Unfortunately, our season has ended with a 12-10-3 overall record and a 7-7-2 record in the MIAC to put the Johnnies in sixth place and out of a playoff spot. I will mention that we did finish the year with a big win against #11 Augsburg, 4-2 on the road. We were able to send our six great seniors off with a win and got great individual performances from them in the final game. #1 Tyler Nelson made 36 saves on 38 shots and #11 Kevin Becker got the game-winning goal in his final game as a Johnnie. Our six seniors did a lot for Johnnie hockey. They have been great student-athletes on and off the ice and have exhibited a tremendous amount of character as Johnnies.
Some interesting facts about this senior class:
1. Four of the seniors came to SJU right out of high school, which is very rare in college hockey these days. The other two played junior hockey in the North American Hockey League (NAHL).
2. The oldest player in the senior class is Dan McNamara at 24 years old, and the youngest player in the class is Ross Stecklein at 21 years old. These two guys are almost exactly 3 years apart in age.
3. Stecklein is younger than one of our freshmen hockey players this year.
4. After this class graduates, we will only have two returning players on the entire team that do not have junior-hockey experience, Sam Valerius and Grady Ewing.
The six seniors have a combined GPA of over 3.6. Two of our seniors, Dan Tripicchio and Tyler Nelson, both have jobs lined up with two Big-Four accounting firms, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, respectively. Stecklein has a job lined up in the marketing department of Retail Construction Services, Inc., where he did his internship this past summer. Dan Voce is in the process of interviewing with some of the top engineering schools in the country and has interest in pursuing a graduate degree in biomedical engineering. McNamara and Kevin Becker have both had numerous interviews and are very close to locking up postgraduate jobs. I am very proud of this senior class as this is truly a special group of seniors with what they have accomplished both on and off the ice.
The season ended with SJU out of the playoffs and ended way too early with the team that we had. We have a lot to be proud of both on and off the ice. We are not only developing hockey players here at Saint John’s, we are developing young men that will go out into the real world and will flourish in any situation in the future. These young men have experienced both success and failure while battling through adversity. Their college experience has not been just fun and games. They have fought through a roller coaster of emotions in hockey while successfully managing the rigorous academic expectations at SJU. The fact that these young men have taken 3-4 hours out of every day during the hockey season to play the game they love and all the while still having the academic success mentioned above is more than impressive.
Thank you seniors for everything you have done for me and for this hockey program. You are Johnnies for life!
