Sports
Lumberjack icers hit rough patch
Matthew Semisch
12/16/2014
Long losing streaks never come at good times, but the one the Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) hockey team is currently on isn’t going to end quickly.
The Lumberjacks lost all three of their games last week, two against Minot State and one against the University of North Dakota’s club team. In so doing, DCB saw its current skid rise to five games.
MSU easily handled the Jacks in a home-and-home series last week. The Beavers came away 7-2 winners on Tuesday in Bottineau before they defeated DCB again by a 7-0 count on Friday in Minot.
Tuesday’s game against MSU provided rough sailing for the Jacks almost immediately. The Beavers beat DCB starting goaltender Ryan Miner five times in the first period and led 5-0 after the opening 20 minutes.
DCB head coach Travis Rybchinski replaced Miner with Christian Vivian for the final two periods of the game, but things didn’t get much better. Cody Cesarz and Connor Hicks scored a goal each over the final 40 minutes, but MSU picked up another two tallies of its own.
“We’ve got to find some consistency here,” Rybchinski said after Tuesday’s game. “We’ve got to play harder for a full 60 minutes, but you have to give Minot credit, too.
“They capitalized on a lot of our mistakes, and we didn’t get the save we needed to in the first period on a couple of their goals, and that made things tough for us. We battled hard in that last 40 minutes and the last two periods were pretty even, but obviously the first one wasn’t.”
After MSU’s 7-0 win in Friday’s rematch in Minot, it was then UND’s turn to inflict damage on the Jacks. At Grand Forks’s Eagles Arena, UND put the hammer down on Saturday in a 7-3 win over the visiting Jacks.
UND’s victory over DCB on Saturday was its third in just over a week. The Jacks fell twice to UND at the Bottineau Community Arena the weekend before last, thus kicking off DCB’s current losing streak.
The Jacks (4-11-0) are now off for an entire month. DCB’s next action will be at home against arch-rival Williston State on Jan. 13 starting at 7:30 p.m.