UVM SPORTS

 
photo by Bill DiLillo

In the spotlight
Catamounts close out debut season in Hockey East

Vermont finished its first season in powerful Hockey East with an 18-14-6 overall mark, and at 10-11-6 placed sixth in the league. The season ended in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament with a pair of losses to Boston College at Conte Forum.

“We faced a lot of adversity tonight,” Vermont head coach Kevin Sneddon said after the final game. “I was real proud of the way the guys tried to overcome it. It’s been a difficult year in that I don’t think any other team out there understands what it’s like to have the spotlight as the ‘new team,’ with the exception of maybe Quinnipiac. I think our kids battled and I really congratulated them, in particular the seniors, for doing such a great job under all that pressure.”

Vermont was ranked in the top 20 teams in the nation for 22 straight weeks over the course of the season and rose as high as #3 in December. For much of the year, stingy defense was the hallmark of the Catamount team. Heading into the Hockey East tournament, Vermont was tied with Wisconsin for the second best scoring defense in the country at 2.03 goals against per game and only three teams in the nation had given up fewer than UVM’s 73 goals.

Senior captain Jaime Sifers stacked up the honors in his final season as a Catamount. Sifers was named one of seven finalists for the 2006 Hockey Humanitarian Award given annually to college hockey’s finest citizen; he was invited to take part in the NCAA skills challenge at the Frozen Four; and, together with the Cats’ sophomore goalie Joe Fallon, he was selected as a semi-finalist for the 2006 Walter Brown Award, presented annually to the best American-born college hockey player in New England.

As the Hockey East era opened, UVM Athletics honored the past by asking fans to vote for an all-time UVM men’s hockey team from the ECAC years. With more than 2,700 votes cast, here are the picks. Goaltenders: Dave Reece ’71, Tim Thomas ’97. Defensemen: Louis Cote ’80, George Kreiner ’70, Aaron Miller ’93, Ted Yeates ’72. Forwards: Ian Boyce ’88, Craig Homola ’81, John LeClair ’91, Tim O’Connell ’76, Eric Perrin ’97, Martin St. Louis ’97.  

SKIING: EASTERN SWEEP
Vermont owned the east this season, taking all of the EISA meets, including the championship. The Cats came away from the NCAA Championships in March with a fifth place finish. Host Colorado won the competition at Steamboat Springs.

Overall Vermont had six All-American citations at the 2006 NCAAs. Senior Jamie Kingsbury and sophomore Jilyne McDonald were both first-team All-Americans. Sophomore Zac Brown, senior captain Kate Crawford, senior Paul Epstein, and sophomore Greg Hardy were second-team All-Americans.

Highlights of the EISA Championships included Greg Hardy’s twin victories in the giant slalom and slalom. In the women’s giant slalom Vermont took three of the top four spots led by senior Amy Cochran who had her best race of the season finishing in second place. Sophomore Jilyne McDonald took third in the GS and senior Jamie Kingsbury was fourth. In Nordic events, Kate Crawford took third in the women’s 5k classical and Anja Jokela followed her in at fifth. In all, 13 Vermont skiers were named to the All-East team for performances that brought the Catamounts their 30th EISA Championship.

MEN’S BASKETBALL: TOURNEY RUN
With a pair of upsets in the first two rounds of the 2006 America East Championship, the three-time defending conference champion Catamounts rekindled the tournament magic of recent years. But visions of a fourth consecutive trip to the NCAA Championship Tournament were cut short by Albany. The top-seeded Great Danes closed out Vermont’s bid with an 80-67 victory.

Sixth-seeded in the America East tournament, UVM became the lowest seed in conference history to reach the championship game and its title run followed a difficult route. Vermont toppled third-seeded Boston University and second-seeded Binghamton to reach the finals, making UVM coach Mike Lonergan the third first-year coach in America East history to lead his team to the title game. The Catamounts finished 11-16, 7-9 America East, over the regular season.

With Mike Trimboli winning the 2006 America East Rookie of the Year Award, it marks the sixth straight season that a Catamount has won a major conference award. In this span, Vermont has had four Kevin Roberson America East Players of the Year (T.J. Sorrentine, 2002; Taylor Coppenrath, 2003-05), three rookies of the year (Sorrentine, 2001; Coppenrath, 2002) and one coach of the year (Tom Brennan, 2002).

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL: PAIR EARN AE HONORS
The second-seeded Stony Brook Seawolves made six of seven free throws in the final 27 seconds to hang on for a 59-52 win over seventh-seeded Vermont, bringing an end to the Catamounts’ season  in the America East Quarterfinals.

“I loved the team’s intensity and effort today,” said Vermont head coach Sharon Dawley. “We played defense with a refuse to lose attitude and had a great battle with Stony Brook. If we had gotten a couple of buckets to fall at the end it would have been a different story. The freshmen—Kelli Poles, Amy Rosenkrantz, Andrea Cihal—played great today, especially Kelli on the block. It shows we’ve got a good future with those three returning, along with Jill (Rademacher) and Sy (Janousek)."

Vermont closed out the 2005-06 campaign with a record of 9-18. Sophomore Alexis Castro, the league’s leading scorer, was selected to the America East All-Conference First Team. Freshman Andrea Cihal earned America East All-Rookie honors.

SPORTS SHORTS
The women’s lacrosse team opened with four straight wins, marking the team’s best start in 12 years. The women’s field hockey team had 10 student-athletes named to the National Field Hockey Coaches Association Division I National Academic Squad. The Catamounts posted a 3.30 team grade point average during the fall semester, second only to the University of Louisville. After serving as head coach of the women’s hockey team for the past 10 seasons, Dennis Miller ’89 has resigned his position, citing a desire to step back from the all-consuming demands of Division I coaching. “It’s time for me to reconnect and re-energize,” said Miller. A national search for a new coach is under way. The team finished the 2005-06 season 3-29-2 overall and 1-19-1 in Hockey East play. In track and field, Carmen Lagala took second in the 800 meters at the ECAC Indoor Track and Field Championships. Her 2:08.03 is a new school record. At the New England Championships, Sean Steinhagen set a new school record for men in the same event, posting a time of 1:52.40 to finish fourth. Women’s swimming and diving recorded their first winning season since 1991-92 with a record of 9-7. Seven school and eight freshmen records were also broken during the season.           
—Compiled from Athletic Communications reports

STRONG-ARM
Infielder finds groove on the mound
There’s a batting cage next to the headquarters of ESPN in Bristol, Connecticut, where pro baseball players occasionally take the pitching machine to task, sending balls into the stratosphere. Chris Marsh ’06 grew up nearby and relished the chance to watch all-stars like Rob Dibble and Harold Reynolds do their thing.

Such sights can be both inspiring and intimidating to a boy with big-league dreams. A pre-teen Marsh was awestruck by the ability of these men to dominate a machine spitting out 90-mile-an-hour fastballs. Fortunately, he wasn’t a pitcher.

Years later, that would change. Well into his UVM career, the third baseman was called upon to help a semi-depleted pitching staff. His first assignment: stop the nation’s top collegiate home run hitter. Flashback to the cage in Bristol? Maybe.

“I got hit pretty hard my first time out,” recalls Marsh, who, like the pitching machine can throw in the nineties. “I’d always joked around saying things like, ‘Hey, let me throw off the mound.’ We were short on arms, so the coaches told me to give it a shot. I was a little skittish at first and I couldn’t feel my arm for about a week, but I’ve adjusted.”

Marsh’s unexpected foray into relief pitching—a move that put the right-hander on the America East All-Conference First Team with a school record six saves and a stingy 1.38 ERA, is just one of many unexpected curves skillfully handled by the senior accounting major. His original vision of college life included three things: skiing, studying and baseball. And although he’s done all these at a very high level (he has a 3.7 GPA), Marsh’s college experience turned out to be a much broader experience.
 
Marsh’s involvement in the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, an NCAA organization for student-athletes to provide insight on the student-athlete experience, started as a sophomore. He’s also helped organize blood drives, collect food for the Burlington Food Shelf, and bring speakers to campus.

“The last four years have really helped me grow as a person, especially with things like time management, playing a leadership role, and helping others,” he says.

“I’ve always been taught to think of life after baseball and to never put all my eggs in one basket,” adds Marsh, who starts work at the Boston accounting firm of Grant-Thornton after graduation, assuming he doesn’t elect to chase the baseball dream. “If I was drafted that would be great, but I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been here and have some pretty good options if it doesn’t happen.”
—Jon Reidel

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