UVM SPORTS
photo by Sally McCay
Power play
Charting a new future for women's hockey
Deep inside Gutterson Fieldhouse, it’s moments before women’s hockey practice, the final one before the first home game of the season. The locker room thumps with last-minute preparations. Senior Gabe Worzella of Madison, Connecticut, one of three newly minted captains for the team, tapes up her stick. Shivaun Siegl, a senior from Livonia, New York, and the team’s starting goalie,snacks on a giant, pink-frosted macadamia-nut cookie that was presented for freshman Korrie Peckham’s nineteenth birthday. And junior Kate Lesniak of Buffalo fiddles with the stereo system; the mellow beat of Snow Patrol doesn’t cut it for the current mood. “Does anyone have any other CDs?” she shouts. “Does anyone have an iPod?”
Out in the rink, the Zamboni smoothes the last strip of milky white ice into a glistening surface lined by boards with sponsors’ logos: McDonald’s, TD Banknorth, Mr. Mike’s Pizza. As the team piles out of the locker room and files under the bleachers, the clip-clop of skates and swish of nylon hockey pants gives way to whoops and hollers when the players hit the ice. Chelsea Furlani, a freshman forward from Colchester, fires a shot against an American Red Cross board that reads, “Give Blood.”
It’s an apt move from a member of a team that is poised for a fierce new future starting this winter. Sure, last season’s twenty-nine losses, three wins, and two ties might have indicated the Catamounts needed a little Red Cross themselves. But then came the hat trick of a new coach—Canada’s Tim Bothwell—new players, and new attention from UVM Athletics. “We haven’t won a game yet,” says freshman Sash Hochlander of Calgary while waiting to join her teammates for a Wednesday-afternoon strength and conditioning session. “But each time we go out on the ice, there’s a purpose.”
BETTER EVERY DAY
Women’s hockey first emerged from the UVM locker room as a club sport in the winter of 1995-1996 and went varsity in 1998-99. The game had been played among women for more than one hundred years; the earliest recorded match was in Ottawa in 1891. But it would take an assist from gold-medaling Cammi Granato and her teammates at an Olympic debut, during the 1998 Nagano Games, to push the sport onto center ice.
“Women’s hockey has really exploded,” says Robert Corran, UVM’s director of athletics. Before coming to Burlington, Corran started varsity women’s hockey as AD at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and then helped steer the program to three national championships in its first four years.
Upon arriving at UVM in 2003 and surveying the surrounding women’s hockey hotbed—Quebec, Toronto, and the all-girls North American Hockey Academy—along with the tradition of the men’s program and the types of students the school naturally attracts, Corran saw the same potential in the Catamounts. “With the right strategic investments, we can have success at the national level,” he says.
On the first major investment—a new coach—Corran says UVM hit the jackpot. Bothwell picked up the game in Ontario and played hockey for Brown University, the New York Rangers (under Miracle on Ice legend Herb Brooks), the St. Louis Blues, and the Hartford Whalers before coaching. His last stint? Guiding the Canadian women’s national hockey team. “We’re very fortunate to have someone of his experience,” says Corran. “I felt we needed someone who is a teacher, and that’s one of Tim’s strengths.”
Hochlander and other players describe Bothwell as calm and even-keeled; indeed, his approach seems to serve as the yin to the yang of the raucous, frenetic energy that bounces around the Catamounts’ locker room. “We’re not the most talented team, and that’s OK,” he says over a slice of pizza one fall afternoon. “We’re working as hard as we can to just get better every day—that’s the whole theme for us this year.”
Along with assistant coaches Emily McKissock and Mike Gilligan, Bothwell has made changes aimed to optimize players’ energy, such as splitting Wednesdays into early mornings on the ice, evenings in the strength and conditioning room. And whether the team is marching across campus in their gray and green sweats, warming up on trainer bikes to Snoop Dogg, or performing overhead lunges and Frankenstein-like high kicks, a spirit of unity pervades. “It may not show it according to our record, but I think we’re there,” Siegl says. “As far as a unit, a team, we’re in good shape.”
During the last Thursday night practice before the first home game, against Sacred Heart, the team works on power-play breakouts, simulating game action. “It’s all about timing,” says Bothwell of some of his drills. “Sometimes you want to control your speed and control your effort to save it for the right moment.”
WINNING WEEKEND
On Friday night, the Catamounts are back in the locker room, listening to Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson, and Britney Spears as they suit up for Sacred Heart. Around the Gut, families are clapping plastic thundersticks; the attendance of 322 is a fraction of the men’s games, but it’s a start. (On Saturday, fans include the brother of captain Gabe Worzella and three of his friends, wearing Sharpie’d letters of G-A-B-E across their shirtless chests.)
Worzella and others know they have a chance of winning this weekend. And then they do, dousing an eleven-game losing streak with a 6-2 win on Friday night and a 3-2 win on Saturday afternoon. Furlani scores a goal in each game and is named Hockey East rookie of the week while fellow freshman Jackie Thode is one goal away from a hat trick on Saturday and is named one of the Vermont student-athletes of the week. “It was a long time coming for our team,” Worzella says. “Excitement was just radiating off everyone.”
The glow will only last so long, as the following weekend, St. Cloud State breezes by the Catamounts with two 7-0, 6-0 victories. But the rhythm of the team remains uninterrupted as the players pile in and pile out of the locker room with a new sense of purpose for the next game, and the game after that. As coach Bothwell says, it’s all about timing.SPORTS SHORTS
BEATING BC
First #14 fell, then #22, as the Catamount men’s and women’s basketball teams pulled off a sweep of highly ranked Boston College squads in November. The men led most of the way and prevailed 77-63 over #14 BC in a game on the Eagles’ home court. The win was Vermont’s second ever over a ranked opponent and first over an Atlantic Coast Conference school. Sophomore Mike Trimboli led the Cats with seventeen points, eight assists, and six rebounds. Senior Chris Holm picked up his third career double-double with fifteen points and ten rebounds.
Twelve days later it was the women’s turn, as the Catamounts upset #22 Boston College 56-48 in the championship game of the URI Invitational tournament. It marked the team’s fourth straight win and second straight in-season tournament title after winning UVM’s own TD Banknorth Classic the previous weekend. The win also marked Vermont's first victory over a ranked opponent in the history of the program. “This win validates that the hard work we put in day in and day out pays dividends,” said head coach Sharon Dawley.
As VQ went to press, the men’s record stood at 4-4. The women were 6-2. One of the losses was a hard-fought game against Minnesota, led by former UVM coach Pam Borton.
TRAPANI II
The quick emergence of freshman forward Joe Trapani is among a number of good signs for coach Mike Lonergan’s men’s basketball team. Trapani is a familiar name at Patrick Gym. Joe is the son of former UVM standout Charlie Trapani ’78, who was a three-time captain of the Catamounts and the team’s MVP in 1976.
HOT NOVEMBER
After a narrow 1-0 loss at Boston College in early November, the Catamount men’s hockey team ran the tables on the rest of the month, putting together a winning streak that included wins over Providence, UMass, Boston University, Harvard, and a stirring 3-2 win at Gutterson over second-ranked Maine.
Prior to the winning November, the Cats got the season off to a strong start in early October by taking the Ice Breaker Invitational with a win over eighth-ranked Miami University in front of a sellout crowd on the RedHawks home ice in Oxford, Ohio.
As VQ went to press, the Catamounts’ record stood at 9-5-1 (6-2-1 in Hockey East), putting them in second place in the league and earning a #14 ranking nationally.
UVM SOUTH
Perrin to St. Louis, goal! That sequence of events so familiar to Catamount hockey fans broke a 1-1 tie at 7:12 of the second period in the Tampa Bay Lightning’s 5-1 victory over the New York Islanders on November 6. It was the first time that Eric Perrin and Martin St. Louis, childhood friends and UVM teammates, had combined on an NHL goal. According to an AP report, Tampa Bay general manager Jay Feaster smiled in the press box and suggested the Vermont fight song should be played as the Lightning celebrated.
(for UVM staff)