There aren’t any NCAA Division I hockey teams in California, but through a new partnership with RinkAtlas.com, College Hockey News now provides easy access to directions and maps for all games.

We’ve been looking to do something like this for some time, and when we learned about RinkAtlas, it seemed like a no brainer. RinkAtlas has the most accurate door-to-door directions for indoor ice rinks in the United States and plans to add rinks in Canada soon as well.

If you’ve seen Google Maps (and by now, who hasn’t), RinkAtlas will be very familiar to you. In addition, what we like most about the site is that its accuracy comes through verification of satellite coordinates, so you don’t have to worry about having the correct street address for an arena.

Besides a new RinkAtlas link on each team home page to its home arena — for example, Ohio State — you will find a new “Map” link for all games on both the weekly schedule page and all team schedule pages. Whether the game is at a regular Division I home arena or not.

So for instance, if you’re planning a trip to Florida for the Lightning College Hockey Classic on Oct. 27-28, the games involving Air Force, Alabama-Huntsville, Army, and Notre Dame have Map links to the St. Pete Times Forum in St. Petersburg.

And don’t forget to click the “Satellite” button on any of the maps for a satellite view of the arena. Keep an eye out for the boss — you can waste a lot of time with this feature.

Even though we’re using RinkAtlas only for maps of arenas hosting Division I games, you’ll find it a great resource for any rink in the United States. There’s no excuse now for missing that late night pickup game — or at least, you can’t say you didn’t know how to get there.

By the way, another new feature we’ve added this season is downloadable team schedule calendars. Visit any team schedule page — Providence, for instance — and click the “Download as Calendar” link to grab an .ics file that you can import into calendar programs like Outlook, Mozilla Calendar, and Apple iCal.

There’s more to come soon, so stay tuned. And please feel free to leave us feedback on these or any other new features you’d like to see.

Monday, October 16th, 2006 - 11:41 pm | Arenas/Travel, CHN Stuff