State tourney puts Duluth on girls puck map
The biggest, most significant week in the history of female hockey in Duluth will be this week, when the Duluth Dynamite takes on Mankato East/West in Thursday’s 7:05 p.m. first-round game of the girls state hockey tournament.
It is breakthrough time for a strong, but comparatively anonymous group of girls from East, Denfeld and Central, who will be putting themselves on the map of top teams with their tournament appearance. And nobody knows that better than Hibbing coach Pat Rendle, whose team has won one state title and was runner-up to Apple Valley last season.
After Duluth finished celebrating their 4-3 Section 8 hockey championship victory over Hibbing, Rendle caught Duluth coach Jack Shearer in the lobby of the IRA Arena in Grand Rapids.
“Going to the state tournament will be the most awesome thing you and your girls will ever experience,” Rendle told Shearer.
Duluth, until this week, was a no-name team among those who watch the state’s elite teams. And the Dynamite will rank as a longshot in the tournament. Park Center (25-0), armed with Krissy Wendell, a junior who has scored an even 100 goals this season, is the upper bracket favorite and will take on South St. Paul (24-1) in the opening game at noon Thursday. Bloomington Jefferson (20-4-1), suffering from illness and ailments that have seen mono slow down or knock out several top players, and Mounds View (16-8-1) match up quite well in the 2:15 second game.
Duluth (20-4-1) ranks as a favorite to beat Mankato (18-6-1) in the 7:05 game, and Roseville (24-0-1) with the redoubtable Curtin sisters, Ronda and Renee, is favored to beat Burnsville (17-4-4) in the 9:15 finale.
Consipicuous by its absence is Eagan, which was beaten 1-0 by South St. Paul in the Section 1 final, as the Packers shut down the mercurial Natalie Darwitz. That prevented a Wendell-Darwitz showdown, but South St. Paul will be the best team Park Center has played this season and could surprise the unbeaten favorites.
There is still a substantial disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots” in girls hockey, and there now has emerged a three-tier level of play, with the elite teams at the top, the ever-improving middle teams, and the new and inexperienced programs at the bottom.
When two of the elite teams hook up in a game, it can be spectacular, because the absence of heavy-duty bodychecking means that teams must confront each other’s speed, skill and finesse with speed, skill and finesse of their own.
The state’s top elite teams are clearcut, as listed in the final Up North Network girls state ratings of two weeks ago: 1. Park Center, 2. Roseville, 3. Eagan, and 4. South St. Paul. The line between those elite four and the next group, which includes Bloomington Jefferson, Burnsville, Rosemount, Duluth, Hibbing and Mounds View, is blurred. The neat thing is, are those six deserving of “elite” status, or are they at the top edge of the middle group?
Section 1 took care of some of the debate, with South St. Paul’s Sarah Albrecht shutting out both Rosemount (4-0) and Eagan (1-0) to win the sectional. The state tournament will determine the rest of the discussion.
And that was the substance of Rendle’s discussion with Shearer. It was more than a congratulatory gesture of good sportsmanship, and it didn’t mean Rendle was not disappointed that his team failed for the first time to reach the girls tournament (“There is no worse feeling than losing a game like this,” he confided later).
But there is a kinship among coaches of the state’s top girls hockey teams. They are pioneers, guiding the fastest-growing sport in any high school concept in the country, and Rendle worked with a lot of the top girls in the Up North area by coaching in last summer’s ODP (Olympic Development Program). So he can assess the players and teams objectively, through his own pain.
Still addressing Shearer, Rendle said: “Tresa killed you last year, and this year she won the section for you.”
Tresa is Tresa Lamphier, the fiery scoring leader of the Dynamite. She was strong last year, but her temper got in the way of her production. In the section semifinal against Hibbing, Shearer sent her to the dressing room with eight minutes to play, because she was venting her temper by running over girls for penalties.
The word was out, and teams tried to provoke Lamphier into penalties. Hibbing did it too, in that title game Saturday afternoon. But the new, senior Tresa Lamphier accepted being knocked down and hassled on every shift, and stayed on the ice to score a hat trick. She got a hat trick in the 4-0 opening section game against Brainerd, she got the first three goals in the 5-1 semifinal victory over St. Cloud, and she made it a hat trick of hat tricks against Hibbing, running her season goal total to 45.
Lamphier works hand-in-glove with center Leah Wrazidlo, and the entire Duluth team has followed their offensive lead to become a tight, disciplined unit. But Lamphier is responsible for lighting the offensive fire, no question. The staff of Let’s Play Hockey, a weekly tabloid, puts together the Ms. Hockey award, and did not name Lamphier among the five finalists.
Goaltender Sanya Sandahl was named among the five finalists as top senior goaltender. That is a major achievement. After recording 28 saves to beat Hibbing, Sandahl pointed out that she never played until eighth grade.
“I played for the Ice Breakers girls team in eighth grade,” said Sandahl. When asked how she could make the team as goalie when she had never played goalie before, Sandahl said: “I made the team because the other goalie trying out had never played before, either.”
Actually, Sandahl might have been left off the list of top senior goalies, except for Rendle.
“My job at ODP was to work with the goalies,” said Rendle. “I must’ve shot 10,000 pucks at Sanya last summer. She played well against us, and stole a couple goals. But nobody knows about her. The guys at Let’s Play Hockey called me to ask who the best senior goaltenders were. I told them Sandahl, and they said, ‘Who?’ ”
That’s what this week’s tournament appearance means to Duluth girls hockey. Lamphier, Wrazidlo, and Sandahl are the only three seniors on the team, and they are leading the team into the state tournament, and the city of Duluth onto the girls hockey map.
Gasparini gets chance to be No. 1
Tony Gasparini insisted that he didn’t feel any difference as he prepared for the long sequence of flights from Duluth to Anchorage. He would say something like that, because Gasparini is always cool and disarming, so he wouldn’t say his was nervous and jittery even if he were.
Gasparini has made a lot of trips before, as a senior goaltender with the University of Minnesota-Duluth hockey team. But every one of them has been as the senior backup goaltender with the Bulldogs. Until now. He and the Bulldogs left home with the game plan that Tony Gasparini would be in goal for both late-night Friday and Saturday games at Alaska-Anchorage.
“I guess this is the first time I ever went on a trip where I knew I was going to play the Friday game,” Gasparini said.
The realization came because junior ace Brant Nicklin sprained his left knee in Saturday’s opening minutes, and Gasparini came in for a sparkling performance and a 2-2 tie with North Dakota. Afterwards, thinking always of his team and his teammate before himself, Gasparini said he hoped Nicklin would be back for this weekend. But Nicklin is still unable to bend the knee freely, so Gasparini gets the call.
“It was nice to see the team play so well in front of me,” said Gasparini, once again dodging the praise for his 28-save performance, which included 17 third-period saves as he held the No. 1 ranked Fighting Sioux to their lowest goal production of the year. “I didn’t have anything like the work Brant had the night before.”
After playing in Grand Forks, N.D., and then in the USHL at Rochester, Gasparini redshirted his first year at UMD. As a freshman, Gasparini — the walk-on son of former North Dakota coach and current USHL commissioner Gino Gasparini — played in one game. He went in when Taras Lendzyk was given a misconduct penalty for the last five minutes of a game against Wisconsin.
Five minutes. One save. That turned out to be Gasparini’s total statistical involvement for both his freshman and sophomore seasons, because in his sophomore year, he didn’t get in for a single minute as a freshman star named Brant Nicklin took over the job and began a sensational UMD career. Gasparini watched silently from the bench, always supportive, never critical, as Nicklin set school records for consecutive starts and saves and all other manner of goaltending achhievement.
That doesn’t mean coach Mike Sertich doesn’t appreciate him. “I almost feel like he’s another assistant coach,” said Sertich. “He knows the game so well, and he notices things and asks questions. I think someday he’ll be an outstanding coach.”
Sertich valued his presence enough to reward him with a scholarship. But he still didn’t get to play much. As a junior, Gasparini got in four games last season, but it wasn’t until the WCHA Final Five — after Nicklin had stunned Minnesota with a best-of-three playoff conquest and then gotten injured in practice — that Gasparini got his first collegiate start. He came through with a magical 47-save performance against St. Cloud State, only to lose 4-3 in overtime when the Huskies scored in the closing seconds, then won in overtime.
No UMD goalie had made as many as 47 saves in eight years, but it happened again last Friday night when Nicklin held on until North Dakota reversed a 3-2 UMD upset bid with 25 seconds left, then won the game with 1.4 seconds showing. On Saturday night, Nicklin twisted his left knee on his second save, and Gasparini got the call again.
In past performances, Gasparini played with great courage, and a lot of luck, throwing himself in front of shots and compromising style points for effectiveness. Maybe those panic performances had an impact on him — he claims they didn’t — but he played with effectiveness and style Saturday to gain the 2-2 tie with the top-rated Sioux.
He discounted the fact that he was playing against the team from his hometown. “It was nice to play against North Dakota, but it was just nice to play,” he said.
“Sometimes when you sit on the bench for a period or two, you might be pretty relaxed and that makes it tough to come in,” said Gasparini. “This time it came right after warmups, so I felt pretty good. I just felt comfortable.”
Nicklin’s mildly sprained ligament prevents him from making the acrobatic moves goaltenders must sometimes make, so the decision was made to leave him home for full rest.
That leaves Gasparini between the pipes, with freshman Jeff Horstman, from Faribault Shattuck, going on his first trip as backup. Gaspo would like nothing better than to turn the season around, even at this late date, for the ‘Dogs.
“I’ve never seen any team work harder and have such bad luck in one-goal games,” he said, and he noted that criticism from fans on the outside or assumptions that there are internal problems couldn’t be more wrong.
“The guys are so close on this team, maybe all the adversity has brought us together,” Gasparini said. “No one has pointed any fingers at other guys, and nobody has complained about Sertie’s coaching — god no. He’s trying things left and right. He changed everything we did in all three zones against North Dakota, and everything worked well.
“I think we’ll stick with some of the new stuff in our defensive zone, because it seemed to make everybody’s work a little easier. It would be great to have a good finish and surprise somebody in the playoffs. If there’s any justice, that’s what will happen.”
Bulldogs get split, face reality
Hope springs eternal. That is still a fact with the UMD hockey Bulldogs. It’s just that it might be time to adjust the target of those hopes.
No longer is a first-division finish feasible. Good-bye home-ice for the playoffs. Forget striving for mathematical possibilities and deal with realities.
The reality is that, after splitting with Michigan Tech, the Bulldogs ended an eight-game winless streak in WCHA play, but they still are four points behind Tech, six behind St. Cloud State, and seven behind Minnesota, in their quest to climb out of last place. And, with the upcoming weekend off, the Bulldogs have only four remaining games in which to make up their deficit.
“Realistically, we have to concentrate on playing well, playing our best going into playoff time,” said coach Mike Sertich.
That doesn’t mean he’s throwing in the towel. But with only four WCHA victories on the board, and three of them against Michigan Tech, the ‘Dogs would have to sweep Minnesota in two weeks and sweep at Colorado College the final weekend, and still hope for a total collapse by Michigan Tech, St. Cloud and Minnesota. Also, Minnesota and St. Cloud State play each other this weekend, meaning they can’t both lose.
The week off will give injured defenseman Mark Carlson and Jesse Fibiger the chance to heal, and ace goaltender Brant Nicklin should be ready to face Minnesota with the extra recovery time for his sprained knee.
In Nicklin’s absence, senior Tony Gasparini had played very well, in a 2-2 tie with North Dakota and in a 0-0 tie at Alaska-Anchorage. But Gasparini struggled against Tech, having problems covering rebounds that not only got away but wound up on Tech sticks for goals — including the overtime winner — in Friday night’s 5-4 loss. He struggled some more Saturday night, when the Bulldogs might have blown out the Huskies but instead had to work hard to accomplish a 6-4 victory.
“It was a tough night for Tony,” Sertich acknowledged. “It was frustrating when we were outshooting them by something like 15-3 and the score was 3-3.”
But the ‘Dogs came back behind two goals from Derek Derow and one from Colin Anderson in a six-minute spurt of the second period, turning a 3-2 deficit into a 5-3 lead. Tommy Nelson and Judd Medak had scored the first two UMD goals, and Jeff Scissons, who assisted on both Derow goals, scored an empty-net clincher off a neat pass from Ryan Homstol.
Scissons also scored a goal Friday, and assisted on Colin Anderson’s second of the game — a goal with 25.7 seconds left on a six-attacker rush to send the game into overtime. So Scissons had two goals and three assists for the weekend, while Colin Anderson had three goals.
Derow’s pair gave him 10 for the season, a long climb for the sophomore, who joins linemates Scissons, with 15, and Homstol, with 11, as the third Bulldogs in double figures for goals. “He’s a great scorer, and it’s important to get him going,” said Scissons.
Sertich dressed little-used Craig Pierce to replace Carlson on defense, and activated never-before-used Ryan Tessier, a freshman from Warroad — Salol, actually — for Saturday when Fibiger went down. Playing a game meant Tessier spent a year’s eligibility instead of red-shirting. “Jimmy Knapp thought we needed the help on defense,” said Sertich. “And Ryan was anxious to play.
“We had six walk-ons in the game Saturday night, with Tony Gasparini, Tessier, Pierce, Nik Patronas, Eric Ness and Nate Anderson. I thought we played pretty well, considering it wasn’t necessarily a great game. We made some plays and scored some goals on the kind of rushes we’ve been making all year, but the pucks hadn’t been going in.”
The most notable of those was a Colin Anderson goal, when Curtis Bois, who has spent four years proving he would rather shoot than pass, passed across the slot early in the second period and Anderson one-timed it on the bounce into the upper right corner for a 4-3 UMD lead.
While winning three of the four games from Tech should be satisfying, the lone loss to the Huskies was a vital blow. Had the Bulldogs swept, they would have even with eighth-place Tech instead of still merely hoping to catch the Huskies.
After the three Huskies goals in the first 15 minutes, when Gasparini made only five saves on the eight first-period Huskie shots, the senior netminder settled down and only an A.J. Aitkens goal, on a rebound in the crease at 9:20 of the second period, got by. In all, UMD outshot Tech 36-27 in the game, and Gasparini stopped 18 of the last 19 shots he saw after the rocky start.
‘DOGMEAT/Eveleth-Gilbert scoring star Andy Sacchetti visited UMD on Saturday and watched the victory against Tech. Sacchetti, a mercurial centerman who led the Golden Bears to the Class A state championship last year, and to the Section 7A No. 1 seed this season, could provide an exciting boost to UMD’s offense…So far, other UMD commitments have come from Jon Francisco, Hermantown’s star center, who will play a year of junior, while Silver Bay defenseman John Conboy and Superior goaltender Rob Anderson were earlier commitments.
Hibbing’s Sandelin learns of life beyond hockey
“Hockey is life.” You can read that on t-shirts, and posters, and in all sorts of flippant, rowdy settings. Scott Sandelin knows better.
Sandelin is an impressive young man who is in his fifth year as assistant coach to Dean Blais at the University of North Dakota. The Fighting Sioux success is more than significantly influenced by Sandelin’s stability, as well as his coaching touch and his recruiting instincts.
He has impressed Up North hockey fans since his days playing defense for his hometown Hibbing Bluejackets. He went off to play at North Dakota, where his defensive abilities and his leadership were so obvious he was voted captain both his junior and senior years. He was team most valuable player and first-team all-WCHA his senior year.
Having been drafted by the Montreal Canadiens in the second round of the 1982 draft, Sandelin set off to play pro hockey. He came back to get his bachelor’s degree in marketing, however, and during a six-year minor league hockey career that also included terms in the Philadelphia and North Star organizations, he came to realize there were other things in his life besides playing hockey.
He came back to the region to coach the Fargo-Moorhead Express in the now-defunct American Hockey Association for the 1992-93 season, and then ran the Fargo-Moorhead Kings junior team for a year, before Blais took the North Dakota job and brought his fellow-Iron Range Conference alum with him.
“I met my wife, Wendy, in Hershey, when I was playing hockey there,” said Sandelin. “She’s a nurse, and anesthetist, and we’d been married seven years in June.”
Sandelin, always a classy, soft-spoken man who is a tireless worker, learned there was more to life than hockey the hard way, when his dad was discovered to have cancer.
“I lost my dad to lung cancer on Veteran’s Day, three years ago,” Sandelin said.
Most everybody has had a loved one or family member afflicted with cancer these days, and there is no way to adequately prepare for or handle the affect. Sandelin got a double dose.
“My mom, who lives in Eagan, found a spot on her lung a year ago that turned out to be cancer. They operated and took out the upper lobe and part of the middle lobe of one lung, and she’d doing fine now.”
Scott and Wendy learned last summer that they were going to become parents. They were so excited about Wendy’s first pregnancy that when Wendy found a small lump in her breast in August, they assumed it was just some bodily change accompanying the pregnancy.
The first week in November, however, a thorough examination detected that the lump was malignant. “I remember, because we learned about it on the Friday we played Clarkson,” Sandelin said. “We had assumed it was just a change.”
With the baby not due until January, Wendy and Scott went through all sorts of mental flip-flops.
“The first thing was that we were concerned that any surgery could induce labor,” Sandelin said. “We thought about a Caesarian, but we had concerns with that, too.”
Wendy underwent a mastectomy in Grand Forks, and both mother and baby got through it in fine shape.
“The lump was small, and there was no effect on the lymph nodes or anything else, so everything looks good,” Sandelin said.
But they held off on chemotherapy.
“She was able to go through natural childbirth,” Sandelin said. “Ryan John Sandelin was born Jan. 3, and she started chemo two weeks later. She’s young, just 30, and everything is positive for the prognosis.”
As for the saying “Hockey is life,” maybe it should be amended to say: “Hockey is a game; people are life.”
Sandelin smiled when asked how he was holding up, after all the traumatic effects.
“For me, Wendy has been great,” he said. “She has a great attitude, and I do fine when she does fine.”
And the baby has changed both of their lives for the better, as babies tend to do.
“He was 7 pounds, 6 ounces,” said Sandelin. “And I think he’s going to be a right-handed shot.”
Thrashing doesn’t always lead to rescue
Remember the old water-safety video of some guy out in water over his head who loses control, screaming in terror and thrashing and flailing his arms in a desperate gesture for help? The point was how careful you have to be if you’re going to save the guy and not be pulled down with him.
It crossed my mind the other day, when I listened to and read a few things about University of Minnesota hockey coach Doug Woog sneaking off to Wisconsin to scout a player. A columnist went on urging “the Wooger” to go farther, away from Minnesota, to find those superstar guys out there in Wisconsin and Canada — especially Canada — where all these superstars are awaiting his call to lead the Gophers back to puck glory.
A couple days later, there was an enormous story attempting to analyze how college hockey has changed in recent years, and how even someone who knew nothing of the history of the game could make the logical jump that Gopher recruiting would have to change too.
So Woog has said he is about to expand the horizons of recruiting. No more all-Minnesota, the Golden Ones are going to condescendingly invite all those superstar Canadians and out-of-staters to pull on the tinsel-colored jerseys and try to lift the Gophers back to a respectful spot in the WCHA and in the nation’s college hockey scope.
First off, it will take more than winning for the program to regain respect. The program has lost the respect of a lot of Minnesota grassroots hockey backers. It’s also lost the backing of some of its most storied alumni, as well as the ones who spend lots of money to back the program.
The word that Woog will go after Canadians and non-Minnesotans was met with universal acclaim by those who have no clue about Minnesota hockey and by those columnists and audio-video guys who, in total, may see five or six hockey games a year out of conscience, and if the Timberwolves or Gopher basketball team is idle.
It also is met with a shrug by those who don’t give a fig about hockey, Minnesota or otherwise. Football and basketball go to the far reaches of the globe to recruit, so why shouldn’t hockey? So what if the football team fights to avoid last place, and the basketball team can’t win a Big Ten game on the road.
The one group most excited about Woog going outside the state to recruit players could undoubtedly be organized to form a chorus line to dance and chant “go-go-go” to Woog. Those are the other WCHA coaches, and the coaches at places like Minnesota State-Mankato, and Bemidji State. They know that every less Minnesotan going to Minnesota means another top Minnesotan available to their school.
Bring in a couple of Canadians. In fact, bring in a half dozen, and a couple guys from Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Boston. And guess what? The mystique of going to Minnesota because it’s all-Minnesota would come crashing down. Suddenly top Minnesota kids would choose schools that better suit them, where they might develop their skills and have fun, because no longer would they feel compelled to go to Gopherville because of a perceived tradition that the best Minnesotans go to Minnesota.
Let’s get one thing straight: Minnesota produces the most quality players for college of anyplace that produces hockey players. Round off the numbers: There are over 150 American players in the WCHA this season, and 100 of them are from Minnesota. Wisconsin is second, with a dozen. Canada is responsible for 75 WCHA players. Think about it. Eight WCHA coaches who traditionally have recruited in Canada have brought back only 75 Canadians and 100 Minnesotans.
There are some very good Canadians out there, but the vast majority of the best ones who used to play college-eligible Tier II hockey are now playing Tier I because major junior teams are offering them scholarships in case they don’t get drafted by the NHL. More players are now being developed in the USHL.
Privately, every WCHA coach except one might tell you that the Gophers have the BEST personnel in the league. The BEST! Line up Wyatt Smith, Reggie Berg, Dave Spehar and Aaron Miskovich, and compare the top four forwards of any other WCHA team. The rest of the WCHA coaches, and those elsewhere in the nation, have coveted almost every Gopher recruit for 25 years.
The current players have not developed. Or is it that they’ve not BEEN developed? They aren’t playing the exciting, innovative style, that Woog’s Gophers used to play. Some of them look like they have forgotten how they played in high school. They are playing without guidance, without direction, without any cohesiveness except what they can summon on their own.
The only coach in the league certain to disagree that Minnesota has the best talent is…Minnesota’s. Like sheep, the Twin Cities media have bought Woog’s alibis that the Gophers are too young, too inexperienced, haven’t panned out, haven’t fit in, and they are only poor little Minnesotans. The coach has succeeded in pointing the finger in every direction except where it should be pointed.
Nobody has figured out that when great player after great player comes to the program and doesn’t improve, but leaves disheartened, complaining that the game is no longer any fun, maybe — just maybe — there is a problem.
As that finger-pointing becomes more and more frantic, think about that video. The one about the guy who chose to go out in water over his head, then lost control, and is displaying the final, desperate thrashing of a drowning man.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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