Women's Hockey Log: Schelling's Grand Theft Won't Faze Friars

PC women’s hockey coach Bob Deraney opted, about midday yesterday, to scrub out the originally slated practice session in favor of a half-hour team meeting, yet one more blunt indication that the superficial consequences of Saturday’s 3-2 falter at Northeastern aren’t poisoning his outlook so easily.

 

Throwing everything –kitchen sink included- at a Swiss phenom in the opposing cage is simply not the same as loosening the lever on your game brain against a mediocre band of Norwegian pucksters a la the eventual Miracle on Ice team.

 

By weekend’s end, the Friars had split their home-and-home card with the Huskies by a cumulative 5-5 score. But elsewhere on the two-night stats sheet, they had dictated the shooting gallery, 100-39. They had won a percentage of face-offs (85-45) that, under Senatorial regulations, would fall just short of immunity to a Presidential veto.

 

And perhaps most admirably, they out-disciplined Northeastern, taking three Friday penalties to the Huskies’ four and only one versus seven on Saturday.

 

“Don’t let the score fool you as to how well we played on Saturday. That was Florence Schelling’s night,” Deraney assessed frankly. “We had an awesome attack, developed so many different concepts to almost perfection.”

 

He spoke those words shortly after the team meeting had adjourned and spoke them with a fairly proud, paternal tone laced in his voice.

 

“I’d have to say that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” he added. “And I never thought that (Schelling) would be able to duplicate the performance she had here on Friday.

 

“What can I say? We had a few pucks hit the crossbar, or some shots that looked like they were going in, but she got a body on or it hit the knob of her stick. I’m not disappointed that we scored only two goals on 44 shots. Sometimes they bounce for you, sometimes they bounce against you.”

 

PC’s feverish, unbreakable resolve –flexed as late as a last-ditch power play on Saturday- was too little to salvage a pair of precious points in the Hockey East standings. With Boston College having finished a sweep of lowly Maine on Sunday, the Friars are forlorn in fourth place when they may otherwise have been knotted for second.

 

And, because the USCHO pollsters are about as superficially stimulated as Glenn Quagmire, the Friars lost their visibility in Monday’s refreshed poll. The same slighting gesture will likely be in store today when USA Today revises its chosen leaderboard.

 

But Deraney has a fast-churning, fast-gelling gang of grinders at his disposal. They verified that over the weekend against a program with even more to prove than they have.

 

“It is very close in the standings, so it’s really tough this year” conceded senior Erin Normore, who nailed two of her team’s five goals against Schelling. “But we had our chances this weekend. We just didn’t capitalize and their goalie obviously played really well.

 

“But I think we make our own luck, so if we just keep pushing it and pushing it, pucks are going to start going in at some point.”

 

Nobody is making that push quite like Normore and her ring-starved classmates. The two-way connoisseur amassed five shots on net over the weekend, followed by fellow A-captain Katy Beach’s 10 (including seven in Friday’s win), 10 by Brittany Simpson, and 17 by Mari Pehkonen.

 

“We’ve been around here for four years, we know what it takes to get to the playoffs and come out on top,” said Normore, not inclined to say much beyond the simplest. “We’ve fallen short each time since I’ve been here, and we don’t want to let that happen again. So we’re pushing it now, and hopefully we’ll make it to back to the finals and come out on top this time.”

 

“It’s really important to keep everything in perspective,” summed up Deraney. “We played extremely well. We were fast, we were diligent. I think, in the whole game, we made five mistakes.

 

“Two, early on, that our goalie made great saves on, two that ended up in our net, and one on a great backcheck that negated the situation. And a couple of the goals they scored weren’t even on mistakes.

They were just weird plays. So if we keep playing like that, we’re going to win a lot of games here down the stretch.”

 

What’s left in that stretch? A home-and-home set with New Hampshire this weekend followed by a two-gamer with BC, the exact same layout the Friars had before them at this time last year, at which point they were 15-12-3 overall, 10-5-2 in Hockey East, and still only within tasting distance of a playoff berth.

 

They would dramatize the drive to near-catastrophic breakage, going 0-3-1 in that span and not stamping that playoff passport until the final buzzer of a tie with BC.

 

That said, most anything they can scrape out this time around will signify something of a refreshing upturn.

 

Or, from the Friars’ own poised perspective, it can reiterate their uniquely exhibited improvement.

 

“I like our team, and I think we match up well against them,” said Deraney in reference to both forthcoming adversaries. “Right now, in Hockey East, there’s no one playing at the pace we’re playing at. And if we continue to play at that pace, it’ll be a very tough thing for UNH to overcome.”

 

Al Daniel can be reached at hockeyscribe@hotmail.com

 

This article originally appeared in the Friartown Free Press

Northeastern 3, Women's Hockey 2: Friars Shell-acked On PP, Lose To NU

Report based on Live Stats

 

BOSTON- The Friars grudgingly assumed a puck-based parallel of Wile E. Coyote last night, hogging the screen time and the active dramatic upsurge in every capacity imaginable –only to plunge into vexing defeat.

 

They facilely outclassed the host Northeastern Huskies everywhere from shots on net (44-15), to face-offs (40-22), to opposing penalties (7-1).

 

But NU’s Roadrunner, principally held on standby with the celestial goaltending of Florence Schelling, made just one fleeting, productive cameo too many for Providence to handle, amounting to a 3-2 decision before 110 viewers at Matthews Arena.

 

Less than two minutes after she had restored her team’s lead with 3:41 to spare in the third, Northeastern senior Ali Bielawski harrowingly invited the Friars to redraw things on the board, taking a hooking penalty at 18:00. The remainder of regulation –barring a conversion- would be spent on the power play, on which PC had been wholly empty in its first six tries despite a cumulative 10 shots in that setup.

 

With goaltender Genevieve Lacasse (12 saves) perched on the bench in favor of a no-duh six-pack attack, the rabid likes of Jennifer Friedman, Erin Normore, Mari Pehkonen, Alyse Ruff, and Laura Veharanta all discharged at least one attempt or other in a two-minute, whistle-free swarm.

 

Nothing doing. Schelling (42 saves) and her indebted praetorian guards held out to serve spot-on eye-for-eye justice in the wake of the Friars’ come-from-behind overtime triumph on Friday.

 

Not unlike the latter two periods of the preceding get-together at Schneider Arena, Providence indulged in the utmost imbalance of ice shavings between zones, running up a 9-0 edge in the shooting gallery, fanning on eight additional attempts, whittling the icebreaker on the scoreboard, and garnering two power plays before Lacasse was summoned to any genuine action.

 

Normore planted the early lead at the 3:39 mark upon drilling home Jean O’Neill’s shipment on the team’s four shot of the game. The Friars proceeded to compress Northeastern’s initiation with a pair of power plays granted at 5:29 (Lindsey Berman, interference) and 9:31 (bench minor, too many players).

 

The Huskies would ultimately thaw out enough to land four pelts on Lacasse within the final eight minutes till intermission. And they drew an interference minor against Katy Beach at 19:11, thereby granting them a carry-over, 71-second power play segment on the new sheet.

 

But the Friars kept the command consistent, admitting nada to the NU brigade and charging up three shorthanded stabs. From there, they enhanced their shooting edge from 12-4 at the first buzzer to an eventual 25-5 at exactly 14:00 (27-8 at period’s end), sprinkling six of those over another three successive player-up advantages.

 

The stanch Schelling, though, pushed everything away and was finally rewarded four seconds after she had finished bolstering the fifth PK. Her Swiss countrywoman, Julia Marty, reeled home NU’s sixth test of Lacasse at 14:04, drawing a 1-1 knot that stuck through the conclusion of the period.

 

The muddling cycle fundamentally reran itself for the third, although Northeastern negligibly stepped up its shooting frequency and concocted a few entertaining, end-to-end, air hockey rushes.

 

But 18 seconds after top gun Kristi Kehoe nudged them ahead, the Huskies broke out the juggling torches once more with defender Ginny Berg whistled for hooking at 10:08.

 

Another double-dose for Schelling to handle on the PK, plus a stab by Veharanta that wiped off the post, and another spilled opportunity for the Friars, though they elongated their livid gush to the cage well beyond Berg’s release and formed a 2-2 knot at 14:25.

 

Pehkonen, Friday’s hero back home, was at it again, solving Schelling after she had whiffed on six other registered stabs.

 

But Northeastern would need one more stealthy swing at Lacasse to finalize their triumph. And they hastily utilized it through Bielawski, whose strike –assisted by Berman and Marty- zapped the deadlock at the green age of 1:54.

 

Al Daniel can be reached at hockeyscribe@hotmail.com

 

This article originally appeared in the Friartown Free Press

Women's Hockey Log: Productive Weekend For Pehkonen

BOSTON- As a team, the Friars recycled the same embittering, fall-from-ahead fashion to spill a would-be sweep of a home-and-home series last night. But senior forward Mari Pehkonen could hardly be held culpable in any fatal twists over this weekend.

 

Whether she acknowledged it at all or not, Pehkonen commenced the latest four-day practice week under the burdensome fact that she had taken a two-minute citation for tripping in the dusk of regulation at Connecticut last Sunday, and hopped back into the action only a heartbeat before UConn’s Nicole Tritter turned PC to stone.

 

On Friday, the Finnish Flare garnered the most tuneful brand of redemption, tipping the scale on a 3-2 overtime triumph after she had honed her twig all night with seven SOG in regulation. And toss in the fact that she had drawn the first penalty (Alyssa Wohlfeiler, holding) in the 13th minute of the opening frame as she routinely churned the puck along the wall in the far corner of the attacking zone.

 

In the rematch, for the second consecutive night, Pehkonen led all PC puckslingers under the SOG heading, adding nine to the salvo of eight she had thrust out on Friday while her linemate Kate Bacon fed off of her fastidious appetite with six bids of her own.

 

She took care of four of PC’s 12 first period shots, rounding out that sequence with a fleeting shorthanded break in the final minute. The Huskies would carry their lone power play over to the second, only to accept more of the same from Alyse Ruff and Brittany Simpson, who leveled four and five respective shots of their own on the night.

 

And if only for a few blinks, Pehkonen appeared entitled to the laudable label of clutch queen once more, tying things at 2-2 when only 5:35 remained in an altogether irksome third period. Even after

Ali Bielawski swiftly renewed the upper hand for Northeastern, and ultimately cemented the decision, Pehkonen had two more tests up her twig for Schelling plus a wide-bound attempt within the remaining two minutes.

 

Calm after the storm
After forty minutes of unmistakable, equal-opportunity turbulence defined the initial phases of Friday’s 3-2 Friar overtime triumph, the scoresheet scribe was utterly idled throughout a third period wherein there was no scoring and no penalty calls. Leading up to that point, though, there were hints of mutual animosity beneath some of the three minor penalties attained by the Friars and four by the Huskies.

 

The last citation handed out on Friday was to PC’s Laura Veharanta (contact to the head), who traded a few post-whistle biffs with NU goaltender Florence Schelling after a power play net crash. Veharanta’s debatable solitary stride to the box effectively spelled 41 seconds of 4-on-4 play.

 

Try and see it my way
Contesting freshmen goaltenders Schelling and Genevieve Lacasse conducted a bit of a role reversal in this series. Lacasse, a tad more accustomed to limitless labor with 11 30-plus save counts and three bushels of 40-plus shots to her credit, dealt with an aggregate 39 NU stabs on the weekend (24 Friday, 15 last night).

 

Schelling, conversely, entered the weekend confronted less than 40 shots in each of her last 11 twirls. She would ultimately work up her two biggest collegiate sweats with 53 saves Friday and 42 last night, snapping a personal eight-game losing streak along the way.

 

Quick Feeds: Friday marked the third occasion this season where the Friars abolished a multi-goal deficit in enough time to avert defeat, if not scrape out a win. They had previously drawn an eleventh hour, 2-2 knot with Niagara prior Thanksgiving and morphed a 3-0 hole into a 4-3 triumph at Cornell to commence this calendar year. Additionally, Abby Gauthier’s two assists Friday matched a personal season-best set in that Cornell thriller…A human interest story on Schelling –composed by ex-Boston Globe writer Peter May- appeared in yesterday’s New York Times –updated online at the last minute to factor in a brief, fundamental mention of Friday’s upshot…Shortly after Deraney’s postgame lecture Friday, the six seniors returned to the ice for a full-gear class photo op along the home blue line…First line center Ashley Cottrell was retroactively credited with the second assist on Pehkonen’s OT clincher for a team-best 15 total helpers. Cottrell also thus joined Veharanta and Erin Normore in this year’s PC 20-point club.

 

Al Daniel can be reached at hockeyscribe@hotmail.com

 

This article originally appeared in the Friartown Free Press