Hockey team cleans up in weekend games
The bad blood continues to boil between the Utah State hockey club and BYU.
For the second time this season, an 11-player brawl broke out between the Aggies and the IceCats in a game the Aggies won 12-4.
Tension began to flair in the third period when a BYU player hit Aggie goalie Adam Lain in the face with his stick. Lain then pushed the net into that player as he attempted to skate away.
“Our goalie is one of the most valuable people on the ice and we have to protect him no matter what,” Aggie Brandon Land said. “That’s just not acceptable in our house.”
Lang, Lain and Nick Haase were ejected from the game after the fight along with two BYU players.
The Aggies won the game 12-4 on hat tricks from Aaron Burrell and Robert Hashimoto. Haase, Hashimoto and Nick Thiros each added three assists.
“That felt great because they had that article in the paper,” Aggie Roberto Leo said. “They were saying they were as good as us. Well, I hope they read our paper because you know what, they’re not. And we just proved that tonight. We came out and we smoked them.”
USU players said they were pleased they played a full game tonight and had no major letdowns.
“We played extremely well,” Lang said. “We were far more intense for the entire game. It was the first game where we played for 60 minutes.”
But the win was overshadowed by the brawl. Trouble started with 4:51 left in the third period when Aggie Ben Froehle hit BYU goalie Tamio Stehrenberger to the ground after the whistle blew. The next time the puck was on the USU end of the ice, Lain was hit in the face.
“I thought something could happen,” Lain said. “I think the other team paid the price for it. The team really rallied behind me.”
The Aggies do not want this incident to hang over them all season. Lang said USU likes to play clean, high tempo hockey without fighting.
“What happened on the ice stays on the ice,” Lang said. “We’re all said and done and it’s over.”
USU Head Coach Jerry Crossley said he does not like seeing fights, but sometimes they can not be avoided.
“Ideally, I’d rather not see it happen,” he said. “As long as it gets left out there on the ice, I guess that’s part of the game.”
As they entered the rink, USU fans were given signs with a picture of Stehrenberger’s bloodied face after the brawl between the two teams on Sept. 16.
Leo said the signs might have caused Stehrenberger to be pulled out of the net less than eight minutes into the game with USU leading 3-0.
“I hope [it threw him off],” he said. “That was the coolest thing. When we got to the rink we were just like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s awesome.'”
The Aggies and Icecats will not play each other again until Feb. 11 in Provo.
“We’re going to own them all season,” Leo said. “If they beat us, it will be a fluke.”
Saturday, the Aggies recorded their second shutout of the year in a 9-0 blowout of the Weber State Division-II team.
Josh Groves scored his first three goals of the season and six other Aggies scored in the second rout of the D-II team in three days.
“I think the team is really coming together,” Groves said. “I think that’s what we need going into next weekend.”
The shutout was their first since Oct. 16 against Eastern Washington.
The Aggies knew they had a good chance to do it again Saturday.
“That was our team’s goal from the beginning,” goalie Scotty Beard said. “We had a few goals [for the team] and I think we exceeded them.”
USU tied the school record for most goals scored in a 19-2 blowout of the WSU D-II Thursday in Ogden.
Mike Lewandowski, Chad Johnson and Robert Hashimoto each had hat tricks and Nick Haase, Ben Froehle, Jordan Francom and Roberto Leo each added two more for the Aggies. In all, nine players found the back of the net for USU.
“It was fun,” Lewandowski said. “We skated well. We executed really well tonight and we finished well. I mean, we scored 19 goals.”
Ten of those goals came in the second period. The Aggies were so far ahead going into the third period the officials decided to not stop the clock for anything in the final period to end the game sooner.
The game looked a lot different from the eyes of USU goalie Chris Webber.
“That was the most boring game of my life,” he said after the game. “That second period was the longest period ever. I feel so stiff right now.”
Webber only faced 11 shots all night while the Aggies had 63 on the Wildcats.
Webber said he does not like those situations as a goalie because it is hard to stay focused.
“It’s very difficult, but you live with it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let those two goals in.”
The Aggies improved their record to 7-5-1 while outscoring their opponents 40-6 over the weekend.
“The guys are scoring lots of goals and getting things in sync,” Crossley said. “We came away with three games won and that’s what we wanted.”
Crossley said the team had been working on getting a killer instinct going into last weekend.
“We’ve had some trouble putting games away,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been trying to focus on. I think this week we saw a little of that.”
USU will face the WSU D-I team on Wednesday in North Logan and then head to Arizona State on Friday and Saturday.
-bhhinton@cc.usu.edu