The NESCAC champions from Trinity are riding an eight game win streak to close out the regular season and conference tournament. During the NESCAC playoffs, the Bantams surrendered just one goal in three games playing stifling defense and scoring early and opportunistically to advance into the NCAA tournament. The early part of the season did not play out like anything close to the consistency and results found in February and early March, but the team and the coaching staff is happy they found it now and bring a lot of confidence into their first round game against Babson on Saturday.
“It really has been quite a year and very much a work in progress,” said head coach Matt Greason. “We went from having a roster with 387 man-games on defense to starting this season with just 37 man-games on the blueline. Experience and leadership matter and in the early part of the season we were struggling with both as well as lacking the ability to score goals. We really had to take a step back and change how we were doing things. I give credit to the whole roster who was willing to make changes and right now we are playing how we want to play and how we can be successful on the ice.”
Early in the season it was players like Jax Murray (9-12-21; +10) and Gerard Maretta (13-9-22; +7) who were carrying the team as the inconsistency in play went across most of the roster. In the second half, NESCAC Player-of-the-Year, Lucas Michaud (9-14-23; +10) found his game and some key role players have emerged with a much more experienced and physical defensive unit playing well in front of goaltenders Patrick Pugiliese and JP Mella.
“We didn’t find our identity as a team until later in the season,” said Greason. “Now, we have great leadership, depth and experience on the back-end, solid goaltending and we are becoming difficult to play against with the emergence of guys like [Devan Tongue], Riley [Prattson] and Cole [Poliziani]. I thought our team defense has been outstanding and certainly in the NESCAC tournament we played a strong 200-foot game. We are going to need that against a Babson team that has great talent, speed and discipline while being very selfless as a group playing for each other. It should be a great game.”
With Patrick Pugliese working through an injury, the goaltending duties have been handed over to sophomore JP Mella and he has delivered for the Bantams going 8-1-1 with a pair of shutouts and a stellar 1.59 goals-against average. Mella shutout Connecticut College and Williams in the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds of the conference tournament and only yielded a late third period goal to Colby in the Bantams run to the conference title.
“JP has really stepped up for us,” noted Gleason. “He made pretty much all the saves he needed to in the NESCAC tournament, and our team game really has been solid. We are excited to play in the national tournament and know all of the opponents are here because they are freaking good at hockey. We have our work cut out for us on Saturday in a building we have never played in. We will practice there on Friday and get ready for the Beavers on Saturday.”
