By Brittany Burke
The final ranking period might have ended and regular season play may have come to a close last weekend for the CCSU hockey club, but with a gap in between their last away match against Boston University and the American Collegiate Hockey Association’s regionals the Blue Devils made sure to fit in one more game.
In order to avoid having a weekend completely free of hockey the team set up an inter-state match up with the Southern Connecticut State Owls. While CCSU competes in the DII tier of the ACHA, SCSU competes in DIII, where they topped the regular season rankings enough to get an autobid into the national tournament.
Despite the difference in divisions the Blue Devils couldn’t pull out a final win, dropping to the Owls 7-4.
“The problem tonight is we broke down defensively,” said Mike Joy. “Seven goals obviously against Southern is something we didn’t expect. We had some trouble getting it out of the zone defensively. We were too quick with the puck and we weren’t confident in ourselves. We took for granted the fact that they were Division III. We were looking forward to an easy game but they came out and surprised us.”
Again CCSU got into a second period slump, which SCSU took advantage of and turned into three goals.
“We have some periods where we’re not mentally focused and we certainly have to clean that up and that was addressed tonight in the locker room and hopefully they take a message from that and clean that up,” said Head Coach Ben Adams.
Headed into the first intermission the teams were tied at two apiece. It was CCSU who managed to strike first less than two minutes into the opening period with a power play goal coming from Jon Knobloch, but the Owls were quickly able to counter it with a goal of their own.
CCSU was getting good chances and skating hard in their offensive zone, which Matt Siracusa was able to turn into the team’s second goal of the period with the assist coming from Dustin Rider.
The game against the Owls counted toward the record, but not towards the team’s ranking. Due to that a lot of players who usually don’t suit up were given ice time. Because of that and the fact that the Owls were outscoring the Blue Devils, the top two lines were consistently on the ice, which could’ve attributed to the lull.
CCSU couldn’t capitalize on a major 5-on-3 power play early in the second, but in the same situation SCSU notched their fourth goal of the game.
Penalties again got to be an issue as CCSU tried to fight their way back into the game. The score got to be 2-6 in favor of the Owls before Conor Stanley cut the deficit to three on the power play. The gap was shortened to two, but a breakaway made by SCSU ended the game.
Despite allowing for seven goals Adams made the decision to keep goaltender Greg Coco in net in his first game back. While at an away game in the first half of the season Coco was hit out of the crease, which resulted in surgery and time away from the rink.
“I thought he played alright,” said Adams. “It’s certainly not the Coco we had first semester, but that’s to be expected, he’s had three months off. He’s getting over a pretty serious injury and the reason I kept him in all game is I wanted to see him battle, it was also more of a conditioning, give him some shots get him game action and see if he’ll be ready to go for us next week.”
CCSU will compete in the ACHA regionals in Danbury, CT., with hopes to gain a spot in the national tournament being held in Florida. The first game of next weekend’s tournament will be Saturday night at 8:30 p.m.
“…we know our ultimate goal and that’s to get to Florida and nothing’s gonna stop us,” said Siracusa. “… I really think at times in the game we looked better than we ever have, but we just didn’t finish when we had too but that happens. We just gotta realize that that game when we were playing it meant something but now means nothing. The rankings are over we know who we’re playing and that’s all we have to worry about.”
