Ohio splits series with defending national champions
By Zach Swartz, Staff Writer
October 17, 2007 | 12:37 p.m.
Ohio took care of business on Friday, ousting the No. 6 ranked Oakland Grizzlies in a 3-2 nail-biter. Captain Dave Fitzgerald and Ryan Tessmer each scored power-play goals in the opening eight minutes of the game, but the Bobcats let Oakland come back to score one in the closing minutes of the first period, and another in the middle of the second. Billy Hemann finally shut the door on the Grizzlies with his five-on-three power-play goal with just 18 seconds remaining in the game. This gave Ohio its fifth win of the season.
Game two on Saturday had a similar feel to it, but it turned out the other way around as Oakland took the game from the Bobcats with the same 3-2 score. Ohio seemed in control on both sides of the puck during the first period. Captain Jim Roach fought hard, laying out big hits and skating all over the ice before scoring the first goal of the game with 9:03 left in the first period, and goaltender Chris Carlson used everything from his glove to his mask to keep his team’s 1-0 lead at the end of the first period.
The Grizzlies fought back and scored both a power play and a short-handed goal in the second, but seasoned veteran Jim Fuhs tied the score at two with a power play rebound with 3:14 left in the period. But after Oakland put a puck in the back of the net with a wrist shot from the point with 7:30 left in the game. Not even a six-on-four push with 26 seconds left could bring the Bobcats to tie the score. The game ended on an even sourer note when Carlson left the game with a broken wrist after coming into contact with an Oakland player near the end of the third period. Paul Marshall, who has notched a 4-0 record for the Bobcats so far this season, took over for the injured goalie.
For head coach Dan Morris, missed opportunities were the theme for the weekend.
“I think when we had the opportunity several times…we couldn’t put the puck in the net,” he said. “We didn’t make choices that hit the spots that we talked about hitting, and guys weren’t executing when we got the puck out front.”
That did in fact seem to be the case Saturday night. The Bobcats were impressive for most of the first game and the first period of the second, but failed to finish against the team who won a national championship its first season in Division I last season. While Morris admitted he was not expecting the scoring to be high, he was not ready for the mistakes his team made down the stretch.
Roach agreed.
“I think that the game was capitalization,” he said. “We didn’t really capitalize. We f----d up, and we didn’t capitalize when they did … We had a total breakdown.”
A “total breakdown” might be a little strong considering the Bobcats managed to win the first game and score a pair of goals against the defending national champs and one of the better goaltenders in the American Collegiate Hockey League.
Still, the Bobcats’ 5-3 start marks the worst beginning for the perennially nationally ranked hockey squad since the 2003-2004 season when the green and white went 4-4. In the respective seasons following that start, the Bobcats have gone 8-0, 7-1 and 7-1 through their first eight games. The year 2004, however, marks the last year Ohio won the ACHA national championship. The Bobcats are far from counting themselves out.
While the Bobcats were on the ice missing opportunities, the fans in the stands couldn’t avoid missing the intensity that poured out from both teams. It was Homecoming weekend, and even though it took until the second period for most of the students and fans to come out of their dorms, the crowd was raucous and rowdy like it usually is at OU hockey games. Players threw both big hits and big punches to get the crowd going, and the game play rarely featured a lull in the action. This intensity was one positive that the Bobcats saw come out of the series.
“I thought it was a high-intensity game … I don’t think we did anything wrong with our preparation and the way we started the game and the effort we gave during the game,” said Fuhs. “Sometimes things don’t go your way, and that’s something that we have to try to work on to make things go our way instead of just leaving it up to the hands of fate.”
Coach Morris agreed, and he hopes that his squad will be able to learn something from the Grizzlies and take this series as a turning point instead of a dropping point.
“The intensity is pretty good,” he said. “There’s a lot of pride both ways. They know how to play hockey. There was a lot of frustration both ways, but they have a lot of confidence, and they play well as a team, and that’s what we want to get to, to be a team that plays like that—as a team.”
This weekend sets the Bobcats off on a month-long road trip, no doubt their biggest test of the season. The test begins right away this Friday when they travel to Happy Valley, Pa., to face their rival and the No. 1 ranked Penn State Icers, the team who was defeated in the ACHA finals by Oakland last March. Ohio is looking to improve upon a 1-3 record last season against Penn State, but if they plan on doing so, they will have to utilize the same intensity they came up with against Oakland this past weekend.
As Fuhs said, “We’re human. There’s a couple [goals] we probably should have had. I think that we had an opportunity and should have won the game, but sometimes stuff happens. It’s not that we accept the loss, but we’re happy with our effort, and we think we worked hard. It’s just little bounces, little things, and there’s a little bit of luck involved too.”
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