the children of yost

 Student ticket holders just got this email:

Welcome back to campus, we hope you had a great summer! Thanks for signing up for your Hockey Student Season Tickets and making the student section at Yost Ice Arena the best in college hockey! The season will be here before you know it, the first game is Tuesday, October 9 vs. Windsor at 7:35 p.m. and with that in mind, we wanted to share with you some important news, dates and updates to your season tickets for this season:

 

New and most importantly this year is the fact that your Michigan Hockey Tickets will be on your MCards. Similar to the basketball student ticketing process, all hockey Student Tickets will be first come, first serve seating in the student sections (no pre-reserved seating or printed season tickets will be used). This change was made to make it more convenient for you, and to create an early exciting atmosphere at Yost. Just show up to the games where you will swipe your MCard and ticket takers will give you a ticket voucher for a student section seat. Make sure to get there early to get the best seats!

 

With the tickets on your MCard, you can now easily and electronically transfer your tickets to someone else if you're unable to make a game. Use of the ticket is free for other UM students (MCard student ID must be presented with ticket at game), and if you transfer your ticket to a non-student they must pay a $20 validation fee at Yost to gain admittance. Transferred tickets will be emailed to the recipient as a pdf Print at Home ticket. Transfer instructions will be sent to you in late September.

 

Yost Ice Arena has been renovated! The new changes include:

New bench seating on the east, west and south sides of the arena

Replacing the historic Yost windows to allow natural light into the facility

Improvements in the audio capabilities within Yost through cutting edge technology

Upgraded concession stands and concourse

We hope to open up Yost before October 9th for you to see these changes for yourself and once we have solidified a date, we will let you know. 

 

We will update you on when and where you can pick up your FREE student section t-shirt.

 

If you have any questions regarding your tickets, call us at             734.764.0247       or email mtickets@umich.edu. Be sure to include your student ID number.

 

Look for some more updates over the next few weeks but until then, thanks again for being a season ticket holder and Go Blue!

EDIT:  Thanks to our amazing donors, including a generous Mr. Aaron Ward, our goal has been reached! Thanks to everyone who contributed, we will keep you posted on the status of the flags!

If you've been to Yost Ice Arena for a Michigan hockey game in the past two years, you're probably familiar with the student sections' giant Swedish and Texan flags. Next season, we plan on adding two more giant flags to our arsenal, and we would greatly appreciate your support in our fundraising efforts. 

Because we are not, and never will be, a University-sponsored student group, we cannot seek funds through the Student Activities Fund. We are very grateful to the Eckert family, who handmade the Swedish flag and donated the Texas flag, but now we seek support from the entire Michigan family for these next two flags. 

Below (in the first comment) is a link to our Paypal account. Our fundraising goal is $600, which will cover both flags (one of which will be a custom design) and shipping. We had issues setting up on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, so we're just going to keep it simple with a Paypal account. We'll keep you posted on our progress via @ChildrenOfYost on the Twitters. 

Thank you, and Go Blue!

If you will be sitting in the student section at Yost next year, please take the following survey regarding becoming a recognized student organization if you haven't already: http://bit.ly/gXwRa2

More information, including obvious pros/cons, is listed on the survey:

Recently, the Maize Rage contacted the curators of the @childrenofyost twitter encouraging us to register as an official student organization and get a table next to them at Festifall. We know that we cannot make this decision on our own, and would like your input.

Foreseen pros:

Possibility of University funded trips to away games, tournaments, meetings with free food, etc.

Possibility of accessibility to hockey practices (Maize Rage has had the above opportunities with basketball in the past)

Foreseen cons/issues:

We may need to "clean up our act" to enjoy the benefits of a recognized student group

We would have to be much more organized: electing a governing body, etc. We would ALL have to be much more involved (we're looking at you, sections not named 16 or 17).

Registering as a student group was previously attempted unsuccessfully about 2 years ago.

Please email childrenofyost17@gmail.com before voting if you have any questions.

Please vote if you are eligible, but even if you aren't feel free to add your opinion below. 

EDIT: If you're going to try to vote as a hockey player, maybe try one who's not graduating. If you are Carl, sorry Carl, you're technically not eligible to vote but we appreciate your opinion nonetheless!

The Michigan Daily continues its impressive streak of outstanding sports feature writing with an article by Michael Florek on how Yost became the intimidating barn it is today.

The student section, barely extending blue line to blue line behind the benches, had already started the countdown.

No. 3 seed Michigan was up 4-3 on sixth-seeded Cornell as the seconds slowly counted down in the 1991 Regional. The crowd, staring at the approximately 200 Cornell fans situated near center ice on the side opposite of the student section, belted out the numbers. “Five! Four! Three! Two!...”. But the countdown never finished.

Big Red forward Kent Manderville slapped a backhand shot from the top of the circle past freshman goaltender Steve Shields to tie the game.

Cornell then scored on its first trip down the ice in overtime to end the game, but it was the halted countdown that spurred the veteran Big Red crowd.

“I’ve never heard a countdown stop,” William Sangrey, a Cornell graduate student at the time said. “Five, four, three, two, and it stopped. The whole building just stopped.”

The following night, as the first period waned down, the boisterous Cornellians added a new chant to their already versatile repertoire.

“They would go, ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, OHHH!’ to make fun of the crowd reaction,” then-Michigan graduate student Matt Thullen said. “I was like, ‘hey that was actually pretty clever.’ ”

From there, it was on.  The crowd started adopting (stealing) Cornell chants and learning how to make Yost work for them.

The article then retells the Molly McGannon/Blizzard story and closes with Michigan fans overtaking Munn Ice Arena, just the way MSU fans used to do at Yost in the years before the surge in Michigan hockey popularity among the student body.

“When we had all our fans there, it was kind of a slap in the face to them,” junior forward Louie Caporusso said two weeks ago. “It showed how much more we cared, and it really propelled our team to win those games.”

Michigan had finally done to Michigan State what had made Berenson so embarrassed in his early years in Ann Arbor — it had forced the Spartans to play a road game at home.

“It culminated in that,” Berenson said. “We have never had a home-ice advantage at Michigan State in all the years we’ve been here. You can just see there is so much momentum around this program that in a situation this past spring it showed up on the road.”

Early in game one, before the Wolverines pulled the first of four upsets to win the conference tournament and extend their NCAA Tournament streak, the Michigan section used its hallmark of recent years and belted out one of its impromptu cheers. It was a simple, but effective, statement directed at the Spartan student section.

“WE CAN’T HEAR YOU!”