Both Sweet Home coach Dave Gerspach and Kenmore West coach Rob Roszak agreed that neither team deserved to lose on Thursday night. And in a 1-1 tie in which shots were 28-24 in favor of Kenmore West, no one did.
“If you ask the Sweet Home coach, I think he’d be pretty happy with a point too,” Roszak said. “I think a point is probably the fairest result tonight, I think. I don’t think either team really deserved to lose that game. I think they played pretty hard.”
“They didn’t get a late goal; we didn’t get a late goal,” Gerspach said. “It was probably an even game. If you look at shots on net, they had a couple more than we did. I thought we had a couple more quality chances on odd-man rushes and stuff, so it’s a tie. You think, ‘One bounce here, we could have won,’ but one bounce — I wouldn’t want to be walking down this hallway with a loss tonight.”
Sweet Home sophomore defenseman Andrew Czyz scored the first goal of the game 4:47 into the first period to give the Panthers a 1-0 lead.
“On the power play, the play was to get it back and just walk it across and just rip one from the point, and if it doesn’t go in, get some rebounds, and that’s really it,” Czyz said.
Czyz has stepped up his offense this season. He’s one of four Sweet Home players with four goals in seven league games so far. He’s doing his best to fill a role left by one of last year’s seniors.
“I’ve just been trying to shoot the puck a little more because last year, we had Jack Cooper, who had a really good shot, but he graduated, and now I kinda have to step it up here, and that’s what I’m trying to do this year,” Czyz explained.
He isn’t the only sophomore playing well this season, and Gerspach was once again impressed by his team’s play against another of mostly juniors and seniors.
“He’s been scoring a ton of goals,” Gerspach said of Czyz. “He just fires that puck for a sophomore, and really, for a bunch of sophomores, they’re playing really really well. if you look at the rosters of other teams, they’re loaded with seniors and juniors, and so it’s good for the next two years, but we’re hoping to take the division this year.”
The game-tying goal came from Kenmore West junior Ben Serrano less than two minutes into the third period.
“I kinda just was hoping for the loose puck and got it and just looked at the net, put it on net, saw he was down, and saw a corner open, so I took the shot, and got a goal,” Serrano explained.
Through overtime, Sweet Home had just two shots on goal, while Kenmore West had just one. The game ended after five minutes of overtime, and each team earned a point.
“We knew this would be a tough team to play against, so I don’t know if we were expecting a tie, but we did not want to lose it,” Czyz said.
Both coaches agreed that Sweet Home came out stronger but Kenmore West was stronger in the second and at least the beginning of the third. The timing of each goal certainly made it look that way.
“I thought we struggled in the first period quite a bit, and I thought we got our legs in the second and third, and it was a pretty even game both ways,” Roszak said. “It’s really hard to play on this rink when you don’t play here every game. I think we adapted and adjusted as well as the game went on.”
“I really liked the way we played in the first,” Gerspach said. “Thought we came out, controlled the period, did a lot of things we wanted to do. First maybe five minutes of the second. Then they really dominated that second 10 minutes of that second period and really took the game away from us. Had a lot of chances, a lot of scoring. In the third, we came back. I thought we were the better team in the third. Thought we had a lot of chances the whole game and just could not bury them.”
Serrano thought that the strong second and third should have been enough for Kenmore West to win.
“We should have won,” Serrano said. “We came out a little slow in the beginning, then we started getting our momentum back. Got our shots on net, but we weren’t finishing, but it definitely should have been a win for our team. We played hard, fought to the end. I’m happy about that, but…”
Serrano saw little things that the Blue Devils could have done better, but Gerspach saw the same with the Panthers, and it would be tough to find a more even game.
“Loose pucks,” Serrano said. “We could have buried loose pucks better, put them in the net; 50/50 battles, should have won those more. Small things.”
“Lot of rebounds, lot of pucks just sitting there,” Gerspach said. “That’s been our struggle all year: we’ve had chances, we’re just not burying those.”