The Falcon hockey team will take on the Alabama-Huntsville Chargers on Friday and Saturday night to finish out a six-game home stand before going into the winter break.
However, the team is looking to keep the upcoming winter break from being too much of a distraction.
“I think what happens to college kids around this time of the year, at least in our sport, is that they start looking at the holiday,” Falcons head coach Chris Bergeron said. “They start counting down the days, and they forget how excited and energized they were in September to play… I don’t want to look back after these two games and say we let some things slip through our fingers because we were too anxious for the break.”
The team also believes that they will be facing a very different Alabama-Huntsville team than what they played against last year in a sweep of all four games against them, due to the players that Alabama-Huntsville recruited getting more experience.
“Their top players are a little bit older now,” Bergeron said. “They have recruited some skill, but over the past couple of years that skill has been young. Now they’ve got the freshmen that are learning from some guys that have been through it and battled, I think they’re underrated in terms of how good their skill is, which means their power play and their top six or seven players on the back end… I believe that some of those are growing pains that you get when you rely on freshman and sophomore players to lead the way. They‘re now juniors and seniors, and they’re seeing the fruits of that.”
The team is also looking for a good weekend to end the final series before the break on a positive note.
“This is a huge weekend for us,” Bergeron said. “It’s not bigger than last weekend or the weekend against Ferris State, but it’s a big weekend because it’s our next opportunity. And we’ve got a two week break coming up after this weekend, so I think it would be huge to play well. I think it would be disappointing and regrettable if we didn’t.”
The team also believes that ending the first half on a positive note will be important because there will be more road games in the second half of the season.
“This is the end of a first half where we’ve played a bunch of games at home,” Bergeron said. “I would really like to see us take advantage of these last two opportunities at home before a two week break, and that just means to play well.”
