UMaine basketball groups will face new schedule format this season
There’s a notable distinction this 12 months within the College of Maine males’s and girls’s basketball crew schedules, which America East launched Tuesday.
The lads’s and girls’s groups will play two league video games in three days as a substitute of two video games in 4 days.
The overwhelming majority of the video games shall be performed on Thursdays and Saturdays, whereas final 12 months’s format featured video games on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
The primary cause for the change is that the league has tried to restrict the quantity of journey between video games. The brand new schedule is anticipated to be in place for no less than two seasons to see the way it works, in response to Matt Bourque, the senior affiliate commissioner of America East.
“The league’s athletic administrators and senior ladies’s athletic directors needed to cut back the variety of street journeys,” Bourque stated.
“I don’t know if it’ll get monetary savings or scale back the quantity of sophistication time they are going to miss, however it’ll avoid wasting wear-and-tear on the student-athletes.”
For instance, UMaine and New Hampshire will go to long-distance opponents Albany and Binghamton on the identical Thursday-Saturday journey, swapping off opponents, and Albany and Binghamton will do the identical factor once they journey to UNH and UMaine.
The one snag is there are 9 groups within the league, so America East can’t divide it into 5 units of journey companions prefer it used to when there have been an excellent variety of groups.
UMaine males’s basketball head coach Chris Markwood stated when he was an assistant at Northeastern College within the Colonial Athletic Affiliation, the crew performed Thursday-Saturday convention video games, and he preferred the format.
However the CAA had an excellent variety of groups so every faculty had a journey accomplice, Markwood stated. Hofstra College on Lengthy Island was Northeastern’s journey accomplice.
“We’d all the time play two video games at dwelling and two on the street,” he famous.
He feels America East has achieved a very good job establishing the schedule to accommodate the groups, and he’s anxious to see the way it works.
“I’ve by no means seen this achieved with 9 groups,” he stated. “There shall be some points. There shall be some discrepancies. There shall be some complaints, however there all the time is.”
Bourque stated the format didn’t get a lot assist from coaches.
“It’s truthful throughout the board,” Markwood stated.
He added that the groups that handle the schedule one of the best will profit. Groups could have much less time to organize for his or her Saturday opponent, and coaches must monitor gamers’ fatigue ranges.
“It’s effective,” stated UMaine ladies’s head coach Amy Vachon. “Everybody has the identical schedule. Everyone goes by means of it. We’re all in the identical boat.”
She stated one distinction is the gamers received’t get as a lot relaxation between video games.
The UMaine males’s basketball crew could have 4 league video games that received’t fall into the 2 video games in three days league format, whereas the ladies’s crew could have two.
Every crew performs 16 convention video games.
The 2 video games in three days block additionally doesn’t essentially imply each video games shall be both at dwelling or on the street. There are cases the place one shall be at dwelling and the opposite shall be on the street.
