By Kate Roth

While flipping through the channels the past couple of weeks you may have noticed something a little out of the ordinary on the ESPN stations, NCAA hockey.

NCAA hockey is not the most popular of the college sporting events and until recently it has received very little media attention.

That is starting to change in a big way this year. This year’s NCAA hockey tournament, also known as the Frozen Four, has had every single game televised on at least one station, many of them appearing on the leader of sports ESPN networks.

This success can be accredited to John Buccigross, a sports anchor for ESPN. John has been trying to push the popularity of college hockey for the past few years and is now finally seeing his hard work pay off. He was even granted the privilege to host a NCAA hockey tournament selection show on ESPN just like the one that is held every year for the NCAA basketball tournament.

I truly believe that college hockey is one of the most exciting sports to watch and fortunately for me, attending Bowling Green State University gives me the opportunity to go and watch that excitement, but for many others there are no teams playing around them so they have no opportunity to watch any games, making it hard for them to be interested in the sport at all.

That is why I think this coverage of the tournament is the best thing that could have ever happened to the sport. People who never get the chance to attend or watch the great game of college hockey have the chance to join in on the excitement now and who knows, maybe they’ll even become big fans of the sport.

I applaud ESPN, all of the other networks televising the tournament, and especially John Buccigross for all the hard work they have put into covering this tournament to bring the excitement back to the Frozen Four. They have done a great job of covering the tournament thus far and I’m sure that will continue on through the final rounds.