December 17, 2009
Quinnipiac Battles Raised Expectations
by Eben Novy-Williams/CHN Reporter
When unranked Quinnipiac swept No. 17 Ohio State in two games to start its season, few people took note. When the Bobcats won 10 of their next 11 games – including a 3-2 victory over No. 5 Cornell at Lynah Rink – the message became crystal clear: The new kids on the block are here to stay.
However, following an unimpressive four-game stretch to close the year, the doubters have resurfaced. As the Bobcats are quickly learning, with great ranking comes great responsibility.
“There is definitely added pressure [to keep winning],” freshman defenseman Zach Davies said. “We have a bulls-eye on our back and our opponents are coming out harder. Everyone gets jacked up to play a top-10 team.”
The Bobcats (13-3-1, 7-2-0 ECAC) are 1-2-1 since an impressive OT win over UMass. Quinnipiac lost a pair of road games to No. 9 Yale and Brown, then tied a struggling Holy Cross squad. The team’s lone win in the last two weeks came against American International, currently in last place in Atlantic Hockey. In that period the Bobcats’ ranking has slipped from No. 4 to No. 8.
“We just weren’t ready to play [against Yale and Brown],” senior forward and assistant captain Brandon Wong said. “It was like a switch that turned off.”
Quinnpiac head coach Rand Pecknold, who has been with team since 1994, agreed.
“We struggled with our game prep,” he said. “Our emotional level wasn’t where it needed to be, our intensity was low and we just didn’t compete as hard as we had been competing prior to that weekend.”
Over the course of a six-month season every team inevitably hits a rough patch. The Bobcats are hoping that they can learn from this one, and insure that it does not happen again.
“It was a wake-up call for everyone,” Wong said. “We had a great record and a top-10 ranking. We got ahead of ourselves and we weren’t properly prepared. ... Now we know that we need to get back to the basics; to prove what we can actually do.”
The doubters in the college hockey world began murmuring following the Yale loss. The whispers grew louder following the defeat at Brown, traditionally one of the ECAC’s weaker squads. Perhaps this Quinnipiac team is not for real. Maybe it was all a fluke.
“We have confidence in ourselves,” Wong said. “We have 20 guys that dress each night, and everyone contributes. It doesn’t really matter what people say. We believe it, and we intend to show it in the win column.”
“It is hard to judge a team on a two-game weekend,” Pecknold said. “You have to wait and see where we are come March. I’m hoping [the team that lost to Yale and Brown] is not the team we are going to be, otherwise we are in for a disastrous second half of the year.”
Pecknold admits that his team was not at its best in the win over American International either, but the victory was significant nonetheless.
“It wasn’t our best game, but a win is a win,” Pecknold said. “We needed to finish the semester on a good note and go into final exams in a positive nature. ... We had to stop the [three-game] winless streak, so I think it was an important win.”
The Bobcats blitzed the college hockey world this season by mixing the perfect recipe for success – a strong class of senior leaders, a confident goaltender and a talented group of freshman who immediately bought into the system.
In many ways the Bobcats are an upset-minded anomaly. They graduated their primary goaltender and the nation’s leading scorer and became a better team.
“One of the biggest differences [this year] is the leadership,” sophomore goaltender Dan Clarke said. “[Senior forward and captain] Jean-Marc [Beaudoin] and Brandon [Wong] have done a great job with the freshman. Over the summer we all did our part and came back to campus ready to work, and the freshman all bought into that. It is more like a family now, everyone is playing for each other.”
Davies, a freshman, echoed similar sentiments.
“The seniors have been unreal,” he said. “They have turned the team into a family. We all hang out off the ice; it is a really tight-knit group.”
Give credit to the family mentality for Quinnipiac’s early success. On paper the team might not scare opponents – the Bobcats were picked to finish 11th out of 12 teams in the ECAC Writers and Broadcasters Preseason Poll – but it is impossible to argue with the resume. Wins over the Buckeyes and Big Red are just the start – Quinnipiac also blew out preseason top-10 Princeton, edged No. 10 UMass in overtime and shut out Robert Morris 5-0.
The moral of the story is simple. The team that plays as one typically wins as one.
“This is one of the better team that I have coached,” said Pecknold, who in his 15 years behind the Bobcats bench has taken his team from Division II to the top of Division I. “I don’t know if it’s the most talented, but talent is overrated. ... It’s a close-knit group of guys, the chemistry is excellent in the locker room”
The team is adamant that the recent rough patch has done little to shake its confidence or cohesion, which bodes well for the second half of the season. If the Bobcats want to avoid becoming the victim of their own success, they are going to need to lean on each other to help alleviate the pressure.
“Everyone had use pegged to be farther down [the standings],” Davies said. “But when we started winning the attitude swept over the whole team. We gave each other the confidence that we could beat anyone we played.”
As long as that confidence in their teammates still exists, opponents should beware. The Bobcats play a fast-paced style of smash-mouth hockey on both ends of the ice. They backcheck, they crash the net and they grind out wins.
Clarke called it “non-stop.” Pecknold described it as “ultra-competitive and up-tempo.” Whatever adjective you choose, Bobcat Hockey is scary. And a team that believes in the both system and each other has the potential to take that fear to whole new levels.
“This program will not sit back and rest on its laurels,” Pecknold said. “We’ve come a long way in a short time and we’re proud of that, but we want to stay a top-20 team and that’s very difficult to do.”
Quinnipiac has two weeks off before resuming ECAC play with road games at Harvard and Princeton. In that time, the Bobcats will be focused on two things: physically resting and mentally preparing for a grueling three-month trek towards their ultimate goal. A team that burns out at the end of December struggles through its final four games. A team that burns out at the end of February forfeits an entire season of work.
“You can’t fake passion,” Pecknold said. “They’ve got to want it, and they’ve got to play hard. We certainly had it there for a while, and then we lost it. Hopefully we’ll get rejuvenated over break and be ready to go for the second half.”
Bulldog07Dec 19 2009, 3:48 pm
I'm sorry, but I don't get all the backslapping for Quinnipiac. WHO HAVE THEY PLAYED? What's the record of the teams they've beaten? A combined 62-95-21. The teams they've lost to or tied? A combined 19-29-10. The Bobcats are entirely a product of a ridiculously weak schedule. In fact, KRACH puts their SOS at 43rd. A schedule that contained 5 games against CHA or Atlantic teams and 12 out of 17 games against teams in the bottom half of their conferences does not make a team deserve to sniff anywhere near the top-10. I guarantee you that QPac's going to fall back to earth hard come springtime.
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