The Beacons Men’s Hockey team started out their season very promisingly. They scored five goals in the first 40 minutes of their opening match against UMass Dartmouth. But the third period is where the comfortable win turned into a smack down of historic significance. Jeremy Finger scored four times, and Nathan Millam, Kit Sitterley, and Luc Suave each scored twice. Add in tallies from Connor McStravik and Brett Mason, and you have ten goals. In 20 minutes. Following the 15-3 drubbing, UMass Boston beat Curry College, 6-4. Through two games, they outscored their opponents 21-7 and in their 6-0 start to the season, that number stands at 37-13. The perfect start matches the best stretch to open the season in program history and coach Peter Belisle’s squad is dreaming big heading into the difficult part of their schedule.
According to senior defenseman and associate captain John Houston, the offensive explosion in their first two games validated a rigorous off-season training program, which the team made sure to after coming so close to an NCAA Tournament birth last year.
“I think [the first two wins] gave the guys a lot of confidence. It showed that we can score goals,” Houston said. “If we’re ever down, we shouldn’t have any problems putting pucks in back of the net.”
Scoring has not been an issue for the Beacons whatsoever, as they boast good team depth and great experience at the forward position. The top eight scorers on the team are all either juniors and seniors, with Millam leading the way with five goals and Buco, Mike Kuhn, and freshman Colin Larkin sharing the team lead with five assists apiece. Houston believes that having and experienced group up front has been one of the keys for the Beacons in the early part of the season.
“A lot of the guys have matured. You see a lot of junior and senior guys scoring. We’ve grown, we’ve become more men as opposed to boys.”
The experience has allowed the Beacons to put an emphasis on creativity in the offensive zone, as opposed to fundamentals that less experiences squads may need to focus on earlier in the year.
“In the offensive zone, we’re pretty much able to do whatever we want,” Houston said. “As long as we have a basic system, third guy high, we can pretty much run whatever we want; coach wants us to be creative.”
In addition to creativity, the Beacons also emphasized taking less penalties and blocking more shots in the pre-season and so far they have been successful, although Houston mentioned that drawing fewer calls is still a work in progress. In November of last season, they served 117 minutes in the box and this month, they served 112. Their penalty kill (86%) is top ten in the nation.
While the six wins have been a great way to start the year, the Beacons know that in order to reach their goal of winning the ECAC East and playing in the NCAA tournament, they need to beat their two biggest conference foes: Norwich and Babson, and in order to do that, they need to compliment their high powered offense with a stingy defense. Goaltenders Zach Andrews and Billy Faust are competing with one another for the top job and they are both turning in quality performances between the pipes. Houston, Dan Cornell, and Mike Kuhn, all of whom are seniors, lead the Beacons with a plus-minus of +9.
“The defense is trying to stay with a system. We want one guy on the puck, one guy piggybacking him,” Houston said. “When it gets down to crunch time Dan Cornell and I will go every other shift, but we haven’t had a game so far when it’s had to go down to four guys.”
You’d think that some of the defensemen would try to limit their time on ice in this early part of the season before the Beacons face their tough conference match-ups, but Houston was quick to mention how brief the season is and how important every match can be.
“The college season is so short that you want to treat every game like a playoff game. If we lose to, say, Skidmore or Castleton, our ranking could fall right out of the top 15. We want to keep our ranking in case, worst comes to worst, we can still get an at large bid to the NCAA Tournament.”
“We have no problem shortening the bench but we haven’t had to because we have so much depth,” Houston added.
When we spoke with Houston, the Beacons were in the middle of a week-long break from matches, but that didn’t stop the guys from working hard at practice. He described an energized group that was working hard and not resting on their laurels as they enter the last six games before their winter break. That starts with playing hard in all of their games until the final whistle.
“We get too content. We’ll go up on teams 2, 3-0 right off the bat but we need to work on our killer instinct and push down on the pedal whenever we can. Like against New England College, we were up 3-0 before we can even get into the game. Before you know it it’s 3-3. We won 5-4 in OT but the game could’ve probably been 7 or 8-0 if we didn’t take penalties. We need to work on staying out of the box and closing things out.”
The Beacons next play on Nov. 29 at Wesleyan University.