Second-year captain senior Sarah Daniel said, “The first league game at home—especially against Cornell—they’re a pretty established team in the league, they’ve been around for a while so for us to come in our first year and dominate is really exciting for us, it gives us a lot of confidence.” She lead the effort with two goals and two assists.

“We had a lot of contributions from everybody, we competed really well” said Head Coach John Burke. “We supported one another on the ice with our play, making cuts and our puck support. And it showed with the plays we made and the end result ... we capitalized on our chances and Ash made some nice saves early on.”

Although the Big Red scored first, junior Kelly Barbera answered back with a power-play goal just nine seconds later to tie it up 1-1 going into the second period. Daniel scored her first of the day just under 40 seconds into the second period.

After a second goal by Cornell’s Brittany Forgues, the Engineers would take control of the scoreboard and score six unanswered goals—five of them before the second period was finished.

Stewart had the eventual game-winner to start the streak at 5:42.

She then received the assist on classmate Allison Wright’s goal at 10:25.

Freshman Whitney Naslund found the back of the net on a power-play at 13:02, and her classmate Jodi Yaworski scored her second collegiate goal at 16:25. A second power-play goal by Barbera at 17:26 finished off the period and brought the score to 7-2.

The last period was relatively quiet, as Sarah Daniel notched her second of the day just 3:24 in and called it a day.

The 10 penalties assessed to Cornell were too much to overcome with RPI’s control of the game. Sophomore goalie Ashley Mayr was steady in net, and made 20 saves.

The next afternoon, the team came out ready for their next opponent, but was never able to find the back of the net and take the game, and so the Colgate Raiders won 1-0. “We played well today too, but…didn’t have as many opportunities today as yesterday for sure,” Stewart said. “We had shots but just couldn’t finish.”

“It could have gone either way,” summarized Burke.

An early 5-3 power-play goal was all Colgate ended up needing as they improved to 7-3-0 in the league, as RPI fell to 6-11-0 overall. Rensselaer played Colgate closely, nearly scoring on several attempts. The same was true for the Raiders, as they found themselves dangerously close to scoring on breakaways.

Stewart managed to save an open net score when she held up Colgate’s freshman Ali Edell as she went for the shot. “I didn’t see Ashley, the player was blocking me and I was just trying to take her down, and knocked her into the post,” said Stewart of the narrowly avoided goal.

Except for the open net incident, Mayr kept RPI in the game again as she blocked 16 shots.

“I thought it was a great hockey game by both teams,” said Burke. “It was back and forth either way. We had a 5-3 get negated by some penalties and they had a 5-3 and made a real nice play on it and scored. I think we could have been better with our puck support today.”

True to their name, rough play was part of the gameplan for the Raiders and took it upon themselves to put dangerous body checks on players when the referees weren’t near. A five-minute boarding call at the end of the second was all that Colgate received for their efforts.

“I thought we had a real good weekend,” Burke said. “Last night with the end result of a win and tonight we played well enough to win and it just didn’t happen. Nicole made a nice play in the breakaway early on, had two chances at it…just bounced off, the kid made two nice saves and we get that one and you never know.”