It was a long week last week having had the frustrating performance against the Tommies the previous weekend. The question as a coach is how to handle the situation and the week off. I chose to use the time to get some guys healthy, have some fun, and to communicate with all the players individually. We took Sunday and Monday off, had a hard practice on Tuesday and Wednesday, had a great practice with 40 St. Cloud junior mites on Thursday (see pictures and video), had a hard practice on Friday, had a competitive dodgeball tournament on Saturday. I feel that it was a very effective bye week in that we got the guys having fun and smiling again. We showed them how much fun hockey is supposed to be with a great day with St. Cloud junior mites, we had some great meetings with all of the players to get this team focused on the task at hand and we also got some players back that had been injured.
With all that said, we have our work cut out for us these next two weeks. Our goal is to make the playoffs as I feel we have the team to be successful if we get in. We know that we will be in the playoffs if we get three wins out of four games as long as two of those wins come against St. Mary’s this weekend. St. Mary’s only has two games left in their season and they currently have 26 points. If we beat them in both games, that will bring us to 23 points and we would then just need one win against Augsburg to tie them and we would hold the head to head tie breaker. Concordia is only three points ahead of us in the standings, but they play St. Olaf and Bethel the last four games. With that said, St. Olaf is playing well right now and Bethel is ready to pounce on a team. The tiebreakers are included below along with the standings. We currently split with Hamline and Concordia head-to-head so if we tie with one of them, it would go to number of wins and so on till we get the playoff team. I could go on-and-on about the different scenarios, but all that matters right now is beating St. Mary’s on Friday night.
We play both games this weekend at the Municipal Athletic Complex (MAC) in Waite Park, MN. We promote these games on campus as our PAC the MAC nights. We will be bussing students over to the games thanks for the SJU Student Senate. Friday night’s game will start at 7:30pm and Saturday will start at 7:00pm.
We hope to see you at the games this weekend. Go Johnnies!
MIAC Playoff Seeding Tiebreakers
1. Head to head winning percentage amongst tied teams.
2. The number of wins (not including shootout wins) earned during that season’s conference play.
3. Winning percentage amongst all tied teams, beginning in rank order.^
4. Total goal differential with those tied (not including shootout goals).
5. Goal differential for total conference season (not including shootout goals).
6. Number of overtime losses.
