Aggie hockey goes 2-1 on Arizona road trip
The Utah State hockey team traveled to the Grand Canyon state over the weekend to play three teams in as many days.
The Aggies first played Friday at Northern Arizona University, followed by Arizona State on Saturday and Grand Canyon University Sunday morning. The Aggies were without three of their top players during the three games: forwards Morgan McJimsey, Ian Beckstrom and defender Shaun Gibbons.
The series started out rough for Utah State with a 3-1 loss to Northern Arizona. That loss made it three straight losses, dating back to the Aggies’ home opener against UNLV Sept 23. The game was close up until the end when the Lumberjacks scored an open net goal in the dying minutes to make it 3-1 after the Aggies pulled their keeper in an effort to tie the game.
Having lost three straight contests, there was a lot of opportunity to be negative, but head coach Jon Eccles didn’t want to get his team down. He said that while there were several things to work on, there were a lot of positives that the team could build on. They just needed to play up to their potential.
And after Friday, Utah State did just that.
Going into Saturday’s contest against Arizona State, the Aggies were determined to come away with their first win since the previous month. Their efforts paid off with a 9-2 route of the Sun Devils in a usually hostile arena. Josh Kerkvliet led Utah State’s scoring barrage with a hat-trick.
The win was a welcome relief and in Eccles’ mind an indication of what the team should be playing like.
“It really showed what they were capable [of],” he said. “If we would play every game like this we would be 5-0.”
The next morning, only two hours after a sunrise in the Valley of the Sun, Utah State upped the ante by demolishing Grand Canyon University 12-0 at their home in Phoenix. There was plenty of scoring to go around as seven different Aggies put the puck in the net. Goalkeeper Colter Pritchard got his first start of the year and also recorded the first shutout of the season for Utah State.
Coach Eccles pointed out in both of the wins the team never took their foot off of the gas. They continued to be disciplined and played hard every minute of each contest and it paid off with 21 goals in two games.
“Whenever you go 2-1 on a road trip,” Eccles said, “that’s great. Yes we would have liked to gone 3-0 and had we played the way we did the last two games, I pretty sure we would have been 3-0.”
Utah State’s next game will be the start of another three-game swing, this time in Boise, Idaho. They will play Denver University Thursday, Montana Tech Friday and Northern Colorado Saturday in the Idaho IceWorld rink.