Eleven different Williamsville South players made their way onto the score sheet with either a goal or an assist — or both — as the Billies won 7-4 over Sweet Home on Saturday afternoon. Two South players, Jake Fuzak and Michael Suchyna, contributed more than usual and maybe more than either of them expected. Suchyna had a goal and an assist, and Fuzak scored the Billies’ seventh goal to cap off four third period goals in a span of 3:35.
While Fuzak is a leader off the ice, he described himself as a utility player on the ice.
“I don’t really do much,” Fuzak said. “I’m kind of like the utility player. I help out where I can. But it’s not really individual for us. It’s more, we feed off of everyone else. If everyone else is playing well, we play well. It’s one of those things. But sometimes it’s up to Mike [Suchyna] and guys like myself and Mike to step up to the plate because we got your halfway decent players like Browne and Fix and Mason out there; then you got us. And people kind of overlook us a couple times, and we just gotta rise to the occasion, so today I felt we did.”
Sweet Home made it a game though as the Panthers were 4-for-4 on the power play, including a hat trick by Jeff Czyz and a goal from Tyler Edholm.
“We just gotta work on the power play and our penalty kill,” Fuzak said. “We gave up four [power play] goals tonight, and we just gotta work on that, but we just wanted to come out with the win and keep moving forward throughout the season.”
“I thought we needed to address penalty kill,” agreed Suchyna. “Although we weren’t able to do it, we were able to get through the struggles. We came out strong in the third period.”
With first period goals from Suchyna, Cam Osalkowski, and Alex Fix, the Billies carried a 3-1 lead into the second period before losing it to Czyz’s first two goals. An intense meeting during the intermission gave the Billies more motivation going into the third period.
“I thought we had a great third period,” South coach Sean Green said. “We challenged the guys to just come out and just slow it down to a 15-minute hockey game and take it as that and forget about the past, and they did. Proud of how they responded.”
“We got in [the locker room] and everyone started screaming,” Fuzak said. “We were asleep in the first two periods. We weren’t really moving our feet. No one was passing; got lazy. Then we just came out there with our feet moving and just played our game, and when we play our game, there’s not many teams that can keep up with us, so that’s pretty much the plan that we’re gonna go with moving forward.”
Czyz’s third goal came just 2:12 into the third, and the Panthers had their first lead of the game on their fourth power play goal.
“We had the three-to-one lead, but unfortunately kind of our theme is getting into some penalty problems,” Green said. “And Sweet Home did a phenomenal job, obviously, on the power play, scoring four power play goals, and that kept them in the game. And any time you keep a team within one shot, they feel good about themselves.”
But it also ignited the Billies, and just nine seconds later they began their fourth period parade of goals. Lorenzo Zendano, Jeff Browne, Brendan DesRosiers, and Fuzak were the goal scorers.
“The four power play goals really woke us up,” Suchyna said. “We were having trouble with all the power play goals, so we really just needed to get back to our game, our foundation: fast talented team. And we succeeded.”
Suchyna assisted Fuzak’s goal to get his number on the stat sheet once more today.
“We don’t play the hugest roles, but we try to help out when we can,” Suchyna said of himself and Fuzak. “They’re a really talented bunch, our top five, but we can really help them out. We had a plus-5 altogether, and we try helping out as we can.”
“One of the good things about us is we got secondary scoring,” Green said. “That’s really important for us to be successful. Earlier in the season, we’ve had kind of our go-to guys scoring and contributing, so to have other guys come in to play and score, it makes them feel good, part of the team, the Jake Fuzaks and Michael Suchyna. Not only that, I thought other players did real good defensively for us, made some great plays, so we’ll just use that as a building block to hopefully just continue to keep working on the stuff we’re working on.”
Fuzak was excited after the high-scoring win and thinks it was just a glimpse of what the team is capable of.
“It shows our composure,” Fuzak said. “And we’ll probably take from it and learn because if we can score four goals in one period, why can’t we score four goals every period? I guess what we’ll take away from this is that we just need to keep our feet moving, keep going, keep playing as a team, and then we’ll win some games.”
“We’ll take goals any way we can get them,” Suchyna said. “I think half of our goals were rebounds, and every goal counts, and if it gets us the win, it gets us the win.”