The No. 3 Mercyhurst women’s hockey team completed its 2008-09 season Sunday, March 22 in the NCAA Division I Women’s Frozen Four championship game in front of 2,437 fans at Boston University’s Agganis Arena. The Lakers fell 5-0 to No. 1 Wisconsin, as the Badgers earned their third NCAA women’s hockey championship in the last four seasons. It’s a tough loss but congrats on an amazing season.

We blogged Saturday about the people who tried to sell stolen equipment to World of Music. It turns out the man whose guitars were stolen was Ron Thomas, owner of R & R Music. He called his friends at World of Music to alert them. Mike thinks the first guitar he ever had came from R&R. It was red.

The first two rounds of the NCAA Division I tournament are in the books and our ErieBlogs.com Challenge is going very well. 13 players are duking it out for a $25 gift certificate to the Stonehouse Grill. At the end of the first weekend, ron is in the lead, followed by our own Mike and erierugby. Stay tuned – anything can happen in the Sweet 16.

The Pennsylvania Junior Wrestling State Championships were held in town this weekend at the Tullio Arena. Good to see the group come back and bring some tourism dollars to the area.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has a story about indoor water parks seeing an increase in visitors, despite the bad economy. Splash Lagoon is mentioned.

The Penn State University Board of Trustees met this past weekend and announced plans to build a new Admissions and Alumni Center at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College at an estimated cost of $4.7 million. The Robert and Sally Metzgar Center is scheduled to be completed in May 2010.

Rebecca Harris has a nice story in yesterday’s Erie Times-News about Erie Bluffs State Park. We’ve never been – have you? Erie Bluffs is 540 acres of Lake Erie shoreline in western Erie County, twelve miles west of the city of Erie. It is the largest undeveloped stretch of Lake Erie shoreline remaining in Pennsylvania.

Sports

Nazem Kadri scored three goals and two assists to lead the London Knights to an 8-1 win over the Erie Otters in an Ontario Hockey League game played Saturday in front of 8,953 at the John Labatt Centre. London leads the best-of-seven Western Conference Quarterfinal Series 2-0. Games 3 and 4 of the best-of-seven series will be played at the Tullio Arena on Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. Tickets for the games are on sale now.

The Gannon men’s basketball team continues the quest for its first-ever national championship Wednesday, March 25 against Central Missouri in the NCAA Division II Elite Eight at the MassMutual Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Tip-off is slated for 6 p.m. Gannon is ranked No. 5 in NCAA Division II. Central Missouri is tabbed No. 6 in Division II.

Jarrod King was not the Edinboro wrestler predicted to win the school’s fourth national championship. He did come in as the 12th seed at 165 lbs., but more highly-acclaimed teammates Paul Donahoe and Gregor Gillespie were expected to stand at the top of the awards stand before the senior from Connellsville, PA. But King didn’t listen to the oddsmakers, and on Saturday night at the Scottrade Center he became Edinboro’s fourth national champion. King handed Wisconsin’s Andrew Howe, the number two seed, a 3-2 defeat.

A team of Steeler backups beat a team of Edinboro students and alumni 70-66. Proceeds from the game will go to The Painted Turtle, a camp for terminally ill children in California.

Allegheny senior Erin Ham earned her second All-American honor as she placed fourth in the 200-yard breaststroke at the NCAA Division III Swimming and Diving Championships.

Events

Starting today, we’re making a change in how we post events here. First a little background. When we are sent an event by people in the community, we usually post it in our daily events post the next day and then in the weekly events roundup at the end of the week. That’s usually fine, but we sometimes forget to go back and see what was happening on any given day to remind you, the readers, about great events going on.

What we’ve done is created a calendar below we’ll post every day. It shows events for the next several months, and we will be adding to it daily. That way, you can always see what’s going on today, tomorrow, and so on. We think this is a much better way to tell you what’s happening in Erie.

There are some cool things we can do with this calendar – you can view an HTML version or add it to your Google Calendar. If you would like to embed this calendar on your blog, let us know and we’ll get you the code (or view this page’s source and copy it). One last thing, if you maintain your own events calendar in Google Calendar, let us know and we’ll give you a special email address you can use to add your events to our calendar automatically. How cool is that?

So, without further ado, here it is.