Part of coaching a young team is knowing when to push certain buttons.
You can’t over-praise them. Similarly, however, the riot act can’t be read every time they have a bad night. And those bad nights? They’re inevitable, especially when you face the number of older teams UMD will face throughout the season.
But that doesn’t mean the occasional message can’t be sent.
9 THOUGHTS
1. As it so often can be in this silly sport, last weekend was a tale of two games. UMD managed the ebbs and flows of Friday’s game awfully well, a big reason the Bulldogs went back to the hotel with a 4-2 victory.
Everyone — players, coaches, staff, parents, assembled traveling UMD fans (hats off to all of you!), even the announcer — knew Lowell would give a better performance on Saturday, and the Bulldogs would need to match/exceed that in order to have a chance.
Didn’t happen.
Lowell was the more physical, more mature, more driven, and quite frankly the better team on Saturday for the preponderance of the 60 minutes.
A 4-1 win was well-deserved for the RiverHawks.
2. UMD coach Scott Sandelin was clear in his thoughts when he spoke about the weekend during his weekly media conference on Wednesday.
“I liked that we won Friday,” he said. “I didn’t like that we lost Saturday. It wasn’t even about losing. The better team won.
“They were more determined in everything. It wasn’t that we were terrible, but they made us be that way. I thought we were careless with the puck and we didn’t have any pushback, which bothered me. So we got what we got. And like I said, the better team won Saturday.”
Sandelin cited a couple areas where he’s looking for improvement.
“I just think our puck management needs to be a lot better. And I think when we are possessing the puck and making the right plays, we’re a good team, but it doesn’t matter if you’re throwing pucks away. And I thought against Lowell, I thought some guys, we needed a lot more moxie and poise. I thought we got rid of pucks too soon.”
The veteran head coach also talked about seeing a better battle level out of his group.
“You gotta win puck battles, you gotta engage in battles. And you’re not gonna win every battle, but you gotta engage in them and you gotta stay in battles and have second and third efforts. And some guys are doing that, not enough guys are.”
3. That led to Monday. Sandelin and forward Joe Molenaar both spoke at the media conference and talked about a battle-themed practice UMD conducted Monday morning.
“It was about compete,” Sandelin said. “And it was about being harder to play against.”
(Sandelin has clarified what it means to him to be hard to play against, but he did so again on Wednesday. “It’s not about knocking guys through the wall. We have some guys that are quick. We’ve got guys that have good sticks. We can pressure, we can angle. We can be a harder team to play against than we were on Saturday night, for sure.”)
“(Sandelin) on Monday kind of did a really good job of making sure we as a group were going to understand that,” Molenaar said, “and that we were not going to put out that effort or performance again on a Saturday.”
“It’s a mentality,” Sandelin explained. “Some guys are fine with it and some guys need to get it. And some guys need to get more of it. It can’t be hit or miss. It’s gotta be consistent. And it starts there. It’s right between the ears. It’s a mentality. It’s a will.
“It’s how this program has always had success. We’ve never maybe out-talented teams, but we out-willed teams and out-competed teams, and we were always a hard team to play against.”
Molenaar said it’s an important lesson for young players to grasp.
“Winning on a Saturday night, especially coming off a win on a Friday, is gonna be really difficult and challenging,” he said. “It’s an adjustment. You got to play an entirely different style of hockey. It’s hard, heavy. You got to realize that that team on the other side was probably hearing it from their coach, making sure that they’re coming out harder and stronger that next night.”
4. Two words: Gopher week. Not much needs to be said about this week to fire up the fanbase, and while there’s always a lot of intensity on the ice between these teams, it doesn’t seem to have the kind of edge it had back in the day.
That’s okay. It should still be really good hockey.
The venerable John Gilbert was at the media conferences on Wednesday, telling stories of UMD-Minnesota games of years past, back in the Huffer Christiansen days, to be precise. I talked to former Gophers forward Pat Micheletti on my radio show Thursday, and he talked about some of the 6-6 and 8-6 style games that these teams played in the 1980s.
This probably won’t be like either of those eras. But they are still big games.
5. Minnesota fell to Omaha in Saturday’s Ice Breaker title game in Vegas, dropping a 2-1 overtime decision in a game where the Gophers led in shots 54-18. Micheletti thought the Gophers played better on Saturday than they did in Friday’s 7-1 semifinal win over Air Force, but the Mavericks got 53 saves from goalie Simon Latkoczy to pull off the upset.
“He’s consistent,” Omaha coach Mike Gabinet said of his goalie, “and I think that’s like our group, too. I think they just keep believing and keep working. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re going to do those two things for sure.”
The Gophers fell a win short of the Frozen Four last season, losing to Boston University in the Sioux Falls Regional final, missing out on a chance to play in the Frozen Four at Xcel Energy Center, marking the third straight time St. Paul has hosted the event without the Gophers qualifying (of course, Minnesota won it there in 2002).
“We gave it our all,” Minnesota coach Bob Motzko said recently. “We ended up with a 2-0 lead in that game against BU, and we couldn’t hold on to it. You know what? Sports sometimes breaks your heart. But we had a very solid season.”
6. This is an explosive, dangerous Minnesota team. Again. Motzko has the ability to reload with top players, and as if the recruiting isn’t strong enough, the Gophers also added top transfer forward Matthew Wood from UConn.
“Well, he’s awful good,” Motzko said of Wood. “He went through two years at UConn where he did all the dirty work. And he could make the World Junior team for Team Canada this year as a junior. He come here with a little snarl. He can score, he will make a tremendous impact in college hockey, and we’re gonna benefit from it.”
“Some teams only need one or two plays to score one or two goals,” Sandelin said of facing Minnesota. “Some teams need five or six plays to score one or two goals. So they have that ability.”
Sandelin is looking within when it comes to his thoughts on the series.
“We may play well enough to win this weekend, but we might not win,” he said. “I wanna see how we play. It’s more about getting back to how we need to play. We need to be a lot more competitive. We need some guys to play better. We need to clean up, obviously, our puck management. And we need to generate more offense.”
7. This is not the only non-conference series of significance being played involving teams from the NCHC this weekend. Big games are all over the place here in mid-October.
North Dakota heads to Mankato to battle Minnesota State. The Mavericks, under second-year coach Luke Strand, already pulled one shocker, as they won their season opener 5-2 at Michigan Oct. 4 to vault themselves into the national rankings. Those Wolverines host St. Cloud State for two in Ann Arbor this weekend.
Denver is home to face Northeastern, while Arizona State plays a pair of games at Providence. Omaha hosts an Augustana team that grabbed everyone’s attention with a 4-1 win at North Dakota, albeit in an exhibition, Oct. 5.
Miami will play Saturday at Robert Morris after the Colonials took care of the RedHawks Thursday night in Oxford. Western Michigan beat Bowling Green on Thursday in Kalamazoo.
Colorado College is idle.
8. The UMD women finally get to play at home. The Bulldogs — thanks to a postponed home series against Syracuse — played six straight on the road to start the season. UMD won the first three and lost the last three, including two at Wisconsin last weekend by a 12-4 aggregate.
“We’re so excited to be back in Duluth and to finally get to play here in front of our home crowd,” said head coach Laura Schuler. “So it’s going to be an awesome weekend.”
Schuler said the Wisconsin games exposed some areas where she and her staff feel UMD needs to be better going forward. She said that was the focus of what she called a “work week” in practice.
Rest is also on the to-do list. UMD played a pair of Saturday/Sunday series, including last weekend. A 2pm game in Madison means UMD would have been lucky to get home by 11pm Sunday, leaving a short turnaround for many players who have morning classes on Monday.
Managing the bodies is going to be a key for the Bulldogs this weekend, along with the emotions that come with finally playing at home. It’s also Alumni Weekend, and four ex-Bulldogs who helped PWHL Minnesota to the league championship are bringing the Walter Cup trophy to Duluth Saturday.
St. Thomas is the opponent, and the Tommies are coming in hot. UST is 4-0 after sweeping Minnesota State last weekend, so it’s a confident team visiting Duluth this weekend.
9. Fun fact: The last time Minnesota played a two-game series against UMD in Duluth? Oct. 14-15 of 2011, the second weekend of the season. The Gophers swept the series by a pair of 5-4 scores, with the Friday game going overtime.
In that wild Friday game, Erik Haula tied it for Minnesota in the final minute, then Nate Condon scored the winner. On Saturday, UMD jumped to a 2-0 lead, Minnesota scored five in a row, and UMD got two but couldn’t equalize late. UMD outshot Minnesota 50-44 on Friday, then 50-18 on Saturday.
The Saturday game was UMD’s last loss of the 2011 calendar year. The next weekend at Providence, the Bulldogs started a program-record 17-game unbeaten streak (14-0-3) that carried into January of 2012 before Omaha broke it.
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Only the men’s games on the radio this weekend (we have football at 1pm Saturday, so we’d only be able to carry the Friday women’s game, and I’ve therefore opted to do three series after Christmas break).
6:30 pregame Friday, 5:30 Saturday. Should be fun.
Back pregame with lines.
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