The Falcons hockey team will face the Wilfred Laurier Golden Hawks on Sunday afternoon in their first exhibition game of the season.
The team will look to recover from losing several key players over the offseason, both by way of graduation as well as leaving to join in the National Hockey League system. However, the team is looking at this as an opportunity to give more players to establish themselves on the team.
“I think the people outside the program think we lost a bunch,” Falcons head coach Chris Bergeron said. “It’s going to be hard to replace that internally. Within the program, we feel like that’s what college sports does, you lose people and it’s an opportunity for somebody else.”
The team is also looking to come back from their double overtime loss to the Michigan Tech Huskies in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association Championship game, before which they held a seven game winning streak.
“The way we performed down the stretch was something I was really proud of,” Bergeron said. “The way we performed in the championship game was something I was proud of, but it left a poor taste in their mouth and I hope it did. Those are the expectations, the way the season went was not the expectation. The way the season ended, we expect to be in those games.”
The team feels that the exhibition games will help to establish themselves as a team to get momentum going into the regular season, but also to come out of the stretch of games with all of their players still available.
“We had an incident at the end of our preseason game which cost us some players for our first (regular season) game at Bemidji State,” Bergeron said. “That started a snowball which we couldn’t get ourselves out of until the end of the season, I’m hoping first of all that there’s no incidents and secondly that two exhibition games will allow us to get our game heading into the right direction before we go into Kalamazoo.”
The team is also expecting Wilfred Laurier to be a competitive team, although they will have a limited scouting report on them.
“We’re not going to get tape on them,” Bergeron said. “They’re going to play Western Michigan on Saturday night, then turn around and play us on Sunday afternoon. I’m expecting them to work really hard and we may be able to get some video clips from Western Michigan, but we’ll probably see really good goaltending, probably a lot of guys that want to come to the U.S. and knock these kids off.”
