Our team got better this week! We have been through a lot this year with injuries and other aspects. This week was no different. We found out that, after our series with Gustavus, we lost our leading scorer, sophomore Matt Colford, for the year with a knee injury. We also lost both of the Division I transfers that came in this year in sophomores Matt Perry and Evan Okeley for the week. When you take these three injuries and add them to the already injured forwards (senior Kevin Becker, senior Dan Voce and sophomore Mitch Fritz), we were down six forwards going into the game this weekend. We could have easily used this as an excuse through the week to not work hard and to take the game against St. Scholastica lightly. We didn’t do that, and instead we worked very hard and played one of our most complete games of the year.
Saturday night we went up to Scholastica with 10 forwards in the lineup and eight defensemen. Luckily we had one of our defensemen, freshman Kyle Wagner, that had a lot of experience playing forward. With all that in place, we played a very good team in Scholastica and came away with a 3-2 overtime victory! This win was exactly what we needed. We had great performances throughout the lineup with freshmen Brady Heppner scoring two goals, including the game-winner, and senior forward Dan McNamara picking up a goal and two assists on the night. This game was a total team effort and getting that win on the road and with a depleted line up will give us a lot of confidence moving into the long Christmas break.
Moving forward, the team is off from now until December 29th. The guys have finals starting on Wednesday, so we give them this time off to finish off the first semester on a positive note. We will then all report back to campus for practice on the 29th. We will practice three days and then give them New Year’s Day off. We get back to game action on Thursday, January 5th, against UW-River Falls and on Saturday, January 7th, against UW-Superior.
We are optimistic that we will have a number of players back from injury after this long break. The only player that is officially done for the year is Colford. We are looking forward to getting all of the forwards back, but especially Becker, who has been injured since November 4th and Fritz, who has been injured since November 17th. Both of these guys played significant roles in our success the second half of last season and we will need them again this year to try and regain that second half momentum.
Thanks for all of your support and for your interest in Johnnie Hockey! Have a great holiday season and we will see you again in 2017!
