What does it take to turn a team around? Evidently a few words of wisdom as evidenced by the UMD hockey team from Friday to Saturday night.
Coach Sandelin reportedly ask his team to do three things better after giving up, and scoring, six goals in the opening game. They were penalty kill, face-offs and coverage in the defensive end. Poof…Saturday brought 58 plus minutes of shutout hockey giving up two goals in a 3-2 win. Those two goals did come in a 108 second span so maybe defensive coverage could be stressed again.
I know, different teams and different nights, but both teams were ripe for the picking. Regardless of the shots on goal differential for the Lakers, they lost to a Canadian college team. UMD has to take that game and complete a “sweep” at Marquette.
The bottom line is that UMD did not lose a game this weekend which would have been disappointing at the very least.
Spread Around the Scoring. Tallying six goals Friday night was impressive. Four of them came from the FCC line with Schmidlt and Seidel rounding out the scoring sheet for UMD. On Saturday, the defense heeded the coach’s words to cover better on defense AND they stepped it up by scoring all three goals in the win. Olsen, Lamb and Faulk had all the offense that was needed by UMD to win. The more players that score, the better, and the more the wins the Bulldogs will win.
Superior Cup Winner. For the first time in the four year history, UMD does not have at least a share of the cup. This year’s winner is clear cut and is the Huskies of Michigan Technological University. MTU went 2-0 on the weekend putting an exclamation point on the deal with a convincing 6-2 win over Lake State.
Michigan Tech is admittedly my second favorite team, so this is a good sign for them, a team that has not had good fortune for a while. I wish it didn’t have to come at the slight expense of the Bulldogs.
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