This has been a long time coming for
all of us but the season is finally here!!! We finished up our first week
of practice with a good run against Union last night down in Queensbury,
NY. As some of you may know, we've played in a full field bubble
facility down in Queensbury each of the past three years now and it's nice to
be able to get on a full field and not have to worry about the elements
outside!
We ended up playing 5 pretty long
quarters and were able to get all 43 players plenty of playing time. I won't go
into too much detail about the score or too many of our guys but will provide a
few first impressions of the group.
We're fortunate to have 21 juniors
and seniors on this team who have played significant minutes the past few year for us and it's apparent that we're going to be a
pretty formidable offensive group this year. We are going to be
inexperienced on defense but having an excellent goalie and dominant face off
specialist can help us in terms of allowing our young defense to get their feet
wet. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about in terms of
youth on defense, last night we went into the scrimmage with 8 defenseman
because of some injuries and the breakdown by class was 1 Junior (Charlie Schopp), 2 Sophomores (Byron Langford and Tyler Lovas), and then 5 first-years!!! So, out of those 8,
we had one defenseman going into last night's scrimmage with any game
experience for us.
While we were far from perfect
clearing and with understanding the nuances of our defense, the guys
competed and did a very nice job for their first time out there. Even
though we weren't keeping score, I can tell you that we only gave up 3 goals in
4 quarters and two of them were man up. We committed 8 penalties so
that's another area for improvement.
The reason we only give up 3 goals
(in the 1st 4 quarters) is due in large part to the outstanding goaltending of
Pete Britt who has taken his game to another level this year. Charles
Ward in the 3rd quarter and senior Bill Zrike in the
4th also made some big time saves. The 5th was split between Ryan Deane
and Jack Reilly who are also very talented. We are very fortunate to have
5 excellent goalies this year.
The other stand
out performances on defense were turned in by freshman defenseman Matt Rayner (Andover, MA) who played on the football team this
fall and scored a special teams touchdown for Bobby
Ritter. Matt played like a veteran with tremendous poise clearing the
ball and did a nice job of getting the ball off the ground.
Our top two defensive midfielders at
this point are also going to be very good for us this year in juniors Zack
Harwood (Bullis, MD) and Matt Virtue (Brunswick,
CT). Both of them are excellent b/n the lines middies
who can put pressure on a defense in transition.
Tri-captain Dave Campbell
(Holderness, NH) and Zack Harwood won a combined 12 face offs out of 15 they
took during those first 4 qtrs which was great to see.
I have no idea how the Union face off guy is so take those stats with a little
grain of salt!
Finally offensively it's going to be
the same group this year for the most part as last year with the exception of
Jim Cabrera in the midfield. Newcomers worth noting were sophomore
David Hild (Kingswood-Oxford,
CT) who stands at a lean 6-4, 220 and who is playing like a man out
there. Dave will play a lot for us this year and will definitely turn
some heads.
We have a newcomer to the midfield
that I'd like to keep a surprise until the first game, that being senior Skyler Hopkins (McDonogh,
MD). Sky has turned into a real leader on the team this year and
has had a great work ethic. Sky is a 6-2, 205lb, beast of a middie right now and while he isn't going to have the speed
of some of our other midfielders, he sees the field very well and has taken to
midfield better than I expected.
Overall, we've had a very productive
first week of practice. Unfortunately our scrimmage with UVM has been
cancelled for tomorrow but we're hoping to get our scrimmages in next weekend
against St. Lawrence and St. Michael's at home on Saturday.
We're two weeks away from the opener
against Bates on March 7th and hopefully if Youngman can melt by then we'll be
playing in the stadium on our brand new field turf for the first time in a
regular season game.
This team has a terrific group of
leaders and while we have a LONG way to go, I like the make-up of this team and
hope we can make you all proud if you get a chance to see us this year.
Yeah blue...........
Best,
dc