During Christmas break many college hockey teams, including the Falcons, play in a holiday tournament.
Bowling Green traveled to Minneapolis, Minn. to partake in the Dodge Holiday Classic on Dec. 27-28.
“When we went into the holiday tournament — it’s always interesting when you come off a break — most teams are coming off anywhere from two to two and a half weeks downtime,” head coach Scott Paluch said.
With the mandatory time off required by the Central Collegiate Hockey Association during exam week a lot of teams not only do not play in any games, but they also don’t practice.
The Falcons had an even longer break due to the fact that they played only four games in 41 days.
Their first match-up was against Paluch’s former team in Boston College, where he was an assistant coach for eight years. “We played as well of a game as we did all year from start to finish,” Paluch said. “We put together a quality performance for most of the game. … We were in control of the game, but we just weren’t able to make the plays down the stretch.”
The Falcons held an early 3-0 lead in the first period over the Eagles, but BC came back scoring three unanswered goals in the third period for a 6-5 win.
“We showed that we can hang with Boston College, No. 6 in the nation,” Steve Brudzewski said. “We dominated. We pretty much kicked their butt. … It was a disappointing loss.”
After losing to Boston College the Falcons played Yale the next night in the conciliation game.
“It was a game in which we outshot Yale 45-28, created a ton of scoring chances and just weren’t able to score,” Paluch said. “We had some letdowns in the first period and found ourselves down 3-0, which was the exact opposite of the night before.”
BG lost to the Bulldogs 5-1 after taking a season-low four penalties.
“We came out flat and it was an uphill battle the rest of the way,” captain D’Arcy McConvey said. “We couldn’t get the three goals back. It was too much of a deficit to come back from.”
At the end of the tournament seven players violated curfew in Minn. and Paluch was forced to take disciplinary action.
“We were forced, after the weekend, to take disciplinary action against the seven players due to violation of team policy on the road that resulted in the dismissal of two players and we suspended five players from [the Alaska Fairbanks] game,” Paluch said. “It was a very simple team violation. We have a standard of discipline that everyone is required to follow and that standard is never going to be compromised.”
Junior Kip Horner and sophomore Colen Pappas were dismissed from the team. Horner had appeared in six games this season with one goal while Pappas had played in two games. Horner and Pappas were dismissed from the team because they had violated team policy before, while it was the first offense for the other players.
Those five players who were suspended included junior Erik Eaton, freshman Mike Falk, junior Roger Leonard, sophomore Ryan Minnabarriet and freshman Brandon Piersol.
“Coach talks about discipline being the key to success and rules were broken, so they were disciplined,” Brudzewski said. Thus, the Falcons entered the second half of their season starting the Alaska Fairbanks series with only 14 players.
“It was real neat that we played with three lines. We only had eight forwards, so that was a boost,” McConvey said.
The Falcons jumped out to an early 3-1 lead in the second period. However, with only 31 seconds left in the game Alaska Fairbanks tied the game to send it into overtime.
Neither team was able to score in the extra five minutes, so the game remained a 3-3 tie.
The second night the Falcons were back to full strength.
“On Saturday, they really came out and played a tremendous first period and we weren’t able to match that same effort and feel behind 3-1,” Paluch said. “And much like the Yale game, earlier in the break, we were able to rebound and play extremely well the rest of the way. We weren’t able to score enough goals, coming from behind.”
The Falcons fell to Alaska Fairbanks 6-3.
However, the Falcons snapped their six-game losing streak Friday night (Jan. 10) as they swept Northern Michigan 3-2 and won 5-3 on Saturday.
“It was a series with quick pace, up and down, not a lot of penalties, some good plays on both sides, and all in all a good weekend,” Paluch said. “It was a tremendous team effort in a lot of ways. There were some real good blocked shots out of a lot of guys and some good saves out of Jordan [Sigalet].”
Sigalet played in net both nights against NMU to improved his home record to 3-0-2.
The Falcons came out strong Friday night scoring the first goal, but NMU fought neck-and-neck to stay in the game and tied it up twice.
Ryan Barnett scored the game-winning goal at 13:03 of the third period for the Falcons first victory of 2003.
Then Northern Michigan came out looking for revenge on Saturday night as they scored the first goal. They remained ahead until the Falcon’s were on a power play late in the third period. At the 6:18 mark in the third period Kevin Bieksa’s slapshot from the top of the right circle found the back net to tie the game 3-3.
“After their third goal I thought we did a good job of getting right back to what we need to do to be successful, which is keeping the puck in safe areas, driving wide, cycling the puck, and that got us back in the game,” said Paluch.
The Falcons did not give up and Leonard gave Bowling Green their first lead of the game, 4-3. That was his second goal of the evening.
Brudzewski scored an empty-net goal to secure the Falcon’s victory over Northern Michigan.
With the two wins over NMU the Falcons improve to 5-13-2 overall and 3-10-2 in the CCHA.
