Season in and season out, opposing coaches speak about the difficulties of playing inside Merrimack’s Lawler Arena.
The rink’s tight corners and hard-checking Warriors teams make for an awfully fast game that can prove to be a challenge for even the best teams in college hockey. This season alone, Merrimack has defeated Boston University and played a pair of one-goal games against defending national champion UMass on its home ice.
Dartmouth head coach Reid Cashman feels that his young club met that challenge on Friday night, ultimately skating to a 2-2 tie that closed the pre-Christmas schedule for all of New England’s Division 1 college hockey teams.
From here, the local calendar takes a 10-day pause through the Christmas holiday. Action will resume on Dec. 28 when Providence and Yale compete at the Holiday Face-Off at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., beginning a week-long stretch of continuous action for New England teams through Jan. 5.
“(Merrimack is) an incredibly competitive team that works hard and plays fast,” Cashman said. “We were prepared for that, but they made it challenging for us … especially when their defensemen got active, which they have the ability to do.”
“It’s a good learning experience for a young team,” which includes nine freshmen and seven sophomores that played their first-ever college games less than two months ago after the entire Ivy League had been shut down since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.
This, too, has been Cashman’s official maiden voyage as a head coach, as he was hired in June of last year following two seasons as an assistant coach for the Washington Capitals. He worked with the Big Green through the entire pandemic year, finally experiencing gameplay for the first time in October.
The roster is inexperienced as a whole, as even seniors like Sam Hesler (Boxboro, Mass.) and Erik Urbank have missed extended periods in their careers due to injury. Sophomore Clay Stevenson and senior Justin Ferguson (Hudson, N.H.) are both seeing their first regular action as starting goaltenders at the college level.
Stevenson, who was named the top goaltender in the BCHL before arriving at Dartmouth last year, made a career-high 36 stops on Friday, including a pair of second-period breakaways. He has a .924 save percentage that ranks second to Quinnipiac’s Yaniv Perets among all ECAC stoppers on the season.
“Clay has had a tough first half with injuries and didn’t play any hockey last year, so he’s just scratching the surface of what he’s capable of being,” Cashman said. “He’s pretty darn good right now.”
With inexperience comes growth and opportunity in every game.
“We’ve got a great group of kids with a ton of character and we’re all going through it together,” Cashman said. “Even with some of the older guys we don’t have a ton of games played, but it’s great because we see the growth from week to week. The results are what they are, but I love coming to work with this team.”
Freshman defenseman Ian Pierce provided another perfect example of the week-by-week growth by scoring his first two collegiate goals on pin-point shots during Friday’s game.
According to the coach, the New Jersey native and product of the USHL’s Dubuque Fighting Saints has seen the most individual growth of any player on the Dartmouth roster this season.
“He has the ability to create and skate, but (associate head coach Jason Tapp) has done a great job with him that he’s calmed down and picked his spots, when to jump, when to skate,” Cashman said of the 5-foot-10, 190-pound Pierce, who has partnered with senior captain Harrison Markell (Andover, Mass.) for nearly every game this season. “He defended rushes really well and was physical for being a little undersized.”
The Big Green will have as many as six opportunities to play Hockey East teams by the season’s end, including the Dec. 30 opener of the Ledyard Classic against in-state rival New Hampshire. A potential game against Boston College the next day and a trip to UMass Lowell in February are also on the docket.
All of those games are chances for the young squad to learn.
“When you play Hockey East and you play an experienced, well-coached team, you don’t get an opportunity to take a breath,” Cashman said. “We’re a highly competitive team. We’ve been in every game except for the first one (a 9-3 loss to Harvard). So, we’ve learned how to compete. The next step is learning how to win. There’s a difference.”
With finals out of the way before Thanksgiving, it’s been all hockey for the last two weeks at Dartmouth.
Following the holiday season, the Big Green’s next opportunity is unique. A trophy will be at stake, offering a taste of every team’s year-end goals for the month of March.
“We’ve talked a lot about choices in our program — how you’re going to work, what you put in your body and everything else in life,” Cashman said. “The guys get eight days to go home and be around family and friends, but we expect them to make proper choices.
“We want to be playing our best hockey on March 1. … For now, I told them we have a chance to win a championship when we come back. We have UNH. If we win that, we’re in a championship game.”
Seeing something new
Merrimack made the most of its own unique opportunity on Dec. 12, taking on the U.S. Under-18 Team in an exhibition game before entering their semester-ending exam week.
As it turned out, fourth-year head coach Scott Borek (Swampscott, Mass.) said that he found potential combinations during the 8-2 win that could benefit the team going forward during a busy stretch run that will later include two more games that were postponed as a result of UConn’s COVID-19 protocols earlier this month.
No player made the most of the opportunity more than sophomore Alex Jefferies (Lunenburg, Mass.), who set up Friday’s opening goal in the first period. Counting the exhibition in which he had two goals and two assists, the former Gunnery star has points in nine of 15 games this season.
“He’s using his outside speed and using his body to protect pucks. I think he’s getting more and more confident,” Borek said of Jefferies. “His 200-foot game is still developing, but when he plays as hard as he is right now without the puck he’s going to have the puck a lot. That’s a really good thing for us.”
Of late, Jefferies has played on a line with freshman Matt Copponi (Mansfield, Mass.), a fellow prep standout turned college player out of Dexter Southfield. The two assisted on junior center Mac Welsher’s first-period goal against Dartmouth, while senior Wisconsin transfer Mick Messner tallied the ultimate tying goal — his first as a Warrior — in the third.
