Sports
History repeating
Matthew Semisch
02/10/2015
Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) head hockey coach Travis Rybchinski said countless times this season that his Lumberjacks lacked a natural goal-scorer.
Never did that make itself more apparent than the four times in the past month that DCB faced in-state rival Williston State.
WSC easily pushed the Jacks aside in the teams’ two-game regular season series in the middle of last month. The Tetons rolled to a 6-1 win at Bottineau Community Arena on Jan. 13, and WSC bested DCB by the same score again the following night in Williston.
When the teams met twice again last week in their best-of-three NJCAA Region XIII playoff, the story stayed largely the same. DCB again struggled to find the back of the net, and WSC won Friday’s Game 1 4-1 in Williston before putting the Jacks down 5-1 in Game 2 on Sunday night in Bottineau.
By winning the regional series two games to none, WSC booked a return trip to the four-team NJCAA national championships in Binghamton, N.Y. It will be the Tetons’ fourth consecutive trip to the finals as they try to lock up a third straight national title.
DCB, which won the last of its eight junior college national championships in 2010, would have been New York-bound had it defeated the Tetons twice last week. Three spots in Binghamton go to regional champions while a fourth is an at-large bid, but DCB earned neither.
WSC WINS GAME 1
Despite how the teams’ regular season series went for DCB, Friday’s first game of the playoff slate at Williston’s Agri-Sports Complex started out in the Jacks’ favor.
The visitors quieted the home crowd in Friday’s first period when Drew Ross gave DCB a surprise 1-0 lead. The Jacks took that slim advantage back to their locker room at the end of the frame.
The final 40 minutes of the game weren’t as kind to DCB, however. The Tetons scored two goals in both the second and third periods and rolled to an eventual 4-1 win.
TETONS WIN AGAIN
Game 2 at Bottineau Community Arena on Sunday night started not unlike how Game 1 ended. DCB was quickly put on the back foot on its own ice when WSC scored three goals in the game’s first seven minutes and 18 seconds.
Tetons forward Jay Croop, who scored a pair of goals in Game 1, opened the scoring in Game 2 just 2:40 in on a flukey goal. A speculative shot from the corner boards snuck its way over the goal line past Jacks goaltender Ryan Miner. A second goal, this one from WSC forward Sam Basich, then went in off of Miner from a bad angle at 3:02.
The Jacks calmed down somewhat from there for the next five minutes. A second goal of the night from Basich at 7:18, however, put WSC ahead 3-0 and forced Rybchinski to call a timeout.
The Tetons wouldn’t get out of the first period with that 3-0 lead intact, but they nearly did. They would have if not for a Lukas Burian blast from just inside the blue line that went in between WSC goaltender Tanner Swift’s legs with two seconds left in the frame.
Once the game restarted, though, the Tetons swung the momentum back in their direction. Wade Weingerber buried a rebound past Miner from close range at 8:17 of the second period to restore the Tetons’ three-goal lead at 4-1.
Rybchinski felt that goal was something his DCB team couldn’t recover from.
“I had said to the guys during our timeout that we’ve got to keep working,” he said. “There’s lots of time left and we need that next goal and we need to calm down, and we did and I was happy with that.
“Getting the goal at the end of the period helped things, but the fourth goal (for WSC) hurt a little bit and that was kind of the backbreaker, I think. We lost our energy on that one.”
The 4-1 deficit didn’t do much to quiet the crowd, which was remarkably large despite the 7:30 p.m. Sunday start time. When the Tetons added a fifth goal on a power play just 34 seconds into the third period, though, the wind went out of the Jacks’ and the home crowd’s sails.
Rybchinski said after the game that he believed his team could have taken the series to three games. In the end, though, DCB’s icers couldn’t do enough to make that happen.
“I honestly thought we could get these guys at least once, and that’s going in today where we wanted to live another day and take our chances into a Game 3 (in Williston) on Tuesday,” he said, “but it is what it is and I’m proud of the guys because they left everything on the ice.”
WSC’s opponent in the Tetons’ NJCAA national semifinal had not yet been determined as of press time.
DCB (7-18-0) will wrap up its 2014-15 season on Friday when it visits Minot State’s club team.