With two gritty games, the women’s hockey team improved to 9-0-1. Saturday’s 4-1 win over the Elmira Soaring Eagles and Sunday’s 3-0 win over Utica were similar in many regards. Both were big-time undefeated Division III teams that came with their “A” game hoping to upset the newly elevated Engineers, who were able to draw penalties with their superior speed and technique.
Against Elmira, Rosina Schiff made her first appearance since injuring her MCL against Colgate nearly a month ago. She was awarded Defensive Player of the Week for Women’s Division I Hockey that week. The senior netminder finished with 10 saves but did let in a goal. Making sure the goal wouldn’t decide the game was Mel Guillemette with a key goal and 3 assists over the weekend. Also standing out this weekend was Nicole McDonald, who had three goals and an assist.
“I just think that when you’re a little bit quicker than the other team they do a lot of clutching and grabbing,” Coach Burke said of the penalties against the two opponents. “That’s something that officials are really coming down on.”
“A lot of these teams come in and they might be D-III teams or they’re new teams just brought together,” said freshman Nicole McDonald. “A lot of teams we’ve played so far have been a little gritty, so we just have to keep our head up, work through it, and not get thrown off by it.”
As for RPI’s slow starts in both games, Burke acknowledges, “We were in the same situation a couple years ago when we played a Division I team; when you’re a Division III team, you raise your level of play. They did some things that just took us a while to get going.”
“I think we just underestimated what we had to do out there, but by the third period we had finally gotten back into the game,” said McDonald. “I think we woke up and realized that they weren’t going to just hand it on a silver plate to us. We had to actually step up to the plate to win the game.”
In Friday’s game, a two period scoring drought was broken by senior Julie Welte hot out of the box when she received a pass from freshman Jamie Lynn Stewart. On the significance of the first goal of the game Stewart said, “I think we would’ve won either way, but we just needed that spark to get us going. We have a saying, ‘Get the first one and open the floodgates’ and that’s what happened.” Just two minutes later, Elmira would tie it up at one when an Eagle forward attacked the net and was able to score on Schiff.
Barely a minute later, Stewart got the game-winning goal off a faceoff to head the Engineers on to victory. “We go with the ideal that the shift right after a goal is always huge,” said Welte. “After any goal, whether it be our goal or theirs, we have to come out flying and that’s what we did. All the bounces won’t go your way, but that’s the thing about this team, we seem to bounce back from anything. That’s just the mentality of everybody. That’s the thing about the team too, we don’t have to rely on one line or team member; everyone’s contributing.”
As the third period progressed, Elmira’s play became more and more desperate—and thus rough—drawing yells from the fans at missed calls by the referees. Some on the team concluded that the officials should referee the game, not the score.
McDonald had the last two goals of the game. Her first score came at 8:17, when Elmira goalie Allison Cubberley gave up a rebound and McDonald tossed it into the net.
She then brought the score to its final 4-1 when she blew a shot through the pads of the goalie. McDonald’s eighth goal of the season came off passes by both freshman Melissa Boik and senior Kari Rabatin.
The next day against Utica, McDonald would score within the first minute of play to help the Engineers to a quicker start than against Elmira. She was in high spirits over her goal as she said, “I was happy about the first one today where I just picked off the puck, because it just gave our team the momentum to start it off. It let us see that we we’re going to work hard and take the game.”
Though the goal would say otherwise, the team again struggled at the beginning of this game. As in the Elmira game, Rensselaer had five power plays in the first two periods and failed to capitalize on any of them.
The next goal came at 7:36 in the second period by senior Sarah Daniel when she put the puck into an open net after Stephanie Yates, Utica’s goalie, went down trying to make a save. A triangle consisting of Mel Guillemette, who passed it to Daniel, and Welte surrounded the net and the goal was inevitable.
The final goal came on a power play in the third period by Brooke Thompson to put the game out of reach of the scrambling Pioneers. Brooke was assisted by freshmen Jamie Jacquard-Sowa and Guillemette. From then until the end of the game, it was shot after shot for the Engineers. The game play was dominated by RPI, who took 23 shots, but they did not manage another score. Freshman goalie Ashley Mayr made 14 saves for the win.
In the end, the Engineers pulled off two explosive third periods to continue without a loss as a solid D-I contender. The team travels to Orono, Maine, for a pair of afternoon games against the Black Bears this weekend. The Black Bears tied and lost games to defending Hockey East champion Providence College this past weekend. The Engineers will not return to the Field House until December 4, when they play Brock University.
