Mavericks start fast, coast to 7-4 sweeper over sputtering Bulldogs
MANKATO, MINN.—One of the classic Yogi Berra lines is, “It’s never over till it’s over.” Ol’ Yogi wasn’t a hockey fan, presumably, because Friday night’s UMD men’s hockey game against Minnesota State-Mankato was over almost as soon as it started.
By the 8:09 mark of the first period, Mankato had fired three goals past freshman goaltender Adam Coole, and UMD had not yet taken a single shot on goal. Things didn’t get much better thereafter, and the Mavericks breezed to a 7-4 victory before 4,042 fans at the Midwest Wireless Civic Center.
The Bulldogs needed to put together three periods of intensity to erase the sour taste from Thursday’s 5-2 loss, and goaltender Coole needed a solid game to get himself back in top form. Instead, Josh Kern, Dana Sorenson and B.J. Abel scored goals for Mankato in a five-minute span.
Kern, Sorenson and Abel each wound up with two goals and the Mavericks climbed above .500 in the WCHA, to 9-8-1, at the expense of UMD, which slipped back to 2-15-1 in the WCHA cellar. The game actually was not as close as the score indicated, because UMD trailed 7-2 until Matt Paluczak was penalized with a 5-minute game-disqualification for checking from behind with 4:31 remaining, and Junior Lessard and Nate Anderson scored on the extended power play.
Mankato coach Troy Jutting said: “I told our kids I wasn’t happy with our performance last night, and tonight we played the way we’re capable at the start — moving, and moving the puck. We had some hop in our step, and we took advantage of the chances we got. I think we’ve done a good job of winning — of knowing when to go, and how to play in certain situations. If you’re ahead 3-1, you play a certain way, as opposed to being behind 3-1, when you might have to take more chances.”
The Bulldogs, meanwhile, haven’t had much experience in learning how to play with a lead, or how to win very often, either.
“We’re tied with Wisconsin now, and we’re one point behind Denver, with a game in hand on Denver, and we’re going to Denver,” Jutting added. “I had heard how well Duluth had been playing the last few weeks, and I was scared of what might happen. Now, next weekend turns out to be more important than this one.”
UMD coach Scott Sandelin, whose Bulldogs return to the DECC to face North Dakota next weekend, vented a little frustration. “We had a lot of spectators this weekend,” he said. “It’s disappointing to me, but one thing — I will not allow this team to go belly-up, like they did last year. Matt Mathias, Jerrid Reinholz and Junior Lessard turned out to be our best line, because they worked.”
Lessard’s work-ethic showed up in the fact that he scored two goals, and both of them came while he was on his knees in front of goaltender Eric Pateman, but still kept battling and swept the puck in. The redheaded freshman from St. Joseph deBeauce, Quebec, was one of the bright spots.
“It was tough, because we played so well against Colorado College, and then we had a week off, and this weekend, we didn’t play very well,” said Lessard. “Mankato had a pretty strong start, and they put the puck in the net when they had their chances.”
Their chances were frequent. Kern was in the clear for Peter Holoien’s pass across the slot, and he one-timed it past Coole at 3:02. Mankato killed a penalty, then, at 7:39, Sorenson scored with a quick shot from the slot. Abel’s first goal came on a breakaway, when Coole partially blocked the shot, but had the puck trickle slowly behind him. Three goals in a 5:07 span.
UMD’s first shot came near the 10-minute mark, and the ‘Dogs were outshot 12-2 for the first period. Coole’s luck didn’t improve in the second period. Ben Christopherson shot from center-point at 4:15, and Justin Martin deflected the puck from being on goal to heading wide to the right of the net, but Sorenson — a fourth-line freshman from Beaumont, Alberta, was right beside the crease and redirected it into the net.
That put the ‘Dogs down 4-0, but they at least were getting some shots by then, and a rebound came loose in front of the Mankato net. Lessard dropped to his knees but kept his focus, and flicked his shot past Pateman. Tommy Nelson then came up with a big play, upending D.J. Guidarelli to steal the puck at center ice, then breaking to the slot, where he scored at 17:07. Suddenly it was 4-2, and didn’t look so hopeless.
But the Mavericks pressed for another in the final minute of the middle period on a power play, and Ryan Severson knocked the puck in from a flurry at the crease with one second left to intermission to make it 5-1.
The Bulldogs needed something good to happen to open the third period. Instead, Abel, a sophomore from Rochester, followed up a rush and scored with a rebound in the slot at 0:19. Kern’s second goal came on a hard, but long, blast at 12:04.
The rest of the game was devoted mainly to penalties and chippiness, but the closing major penalty gave the Dogs a chance to close the gap and wind up outshooting the Mavericks 29-24. Pateman, however, made 25 saves to only 17 for Coole.
Schmidgall announces delayed return to UMD lineup
Jenny Schmidgall has confirmed with UMD women’s hockey coach Shannon Miller that she will not rejoin the Bulldogs for the current semester in order to focus on taking care of her new baby, Madison.
Schmidgall, who led the nation in scoring with 41 goals and 52 assists for 93 points last season, took fall semester off after becoming pregnant. She has moved into an Eagan apartment with her fiance, Rob Potter, and said that while she has enjoyed tending her 3-week-old baby, the involvement wouldn’t leave her time to go to school and play hockey right now.
“I plan on finishing school, it’s just a matter of when,” Schmidgall said.
Miller was not surprised by the decision, and, in fact, wasn’t sure if it would be worth spending one of Schmidgall’s two remaining years of elibility in one semester. The next decision Schmidgall faces is whether to play at UMD next fall or join the U.S. National program for the season and prepare to play in the 2002 Winter Olympics.
UMD blitzes Mankato 7-0 for 8th straight women’s hockey victory
MANKATO, MINN.—The UMD women’s hockey team needed a revised cast of prominent scorers Saturday night, but steamrolled to its eighth straight victory by overrunning Minnesota State-Mankato 7-0 at All-Seasons Arena.
When the Bulldogs whipped the Mavericks 8-0 on Friday, Maria Rooth scored three goals and Erika Holst two, but those two departed Saturday morning to join the Swedish National team for an international exhibition series against Canada. Shannon Miller simply revised her lines, altered her defensive sets, and asked some players to step up to more prominent roles in the rematch.
Laurie Alexander scored two goals, and Hanne Sikio, Sanna Peura, Tricia Guest, Shannon Mikel and Satu Kiipeli scored one apiece for the Bulldogs, who outshot Mankato 45-18. Tuula Puputti made only five saves through the first two periods, and Riana Burke relieved and wound up facing a lot more action, needing 10 saves in the final period to hold the shutout.
“I asked Laurie to step up and be a goal-scorer on that line,” said UMD coach Shannon Miller, whose team is now 9-4-1 in the WCHA and 17-4-1 overall. “I thought we got a good effort from everybody.”
The Mavericks (0-15-1, 1-20-1) were trailing 5-0 at the second intermission, but played with much more intensity in the third session, and stretched the boundaries of no-bodychecking rules several times.
“I told the players after two periods that we were going down to two lines, and the players who play better play hard, or they won’t play after that,” said Mankato coach Todd Carroll.
The physical play ended up in a brief scuffle near the Mankato bench, with Ashleigh Miller taking on UMD’s Pamela Pachal in a lively scrap. Miller threw a punch, and was punched twice before she realized she had challenged the wrong Bulldog.
However, referee Jay Mendel apparently awarded penalties based on the “5-minute-must” standard. He gave Pachal a 5-minute major for fighting, and a game disqualification that means she can’t play Friday against Bemidji State, while issuing only a double minor to Miller for roughing, apparently because she didn’t punch as effectively.
“Mankato threw a lot of bodychecks in the third period,” said UMD coach Shannon Miller. “And the officials obviously had no intention of calling checking. We had several players who got checked and thrown down, and all of them pretty well held their tempers, except for No. 81 [Pachal].
“The Mankato player instigated the fight by throwing the first punch, and our player retaliated.”
Maybe that’s another difference in men’s and women’s hockey; it’s incomprehensible that two men could fight, both throw punches, and the one who wins the fight gets a major and DQ while the other gets a double minor.
The Bulldogs had a different goaltender to confront with, as sophomore Katie Beauduy of Blaine replaced Shari Vogt, who made 42 saves in the first game. Beauduy was no stranger to the UMD sharpshooters, having set a school record with 51 saves in a game against the ‘Dogs last year.
Beauduy gave it a heroic try, too, with 16 saves in the first period when UMD outshot the punchless Mavericks 18-5, but managed only a 2-0 lead.
Laurie Alexander scored the first goal, directing the puck in from a scramble on a power play at 6:12. Hanne Sikio scored her 19th to make it 2-0 at 12:31, stickhandling through two defenders, cutting left, and shooting back to the right.
Peura’s power-play goal made it 3-0 early in the second period, then Guest, a freshman defenseman, fired one from the right point that caught the upper left corner of the net at 17:24, for her first collegiate goal. The Mikel, who sat out Friday’s game but was a bundle of energy in the rematch, followed Jenny Hempel to the net, and when Beauduy stopped Hempel, Mikel converted the rebound for her second goal.
Alexander scored with Sheena Podovinnikoff’s behind-the-back pass in the third period, and Kiipeli scored another power-play goal to close out the scoring at 15:53. UMD was 3-for-5 on the power play, while blanking Mankato on five power-play attempts.
Rooth, Holst lead Bulldogs to 8-0 romp over winless Mavericks
MANKATO, MINN.—Maria Rooth and Erika Holst had only Friday’s game to play for UMD’s women’s hockey team before departing for two weeks with the Swedish National team.
They chose to give their teammates something to remember them by while they face Canada in a series of exhibition games that will lead up to selection of next year’s Olympic team, as Rooth scored three goals and Holst two in an 8-0 romp past outgunned Minnesota State-Mankato at All-Seasons Arena.
The game was a part of an unusual weekend, with the Friday game at the weird starting time of 2:35 p.m., and at All-Seasons Arena, the “old” arena in town. The women usually play downtown, same as the men, in the posh new Midwest Wireless Civic Center. But MSU-Mankato had a women’s and men’s basketball doubleheader in the Civic Center, so the women were pushed to the All-Seasons rink, which is much closer to campus.
Today’s rematch is at 8:05 tonight, also at All-Seasons, although nobody is playing in the Civic Center, after which the Bulldogs face the long busride home. Logic might say Friday’s game should have been at night and today’s in the afternoon, to give the Bulldogs a better travel day. But logic apparently didn’t enter the equation.
The Mavericks barely entered the equation themselves, being outshot 50-20 by the free-wheeling Bulldogs, who now are 8-4-1 in the Women’s-WCHA and 16-4-1 overall. They are one point behind second-place Wisconsin (8-4-2), which faces a tough series against Ohio State today and Sunday.
Mankato is 0-14-1 in the league and 1-19-1 overall. Worse than that record — impossible as that sounds — Mankato has scored only seven goals in 15 league games, meaning Tuula Puputti’s mere presence in the UMD nets represented a mismatch.
“We had five breakaways today, but we’ve been lacking the ability to score all season,” said Mankato coach Todd Carroll. “The kids worked hard, but we’ve had to rely on our goaltender. But UMD has size and big-time firepower, and a lot of those goals were good goals.”
Correct, on all counts. The Mavericks got loose for a few breakaways, which kept Puputti from dozing off, and she made some good stops, but the Mavericks also missed the net on several good opportunities, and appeared unaware of how to get open for a pass once inside the UMD zone. But Shari Vogt did a great job in goal for the Mavericks, and UMD scored some colorful goals.
Vogt, a freshman from Richmond, Minn., played at Rocori, where she got good training for what she’s faced this season. She once made 86 saves in a high school game, which was not too different from last weekend at Minnesota, when she made 97 saves — 38 saves in the first game and a school record 59 saves in the second. Mankato lost 3-0 and 4-0. So Friday, when she made 42 more saves, her team failed to manage a goal for the fourth straight game.
UMD coach Shannon Miller was perturbed in the second period, when Holst and Joanne Eustace both were knocked down and injured by being butt-ended on the side of the head after faceoffs, and moments later Navada Russell also went down, when a careless butt-end of a stick caught her in the throat. All of them came back, and Miller, who said Mankato’s Tina Serafin had been the villain in both the Holst and Eustace incidents, fought off the urge to send someone out to settle the score.
“The game was so scrappy, but when we scored, we scored with some nice puck movement, and some classy goals,” said Miller. “We just tried to have fun in the third period. We tried to get a goal for Kellie Frick, Leah Wrazidlo and Jenni Venho.”
The Bulldogs failed at that mission, but that was about all that failed, as they won their seventh straight game in their first league contest since losting 2-0 at Ohio State on Dec. 2.
Vogt’s goaltending kept the game scoreless for the first 12:37, and the longer it stayed that way, there was a chance the Bulldogs might get frustrated. But Holst moved into the slot, and ripped a wrist shot high into the left corner of the net at that point.
At 15:12, Rooth blocked a Mankato outlet attempt, broke in and passed to Joanne Eustace on the left side, then broke to the net for a perfect return feed, which Rooth one-timed past Vogt.
The Bulldogs outshot Mankato 17-7 in the first period, but tightened the screws down in the second, outshooting the Mavs 18-4, although they again failed to score for the first 10 minutes of the period. Then Rooth scored twice more, with Michelle McAteer getting one in between them.
Rooth scored from the right circle on a power play at 10:18, McAteer scored a nicely arranged goal when Brittny Ralph broke up the right boards, stickhandled in behind the net and fed out front for McAteer quick shot at 13:02. Rooth scored from the left side at 15:50 and it was 5-0.
Hanne Sikio’s shot opening the third period was partially blocked and slid toward the goal when Holst came by to make sure it got in at 3:38. Sikio then jammed in her 18th goal of the season 49 seconds later and it was 7-0. The final goal came at 14:43, when defenseman Pamela Pachal, stopped moments earlier on her hard blast from the point, skated in front to deftly tip Satu Kiipeli’s shot past Vogt.
CC’s last-minute reversal overcomes UMD’s spirited, 3-goal rally
Tom Preissing scored a power-play goal from the left point with 28 seconds to go Saturday night, breaking a 4-4 tie and — with Justin Morrison’s empty-net goal added in — giving Colorado College a 6-4 victory over UMD before 3,847 fans at the DECC.
“If this is the last-place team in the leagueÂ…give me a break, what kind of league is this?” said CC coach Scott Owens. “That was as good a team as we’ve played this year.
“After the way we lost the first game, I honestly didn’t think Duluth could play that well tonight. Because even though we outshot ’em 41-19 in the first game, and the shots were 30-27 tonight, we played better tonight. But they did too. We came into this series hoping for four points, expecting three, and happy to settle for two.”
UMD had established a new standard for itself by surprising Colorado College 3-2 in Friday night’s WCHA series opener — which made Saturday night’s reversal all the more painful for the Bulldogs. The Bulldogs (2-13-2 WCHA, and 5-17-2 overall) battled from 2-0 and 3-1 deficits with a goal late in the second period by Nate Anderson and two in the third, by Jon Francisco and Drew Otten, to take a stunning 4-3 lead.
But Jesse Heerema came up with an outstanding individual effort to tie the game for CC, and Preissing’s last-minute power-play goal was the game-winner, although coach Scott Owens couldn’t breathe easily until Morrison took a pass from Mark Cullen and threw a 55-footer into the empty net with five seconds to go. The victory pushed CC back to within two points of new WCHA leader St. Cloud State with a 10-5 record, 11-5-1 overall.
Owens noted after Friday’s game that the Tigers had created a problem for themselves: “We gave a team lacking in confidence a lot of confidence.” It carried over, as the Bulldogs were outshot 5-0 over the first 8 minutes, during which CC took a 1-0 lead on Alex Kim’s power-play goal at 4:21, but then the Bulldogs came back, battling the Tigers evenly the rest of the way and equaling the shots at 7-apiece by the intermission. The teams only managed two shots apiece through the first 8 minutes of the second period, before the Tigers scored again.
Justin Morrison made it 2-0, on a well-executed pass exchange with Mike Colgan passing ahead from right point to Mark Cullen at the faceoff circle, and Cullen passed crisply across the slot, where Morrison one-timed his shot past Rob Anderson at 8:49.
But the indication that the Bulldogs were not going to fade came just 29 seconds later, when one of coach Scott Sandelin’s new line combinations clicked. Jon Francisco fed freshman Junior Lessard on the right side, and Lessard feathered a perfect pass across the slot to Tommy Nelson, who gathered it in at full speed, deked goaltender Jeff Sanger, and lifted his shot into the left side of the net.
An interference penalty to Ryan Homstol gave CC the chance for its second power-play goal of the game, when Kim got free coming in on the left and broke in to beat Anderson at 14:49 to make it 3-1. Again, though, UMD came right back, this time with the other new Bulldog line connecting. Mark Carlson passed to Judd Medak, who relayed the puck to Nate Anderson, busting up the slot. Anderson shot through Sanger’s pads at 16:36, lifting the ‘Dogs to a 3-2 deficit.
The crowd was genuinely turned on when Francisco opened the third period on a carryover power play by scoring with a deflected shot from center point at 0:27 to tie it 3-3. “Judd got the draw back to Andy Reierson, and he slid the puck across to me,” said Francisco. “I saw Nellie [Tom Nelson] going toward the net, so I just tried to put my shot on goal.”
The fans and the Bulldogs went predictably crazy at 12:33, when UMD gained a 4-3 lead. Paul Manning’s penalty for high sticking at 11:05 set the stage, and, after the Bulldogs applied some heavy pressure at the left side of the net, Drew Otten scored to bring UMD a long way back from those 2-0 and 3-1 deficits.
But the celebration was short-lived as the determined Tigers came right back down the ice. Jesse Heerema got the puck from Kim behind the net, stickhandled out front for a great chance, but Anderson stopped him with perhaps his biggest save of the night. But Heerema followed up to score the equalizer from the left side, at 13:42.
“We hadn’t been able to get much done 5-on-5 through the whole game,” said Owens. “Then Heerema and Kim came up with a big play. That was a heck of a shift for out second line.”
Nate Anderson was called for holding with 1:15 to go, giving CC’s potent puck-movers one more chance. Rob Anderson withstood the pressure, and Tom Nelson got the puck. “I thought I could clear it up the middle,” Nelson said.
But his clearing pass was blocked at the blue line by Paul Manning, and two passes later, Preissing moved in to the top of the left circle and whistled a one-timer into the net at 19:32.
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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