Winning its first-ever regular-season conference title in program history last Friday wasn’t just satisfying for Western Michigan on a surface level.
The Broncos were already well aware of what the Penrose Cup looked like ahead of WMU’s 6-4 win Friday against North Dakota, which saw Western lock up the NCHC regular season title with three games to spare.
In the 12 years since NCHC play began, and with WMU a member school all that time, the Broncos had been in the same building several times as that massive silver chalice. Until last week, though, they had never put their mitts on it.
“We’ve been on the other side of it at least two or three times with North Dakota, and once with Denver so we’ve been in the building when it’s been presented many times,” WMU coach Pat Ferschweiler said. “This is the first time it’s been presented to us, and it’s a cooler feeling.
“The numbers were working in our favor as we crept through the back half of the season here, and we’ve been able to get points in every game but one, 21 of 22 games in the league, which in this league is absolutely remarkable.
“It certainly shows a consistency of play and competitiveness of our players, and with two games in hand, we wanted to close it out at home, and I couldn’t be happier for this group of young men,” Ferschweiler continued. “They’re a dream to coach, they love coming to the rink and they love to work real hard.”
Two power-play goals, and six all told from six different players, helped WMU take Friday’s series opener with a North Dakota team firmly on the NCAA tournament bubble. To that end, the Fighting Hawks did themselves a favor in winning Saturday’s game, 4-3 in overtime.
A lot of people were wrong on WMU this season. The Broncos were picked sixth in the NCHC’s preseason poll. Whoops. They opened league play 6-0-1 and, by and large, kept rolling. Two wins this weekend against Miami, plus a good NCHC postseason run, could help the Broncos tie up a No. 1 regional seed for the NCAA tournament. But, first thing’s first.
“We’re approaching Friday’s game as our most important game of the year,” Ferschweiler said of WMU’s road series this weekend with Miami. “We do that every game, and we’ll stick with that.
“We have a stated goal from the start of the year to get better every day, and we’re certainly not a perfect team but we’re working on improving. We’ve had two fantastic days of practice this week, and I’m looking forward to us being on top for our series at Miami.”
And once that series is out of the way, Ferschweiler’s team will turn its attention to the back half of what it wants to accomplish this season.
“We have a chance to play for four championships,” he said. “First was the Great Lakes Invitational, and we lost in the championship game, and the second is the regular season (conference title), and we were able to win that, and that’s great but there’s two more championships to compete for: the (NCHC) Frozen Faceoff and hopefully the NCAA tournament.
“We’re going to take them one by one, we’re going to go one day at a time, and we have a real mature group that doesn’t get ahead of themselves, and they don’t look back. They rip off the rear-view mirror and stare out the windshield.”
