Michael Stack is trying something new this season. The Lewiston-Porter assistant captain played defense last year for the Lancers, but this year he’s right up front — on the ice and in the scoring column.
“Last year I played defense, and I was alright at it,” Stack said. “My coaches liked how I played. I always thought I played fairly physical, and I always played good in our D zone, but I played forward for my travel team, and I had some pretty goals, and my coaches saw that the first couple days of tryouts, and they thought they’d move me up to forward, and I’ve had some good success with it since the season started.”
Stack scored in Lew-Port’s first game against North Tonawanda on Monday night (Nov. 28), and he added two more Wednesday (Nov. 30) against Lockport in a 6-2 Lancers win.
“Stack, he’s awesome,” said Lew-Port coach Kevin Kirsch. “He’s all effort, all heart, and he’s got three goals in our first two games, so there’s no looking back on that one. He’s not going back on defense.”
Stack almost didn’t have the chance to score his two goals on Wednesday night when he took a hard slide into the boards and an accidental kick to the head in the first period. He sat the rest of the first as a precaution but took a skate after the period and came back out for the second.
And then?
“I scored two goals and I couldn’t have had more fun with it,” Stack said with a smile. “I love this group of boys. My cousin Mat Carden, he’s always setting me up, so he knows where I’m at at all times.”
Mat Carden picked up three assists Wednesday night, including both of Stack’s goals. Aidan DeCastro had a goal and an assist, Jacob Peters and Ryan Russell each scored once, and junior Ryan Sharer scored his first Fed goal and picked up an assist as well.
Sharer’s goal came 11:18 into the first period and gave the Lancers a 3-0 lead.
“It started in the corner,” Sharer said. “Ryan Russell took the hard shot. He fumbled it in his skates. I turned around and popped it up. I was psyched. It was great.”
“It was awesome,” said Stack.
Lockport’s Brandon Rice scored late in the first, and the second was scoreless. The Lancers had a chance to talk in the locker room after the second.
“Getting back and playing structured hockey,” Kirsch said. “We were getting a little sloppy. Lockport, give them credit, they were still coming hard. A 3-1 game, they’re still in it. They were playing hard. We were just getting sloppy and trying to play individual hockey, so we talked about getting back into the team game, playing our system, playing our structure, and things worked it.”
“After the second, we talked about not playing a hard game, not communicating, knowing when we had to get it out of the zone,” Stack said. “They were trying a tight coverage. They were having their wingers on our wingers escaping the zone, and that made it hard for us to create a fairly normal breakout, so we just worked on ways for our D-men to get it out and make it easy for us, so we could actually get it out.”
The Lions made the game even closer early in the third as Drew Gmerek scored on the power play 3:50 into the period. But it was less than 30 seconds later when Stack scored his first of the night.
Sharer called the Lockport goal a wakeup call, and Stack agreed. He added another less than four minutes later, and Aidan DeCastro sealed the 6-2 win with 3:07 left in regulation.
The game in its entirety was a wakeup call for the Lancers. What Stack had been trying to tell his teammates even before the season was finally made clear.
“I’ve been telling my teammates since we started that we can’t underestimate any teams, and we knew that going in,” Stack said. “As soon as we start to underestimate a team, that’s when it starts to go downhill. We don’t wanna do that this year. This is an important year for all of us, and it being my senior year, I wanna go out with a bang.”
Stack doesn’t expect the Lancers to underestimate another team anytime soon.
“We can’t let up anymore,” he said. “We gotta come out firing on all cylinders and we can’t take any team lightly. We’re not going to for the rest of the season.”