Bowling Green is a case study in how quickly fortunes can change in college hockey.
With six games left to play in their season, the Falcons are now in fourth place in the CCHA, still very much in the race for the MacNaughton Cup.
But that wasn’t always the case.
“Coming into the year, and if we’re having this conversation in the preseason, in August, we felt like we were going to have a good team. We were picked to finish third by the coaches,” head coach Ty Eigner said in a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon. “Obviously, we went through what we went through, and I do think it just took us some time to get our footing. And now we’re at a point where our program, our guys and our staff, everybody’s moved past that and moved forward. These players deserve all the credit.”
Eigner, of course, is referring to the incident that happened right before the season began that involved former player Austen Swankler and accusations of hazing. Eigner and several players were suspended before it was found that no hazing occurred. The players were cleared, but the Falcons played several games at the beginning of the season with no coach and a sorely depleted squad. Back then, it didn’t seem like the Falcons would be competing for much of anything in February and March.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, the Falcons have gone from a precarious position–at the holiday break, they were lingering near the bottom of the CCHA standings in seventh place–to a legitimate shot at the CCHA title. The Falcons (12-16-0, 10-8-0 CCHA) have 30 points and are just five points off league-leaders Minnesota State with two games in hand. Granted, part of this is due to the fact that the Mavericks are not the sure-fire favorites they have been in the past. The league as a whole has also been average outside of the conference. But that just made conference games all that much more important, which might explain why five teams still have a shot at the league championship with just three weeks to go in the regular season.
“Minnesota State did such a good job prior to this,” Eigner said of the league’s parity this year. “It was always Minnesota State and then everybody else fighting for second, and that was always a close race. But now, it’s everybody fighting for first and that’s a good thing. And again, we’ve said all year long that if you get surprised by your opponent playing well, then that’s on you, because I think every team in our league has won a series on the road and everybody’s swept a series at home. And so if anybody is surprised by the results, then they’re not paying attention.”
The Falcons have also helped themselves get into this position by simply winning when it matters. After coming back from the holiday break and being swept by Ohio State in early January, BG has won five of six games. First they split with Minnesota State–which was their first win over the Mavericks since 2019–then they swept Ferris State and Lake Superior to move into a tie for fourth place.
And the way they got those wins bodes well for the Falcons. They scored at least three goals in all five wins, but most significantly, their scoring came from all over the place.
“The way we recruit and the way we build and build our team is we want to be a four-line team, and if we have 12 forwards and seven D on a night then everybody’s going, and if we have 13 forwards and six D, everybody’s going,” Eigner said. “We don’t want to have to rely on one pair of D who plays 27 minutes and then everybody else is kind of mixed in, we want everybody to have a role and everybody to feel like they’re going to contribute and that’s what this team has been doing. And the last six, eight games, when we’ve had the success we’ve had, it’s because we’ve been able to do that.”
The Falcons will be needing to use some of that depth going forward, since they will be without leading scorer Ryan O’Hara. Eigner said he had season-ending knee surgery last week and will miss the rest of the year. They’ll also be without junior defenseman Ben Wozney, who had shoulder surgery this week.
Still, it seems BG’s depth has been on display and they’d had players step up. The win against MSU, for example, had four different goal scorers. In the Ferris State series, freshman defenseman Michael Bevilacqua had two goals and an assist while freshman forward Ben Duran had a goal and two assists. Against Lake State (a 6-3 and 4-2 sweep) it was Quinn Emerson and Ethan Scardina who led the way in two different games.
“So we’ve had guys step up, they’ve had opportunities. For example, Ethan Scardina had a good weekend this weekend up front, and Ben Duran had a good weekend. On the backend it’s Gustav Stjernberg one night, or it’s Michael Bevilacqua. Or it’s Eric Parker, who has been playing really well,” Eigner said. “So we’re getting contributions from all our lines and then our D – all six or seven D depending on the night – are contributing whether it’s on the five-on-five, on the power player, or on the penalty kill, so that’s a good spot to be in.”
The Falcons have a big series this weekend against one of the teams ahead of them in the standings. They travel to Minnesota to take on second-place St. Thomas on Friday and Saturday. The Tommies (13-14-1, 11-7-0) have 34 points and are just a point behind MSU for first. So depending on how the series goes, either St. Thomas or Bowling Green could be atop the standings by Saturday night.
The Tommies swept the Falcons in Ohio way back in November, but BG was a different team back then. Still, Eigner knows just how strong a team the Tommies are and has been very impressed with the way they have played this season.
“We didn’t have our full lineup, but that’s not to take anything away from St. Thomas,” Eigner said. “Obviously they’ve done a really good job this year. Rico (Blasi, UST coach) and his staff have put themselves in a position where they believe they can win the league, which, for a program that’s in its third year, there’s something to be said for that.”
