viewership of UNB’s dominant win to stay unprecedentedly undefeated on the year. 

Although it plays a large part in showing the impact and outreach of a team / league’s success, viewership is far from everything and by no means should define or take away from one of the more memorable U Cup’s in its recent history. 

However, acknowledgment over a product that continues to thrive and grow seems to be long overdue at this juncture in a league that even just this past season was oozing with talent. 

Programs like TMU exemplified this with flying colours since the start of their season back in October. Led by head coach Johnny Duco, the group attracted not just one, but two Russian-born players to their lineup this season, including Daniil Grigorev and 2022 second-round NHL draft pick and Arizona Coyotes prospect Artem Duda. 

U SPORTS, a league that caters primarily to players that have already finished up their junior careers across a range of levels throughout the country, became a temporary home for the two Moscow natives standing in the prime of theirs as the semi-professional ban on Russian players lingered into 2024. 

Both Duda and Grigorev played their debut seasons on the university stage as players teetering closer to the prime of their careers than the many in the league rapidly finding themselves exiting theirs. 

Brock Badgers goaltender Connor Ungar was among the former this season and used the U SPORTS platform to garner a two-year entry-level contract from the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers less than a day after the conclusion of the National tournament in which he and his team participated in. 

If called into game-time action this season, Ungar will suit up alongside former University of Alberta Golden Bear Derek Ryan - who like the former Badger - used U SPORTS to boost his stock in hockey before leapfrogging from Europe to the pros back in 2011. 

For years U SPORTS has sat quietly in its place within Canada’s hockey landscape, tucked too far behind the mirage of junior options available for the country's young players and just a touch beyond a post-junior career that fans of the sport feel is worthwhile to watch. 

If last weekend showed anything at all other than the generational storylines attached to it, it would be about the abundance of talent that although isn't demanding for attention, should still be recognized as a place that both fosters it and maximizes its potential. 

There is good hockey at the university level in Canada and it took place in what is largely thought of as the ‘hockey capital’ of the nation last weekend. Hidden in plain sight, U SPORTS witnessed its greatest team to ever lace things up end a flawless season in flawless fashion.

But not even perfection could hand the hockey league the attention it deserves. It begs to question what ever will.