Missed Messages

June 14, 2020

As she skated to the blue line at The Ohio State University Ice Rink for the pregame ceremonials prior to the Buckeyes’ 2017-18 opener against Michigan, Nora Anderson was a bit nervous.

It’s natural, of course, for anyone in Anderson’s skates to feel some anxiety. She was about to do something she had done on numerous occasions previously, however this time was different. Not only was it the season-launching contest against the hated team up north, it was her debut in scarlet and grey. And while nobody will confuse a typical ACHA women’s game atmosphere for Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, Anderson was nevertheless the center of attention on a bigger stage than she had known to that point.

But, when things came down to it, her best instincts kicked in. The familiar opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, Anderson dropped to one knee, and she was joined by teammates Kaitlin Berigan, Julia Phillips, and Mikayla Richter.

---

You undoubtedly know Colin Kaepernick. While the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback didn’t invent the concept of national anthem protests, he became the modern face of them in 2016 when he began taking a knee to draw attention to police brutality and other issues facing people of color. Kaepernick was eventually joined by roughly 200 other NFL players at one point, before the league effected a policy against the practice prior to the 2018 season (and probably blackballed Kaepernick as well).

It’s likely that you also know Megan Rapinoe. The U.S. national soccer team star backed Kaepernick’s efforts by kneeling prior to a match against Thailand in 2016 (and once before that with the Seattle Reign, her professional team), but was similarly cut off from future protests by a hastily-enacted U.S. Soccer Federation rule.

If you’re a hockey person, you’re probably familiar with John Tortorella and J.T. Brown as well. The fiery Tortorella, the Columbus Blue Jackets’ head coach, was asked about the Kaepernick protests in 2016 while coaching Team USA at the World Cup of Hockey and infamously said “If any of my players sit on the bench for the national anthem, they will sit there the rest of the game.” The hockey community, noted for its – let’s just come out and say it – whiteness, conservatism, and commitments to authority and the group ahead of any spirit of individualism, overwhelmingly supported Tortorella.

Brown, then playing with the Tampa Bay Lightning, was an exception, quickly tweeting “Wouldn’t benching a black man for taking a stance only further prove Kap’s point of oppression?” in response. He later backed up his words with action by raising his fist during the anthem on October 7, 2017 in support of Kaepernick and his cause.

“I remember that, and Seth Jones said he found kneeling disrespectful too,” Berigan said. “I thought it was a peaceful way to protest, and mostly I just saw how negatively it was taken. I was an intern with the Blue Jackets at the time, and one of my main jobs was to send out Leo [Welsh, the Jackets’ anthem singer] and the military honor guard every game. So I really felt like that wasn’t a safe place for me to voice my opinion.”

“It just always felt, especially in hockey, that kind of stuff just doesn’t fly.”

Nevertheless, just four miles north of Tortorella’s home ice in Nationwide Arena, seven days prior to Brown’s protest, and with much more anonymity than either man ever receives, Berigan, Anderson, and a couple of their teammates first made their own stand, by refusing to do so.

---

There are a few things you should understand about Anderson. She’s outspoken and passionate, that much may already be obvious, but her opinions are educated – she played hockey as a law student and is now an immigration attorney in Cincinnati – carefully considered, and deeply researched in a way that flies against the “outspoken and passionate” stereotype. And kneeling for the national anthem wasn’t something that came to her on a whim or because Kaepernick made it trendy.

“I haven’t stood for the national anthem in years,” she said. “I didn’t decide to do it in 2017 just out of the blue, it came to me slowly.”

Anderson (left) and Berigan (front)

Her upbringing was typically American in that she was raised in a culture of national reverence, enhanced by a dozen years in the Girl Scouts and its quasi-militaristic program of flag ceremonies and patriotic songs.

“I think that’s good actually, that you as a young person should learn the traditions of your country,” Anderson said. “But one of the things that really was an issue for me in the back of my mind was that growing up in Columbus, Columbus police are one of the most violent police forces in the country, and I think that’s very much still true to this day.”

A transformative experience came from a church-sponsored year of service she completed between her undergraduate degree and law school. Anderson lived as an economically disadvantaged person during that time, an attempt to truly understand the less fortunate.

“Experiencing the other end of life in Columbus, living in a low-income neighborhood, was really eye opening,” she said. “It was also at that point in time that the Ferguson protests were taking place. The combination of those two things were…what is it about this country that makes it worth respecting, that makes it worth standing for the national anthem? At that point, if I went to a major sporting event like an Ohio State football game, I would just sit down, I just wouldn’t do anything.”

“I still don’t stand for the national anthem, because people are still being murdered by the state.”

---

Anderson has a highly unconventional hockey background. She didn’t learn to skate until she was 22, and mostly learned the game playing roller hockey at Tuttle Park, as she put it, “just getting absolutely hustled, getting my ass kicked by all the roller hockey guys there.” Through that experience and sessions through the Chiller rinks, she eventually got to the point where she felt she could hang with the club team at Ohio State, fulfilling a dream of competing for the Buckeyes.

There was just one issue: her refusal to stand for the national anthem. Figuring she had nothing to lose, Anderson approached head coach Derrick Henderson, then the whole team, and found a receptive audience.

“My reaction was just shock,” Henderson said. “I didn’t think it was going to be a thing. Inevitably, you always think about what you’d do in that situation. I know what I would have done, or I’d like to think I know what I would have done, but as a coach, I can’t really do anything.”

“So when Nora comes up and she says she wants to do this, she says ‘I heard we play the anthem before games…yeah, I’m not doing that.’ And I was like wait, what? We’re all a team, I’ve got your back, that’s not a problem, but make sure it’s cool with your team. You guys have to have this discussion, because I don’t want to just drop things on them. Because if they don’t support it, then I can’t really support it, but we’ll figure out something to make it work for you.”

Henderson probably didn’t need to be worried. Ten minutes later, Richter and Phillips came up from OSU’s infamous basement locker rooms and said that they were in as well. Berigan missed that initial meeting due to her internship but caught wind of the idea later, and surprised Henderson by spontaneously joining the protest. While participation never exceeded four (of 14 players on the Buckeyes’ roster), nobody expressed any objections.

“The anthem didn’t really represent anything I believed either, so I thought it was really cool to have other girls on the team who had a similar way of thinking as I did,” Berigan said. “I had friends growing up that were Black, that played on my team, so I’d been discussing things with people since then. It seemed like the right thing to do, it didn’t really feel like a decision.”

The fact that her coach, Henderson, was Black wasn’t lost on her either.

“I think he really was kind of touched by that,” she said. “I don’t want to come across with the white savior mentality, but I didn’t realize how much until he started tweeting about it again recently. He still thinks about that, so I guess that made it worth it.”

Henderson acted as a point man and helped keep tensions to a minimum

From those initial steps, Henderson developed a plan to make sure everyone was protected and to reduce any possible friction. He cleared the idea with the university and its rec sports department, the CCWHA, and the ACHA, and those organizations were supportive. Home games, he reasoned, were in their house, so their wishes would apply. But for road games, he checked ahead with the hosts to make sure kneeling would be okay. Two teams, Mercyhurst and Miami, took issue, so Anderson and the others remained in the locker room during the anthem before those contests.

All in all, there were very few hiccups. Sure, there was plenty of awkwardness, a few people sharing photos with non-committal “I’m not taking sides here, just reporting the facts” comments, but many were also supportive. Michigan’s Caroline Hurd even joined in the kneeling during the season’s opening weekend.

“I honestly have so much respect for her, because I don’t know if I would’ve done it if it was just me,” Berigan said.

“After hearing all of the hype with Kaepernick and the NFL, and all of the backlash he got, it was a really interesting moment for me to experience it firsthand right before playing a hockey game,” Rachel Arias, who skated against the Buckeyes with Robert Morris, said. “It was definitely a moment where I felt like the girls were doing it out of respect for what they believe in.”

Then there was Adrian.

“Adrian was hysterical to me,” Henderson said. “At first when it happened, it was kind of like shock, people were like ‘oh my gosh.’ But we got through day one.”

“Day two we did it, and some girls in the crowd decided that they were going to quote-unquote taunt us by singing the national anthem, because they just used the canned music you get from YouTube.”

“And you know what happens when you’re singing a song and you get to a part and you realize you don’t know the words to this part, you just kind of mumble your way through it, power through to the part that you do know? You could kind of see that they got to a part where they didn’t really know the words. So it starts with them just belting out the national anthem, and then dying out and stopping because they forgot the words. That is priceless to me.”

By the time OSU traveled to take on the Bulldogs, the counter-narrative of “kneeling is disrespectful to the military” had fully taken hold. And Adrian might have been the most military-friendly team in the ACHA, outside of the service academies, thanks largely to a fundraiser that involved the team donating to Wounded Warrior Project for each goal scored.

There were a few taunts from fans following the anthem, then things spilled over to Twitter after the game. The Bulldogs’ Sam Fortune, who spearheaded the WWP fundraiser, was respectful and simply restated her beliefs: “I love my country. I respect our troops. And I will always stand for the national anthem! #FreedomAintFree,” followed by “Meanwhile we’re raising money for our veterans with our annual ‘goal-a-thon’ if you’d like to pledge plz visit our website! #WachaStands.” Others got a bit nastier.

“They were the only school, the only series of games, where somebody made a stink about it,” Henderson said. “We knew it wasn’t anything to do with the flag and the military because we’re smart people and can understand nuance.”

“People would come up to me and say ‘oh I have grandparents and family who served in the military, and that’s what the flag means to me.’ And I’d have to sit there and say, I’m Black. My grandfathers fought in the war. And you know what? When they came home from serving their country with honor and distinction, they had to come home to that same country not giving them personal freedoms. Not giving them the G.I. Bill loan with money they were promised they could get. Segregated housing, because the guy who created the town I was born in and lived in didn’t want Black people living in his town, despite the fact that it was supposed to be for military housing.”

“One of the things that really bothered me is that people would say ‘you’re disrespecting the flag, you’re disrespecting America,’” Anderson added. “In no way am I doing that. I think America was founded on the promise – the partial promise, I should say – that each person has the right to choose their own destiny and their own freedom.”

“If we had an America that lived up to that promise, one in which our Black citizens could literally have life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness, I think we would be in a much better place. Why can’t we live up to that promise? It’s a false narrative that it’s somehow disrespecting the troops. That’s not the case at all.”

---

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Whatever your beliefs, there’s something a bit jarring about an anthem protest. Something that violates comfort zones, following a lifetime of culturally-conditioned obedience to the phrase “ladies and gentlemen, please rise and remove your hats.” Even after seeing clips of various athletes kneeling hundreds of times over the previous year, witnessing the Buckeyes do it in person still made me say “whoa, this is big.” And that’s precisely the point.

“It’s intended to be a conversation starter, but not a conversation finisher,” Anderson explained. “Not standing for the national anthem is not the end-all be-all. If that’s the only thing you’re doing, then I don’t know why you’re here. If that is the end-all be-all of your activism, then you’re a weak activist.”

Really though, the activists were never the flaw.

Kaepernick tried to tell us, with his protests coming largely in reaction to the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner (the latter two coming at the hands of the police, and among many others) in 2013 and 2014. So did Rapinoe, Brown, and the quartet of Buckeyes in following Kaepernick’s lead. Former NHL player Akim Aliu detailed his experiences with racism through a heart-rending piece in The Players’ Tribune just last month.

For his part, Henderson tried to open the lines of communication several times during OSU’s version of the protests, but nobody took him up on the offer: “Nobody had the curiosity, they wanted their opinion, and then they left it at that.”

So we failed to receive each message, and the issue festered until a new round of police murders – most famously including George Floyd – lit up major cities across the world in protest, beginning in late May.

The recent events, necessarily more widespread, forceful, and jarring than ever before, have cast the kneelers in a new light and have forced a reckoning across the sports world as well. Kaepernick has largely been vindicated, a grassroots push to get him back in the NFL is underway, and it’s expected that numerous other players will begin kneeling when the season gets started. The U.S. Soccer Federation reversed their rule. Even Tortorella has come around a bit, recently telling The Athletic that he has “learned over the years, listening and watching, that men and women who choose to kneel during this time mean no disrespect toward the flag.”

“It’s not like there’s a hipster culture of ‘oh I was protesting before it was cool,’ that’s not at all how I feel,” Anderson said. If you come to the realization that something needs to change in this nation, I don’t care when you come to that conclusion, I just care that you’ve come there.”

“From the history of protests over Black people or other people of color being murdered by police, it’s been a very one-sided discussion. And I say that in a way that, one of the things that was very present in the Ferguson era, and that was only five, six years ago, was that it was primarily a series of Black protestors. And I think what a lot of white Americans have come to realize since then is that, again, if one person is not free, then I myself am not free. If the police can kill a Black person without any consequences, then what is to stop them from killing you without any consequences?”

---

At one point, I asked Henderson about his personal experiences with racism, and he wanted to know whether I meant the “Kaepernick stuff” or in hockey. I wasn’t even sure which one I meant, but maybe it doesn’t matter. The more one thinks about it, the more they seem connected. In a sense, they’re branches of the same tree – is it really that far of a leap from the guy who threw a banana at Wayne Simmonds on the ice to Derek Chauvin?

“It’s good that you have all of these NHLers coming out and saying ‘oh I listened and learned,’ and ‘oh I didn’t realize because I was just blind to it,’ and ‘oh I didn’t really understand,’ and it’s like dude. The Akim Aliu story was a huge story eight, nine years ago when it first happened and the kid was 16, and nobody said anything about it,” Henderson said. “He came out and told you when it happened again, like two years ago, and nobody said anything about it. But now, because of the riots and the protests, and now it’s in your face, now all of a sudden its time for you to perk your ears up and pay attention.”

“This is why this is still a problem. Nobody wanted to say anything until the world started burning.”

So now that everyone is paying attention, where do things go from here? Everyone seems to agree that this time at least has a chance of being different, of being something that creates lasting change. Ending racism might be a pipe dream in the short term, but maybe we can at least start down the road in the right direction.

“It’s sad that we’re still talking about it, but it’s also encouraging to see that there are so many people who, it seems, have changed their stance on it,” Berigan said. “They’re joining Black Lives Matter, going out to those protests, and actually listening to what the Black people in their lives have been through.”

“The message is getting out, people are starting to realize that there needs to be change, and then actually doing something about it. It’s more than just a conversation.”

Anderson, as might be expected from a lawyer, has policy ideas. Some of them center around stronger regulation of the police, fueled by bewilderment that an officer can have 71 use of force complaints and keep his job, as is the case with a Fort Lauderdale, FL cop who made headlines by shoving a protestor. She would like to see a free market approach to policing, with an elimination of qualified immunity and cops forced to carry malpractice insurance, much like a lawyer or a doctor. She also sees an issue with the level of training police have, compared with what she needed to practice law.

Other suggestions are more fundamental.

“What I would like to see, personally, is moving towards a society in which we do not need police,” she said. “Whenever you listen to true crime podcasts, about the worst of society, the dregs of society, serial killers, rapists, murderers, stuff like that. Each one of these people grew up in abject, disgusting conditions. So if you de-invest from the police, and you re-invest in the basic social safety of the United States…it’s not a big discussion because it costs quite a lot of money. But what if we took some of the money we spend on police and put it into that?”

“It really gets me that we’re putting police in situations they shouldn’t be in to begin with. Mental health checks? The cops are not the solution to that, at all. They’re not trained to deal with it. You can’t place all of the city’s problems on the back of one department, it’s literally unsustainable. Take some money that we don’t need to be spending on this, and spend it on programs that will reduce poverty, that will raise the standard of living in society.”

“There are some things you can legislate, but legislating and actually being the culture change, there’s a difference,” Henderson said, while citing examples as varied as shallow NHL team statements and former Rowan County, KY clerk Kim Davis. “The hope is that when you get some of the older generation to move on, the guys taking over can then institute the changes that need to be made. That’s not necessarily throwing the older generations under the bus, but in order for a culture change to take place, one of two things has to happen. One, the previous generation moves aside and the new group takes over and puts their stamp on it. Or two, you burn everything to the ground and rebuild and start over.”

“Like anything else, it’s just going to be time and a change in the culture, and that’s the hardest part.”

The Old Normal

June 4, 2020

Roosevelt’s Carla Pentimone leads Roosevelt’s star-studded Zoom workouts

In late February and early March, the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in North America and brought society to a standstill. Businesses were shut down. Stay-at-home orders were issued. A lot of people died, and even more people lost their jobs as the economy crashed. Joe Exotic (and his arch-nemesis, fish oil connoisseur Carole Baskin) somehow became a phenomenon.

Sports, along with every concert, trade show, and family reunion, were canceled – obviously, including the ACHA National Tournaments and the golf-a-thon disguised as an annual meeting.

While people focused on the teams qualifying for nationals and their ambiguous endings and lost chances in the early days of the situation (guilty), the fact is, even those who had finished their scheduled games sacrificed plenty as well. Team banquets, a cherished opportunity to celebrate the season, are a staple for most.

There is also the chance to skate and work out as a group without the pressures and physical toll of having games a couple days beforehand and a couple days afterwards. Those are helpful in a hockey sense, but even more so in terms of team building and simply having some fun. Players who are over 21, or can at least convince a bouncer they are, often hit the bars together. Beer league is another option, of course.

All of that was wiped out as restaurants, bars, rinks, and gyms went dark.

And not only was the end of 2019-20 canceled, as things have ground on, the timeline has inched further backwards to the point where the 2020-21 season isn’t entirely safe either. For now, we’re left with total nothingness, as we sit around, obsess over social media, and hope for the best.

Well, that’s not entirely true. As it turned out life, and the ACHA, found a way. That way largely involved Zoom, a previously-anonymous video conferencing app that lapped competitors from Apple, Google, and Microsoft to become the Starbucks of the virtual world this year: ubiquitous and universally-known, great for meeting up with people, but you need to buy something if you stay longer than 40 minutes.

So when talented Roosevelt defender Ali Sinnett joined her teammates, coaches, and a steady flow of visitors every Friday through the spring for a Zoom workout before starting her shift at Whole Foods, it felt less like a desperate grab for normalcy and more like an innovative way to keep otherwise-isolated players plugged in during the offseason while also growing the program. The Lakers’ sessions, organized by coaches Carla Pentimone and Mason Strom, were a multi-faceted success.

The Lakers’ Ali Sinnett has had an unconventional, but productive, junior-to-senior offseason

While Pentimone was there every week, she also featured a healthy roster of guest stars. Former Wisconsin teammate Carolyne Prevost, who went on to play pro hockey and become one of the top-ranked CrossFit athletes in the world, led one session. So did Saige Pacholok, another former Badger, and stuntwoman April Sutton, who has worked on Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med.

“[Carla] had different people every week, usually she knows these people, but they’re from like different walks of the exercise life,” Sinnett said. “She had [Sutton] come out, she’s had coaches come out, different former players, she had a mental health practitioner come out and talk about how serious the whole mental health thing is.”

Fellow Lakers blueliner Cora Weibye enjoyed later sessions that had a bit less celebrity, but a bit more familiarity and comfort.

“My favorites have really been when we’ve had our seniors lead them the last couple weeks, I definitely think that’s been fun,” she said. “It’s been more team-based in that sense, less like you’re watching a workout video. It’s more personal, and it’s fun because you can make fun of each other, and you don’t feel like you need to behave for your guest. Ali ran a great one, Val Whalen ran a great one, Emily Urban ran a great one. So those have definitely been my favorites for sure.”

Not only have the workouts provided RU an opportunity to assemble remotely, joining the Chicagoans with their teammates from Texas and Minnesota, it’s also proved a fertile outlet for recruiting and marketing. Those vital opportunities are not lost on Sinnett, as the program formerly known as Robert Morris looks for a successful launch into its new era.

“Even though we would’ve had weekly team workouts, and we probably would’ve seen most of each other at least once a week, I think this is even better in that we can have recruits come on,” she said. “Carla usually opens it up to different hockey players in Chicago and across the world. I think at one point we had people from eight or 12 different countries on at once.”

“I think having that aspect to it as well is beneficial, not only to our team, but getting our team out there since we are a new team this year, I feel like that’s a hidden silver lining that I really appreciate,” Sinnett added. “Asking the current players to come out and bring a workout for the girls is also a great opportunity for the new recruits to see the current players in action and interact with them.”

“There’s this one girl, and I think she’s like from Indonesia, some foreign country, I don’t know where, and she keeps her mic on and just yells things at us the entire time,” Weibye said. “She tries to show us her hockey sticks, and her hockey jerseys, and it’s very entertaining, but it’s also your prime ‘what is going on right now?’”

Beyond the overexcited prospects, the standard boring technical issues of mics and cameras cutting out, and the runaway dogs – as happened to forward Xochi Ryskamp during one session – things have been pretty seamless.

“It’s cool because it adds to the team dynamic,” Weibye said. “You’re forced to interact with each other, everyone’s looking at each other, you’re holding each other accountable, which is huge too. It’s nice because we have a decent amount of girls who live out of state, and our quarter would’ve ended at the beginning of May, so I imagine we wouldn’t have been interacting as much at this point with most of them going home.”

Of course, technology unfathomable to Hap Holmes, Odie Cleghorn, Joe Malone, or anyone who participated in the influenza-doomed 1919 Stanley Cup Finals helps players and coaches stay in touch on a more casual level as well.

“As a team we’ve stayed in touch in our group chat almost every day, players and coaches during quarantine, checking in making sure we all know we are together on this,” Khloe Yunker, who helped launch Bowling Green’s team last season, said. “Coaches are also making sure that we are staying productive with weekly workout schedules and making sure we still have the commitment to hockey, even if we are not playing. I think the most important thing out of it is that even though we are not seeing each other or practicing, we are still working as a team and as a family.”

Just a bit north of Yunker and her gang, Concordia Ann Arbor coach Maria Barlow has proceeded with her recruiting on a close-to-normal level.

“[The pandemic] wasn’t a huge hit, because states and stuff in Michigan were already over,” she said “You missed out on [USA Hockey] nationals, which is a good chance to see people from further away. But I mean with our technology these days, honestly, it hasn’t been that different. Online recruiting and videos and stuff is just almost overwhelming how much you can use, so that’s been our focus lately.”

In some ways, ACHA teams are custom built for these types of events. The lack of a 500-page rules manual (along with plenty of supplemental documentation), or the multi-tiered bureaucracy behind it can sometimes be a detriment when it comes to compliance enforcement or preventing poor legislation like well-intentioned but asinine age limits, but in pandemicland, it’s been a boon. The suffocatingly-regulated NCAA recently extended its COVID-related recruiting dead period in Division I through July 31st, while voluntary on-campus workouts were only once again allowed on June 1st (and furthermore, strength and conditioning coaches aren’t able to conduct those workouts).

The ACHA offers no guidance whatsoever pertaining to any of that, and teams are only limited by physical closures and technology, allowing Pentimone and Barlow to do things they wouldn’t be permitted to do elsewhere. Even beyond that, there are cultural differences, usually born out of an environment where, compared to the white-glove treatment afforded NCAA student-athletes, no quarter is given. Quite literally in the cases of teams without a dedicated locker room.

“I think we do know how to make the best of a bad thing,” Sinnett said. “I’m not necessarily saying anything poor about us, but I feel like we can see the good and the bad, and we can make the best of it. And we know how to still be happy about what we can do.”

“A lot of these NCAA teams are on campus, they don’t necessarily have the rink on campus, but they for sure will probably have like a gym on campus that they would be able to use,” she continued. “Or they have like all of these different tools available to them that we don’t necessarily have. We don’t have the amount of funding that they do at all, so we wouldn’t have had any of the stuff they would have either.”

Workouts and recruiting are pillars for any team during the ghostly postseason-but-still-in-school period and into the summer, but most have gone beyond the bare essentials to also preserve elements of what makes them unique.

Concordia Ann Arbor managed to virtually attend chapel as a team through the end of the year

Barlow’s CUAA, for example, typically has in-person chapel sessions available each weekday, with her squad in attendance once a week. The course schedule and cafeteria are blacked out, and the campus pastor (with occasional guest pastors) leads 30 minutes of a message, a couple songs, and a couple prayers before sending the Cardinals on their way with a bite-sized bit of inspiration. The school has been able to continue conducting chapel thanks to Zoom.

“I think I see negatives and positives on each side,” Barlow admitted. “I’ve seen it both ways, you lose out on that personal touch, we’d chat a little before and a little after in person, so you kind of miss out on that. I would try to open it up a bit in our team group chat to talk a little bit before and after, but you just kind of lose out on that personal conversation.”

“But I do think a lot of people, especially this younger generation, they almost thrive on figuring out the easiest way to do things. Now you don’t have to get out of bed and walk across campus to go to chapel, you can log in on your phone and you’re still in bed laying there, listening to chapel. I guess some people could see that as a negative, but I personally see it as a positive that they’re still finding ways to get it done, that sort of thing. I know I appreciate not getting up and getting dressed to go there.”

Others have managed to keep the beat going through social media. The old days where teams would drop all semblance of a digital presence between March and October (then were often forced to start new accounts if the password holder graduated) have largely passed naturally, but things seem to have kicked to a new level during the pandemic.

Roosevelt and Concordia have both been publishing “meet the team” graphics, while Minot State took things a step further with players recording short videos introducing themselves. McKendree even participated in the viral toilet paper challenge, which involves the entire team taking turns virtually passing a roll of toilet paper across state and national borders with some creative flair and crafty editing.

“We just make sure we are connected to each other, and a few of us enjoy connecting to fans and supporters, keeping them updated and hoping to inspire them to join in and do the same with their friends and family,” said Yunker, who helms BG’s active account.

As everything tentatively opens back up, hopefully for good, it seems as though most have taken things in stride. After all, COVID and its attending issues, as widespread as they may be, are simply another set of challenges to overcome in a sport full of them, and carrying a unique set of lessons to learn along the journey.

“The big thing has really been making sure we hold each other accountable, which is important because we definitely have had some accountability issues last season, with participation and all that jazz,” Weibye said. “So I think that’s been a big thing, I hope that it’s teaching us the importance of staying together, especially during things like this, the hard times and challenges.”

“I think just kind of going with the flow of things, and kind of not worrying about the things you can’t control has been huge throughout all of this,” Barlow added.

Perfectly Imperfect

Ohio State at California (PA)
Rostraver Ice Garden
Belle Vernon, PA

February 1, 2020

It’s hard to explain Rostraver Ice Garden to someone who’s never been there, other than by pointing out that she was born in 1965 and just kind of stuck around. She’s dated, but comfortable, like your grandparents’ house.

Other structures of a certain age make allowances for vanity at some point. Botox, a hair transplant, a tummy tuck. Most of those things aren’t essential procedures (does anyone actually need the standard “enhanced seating and concessions” included in a typical rink renovation?) but most buildings are trying to be seen as younger than they actually are by any of several groups, including fans, tournament committees, and recruits.

Not Rostraver. Inside her hangar-chic exterior, you’ll find plenty of wood paneling, a bathroom declaring that it’s for “gents” without a trace of irony, and seating that consists of loose wooden benches perched on shallow-angle concrete. There are also hand-painted signs everywhere, from the “ICE GARDEN ARENA” above the main entrance to the “DO NOT SHOOT or THROW ANY THING AGAINST THIS WALL” all the way on the other end by the locker rooms.

None of that is retro, a word that implies deliberate activity and new procedures to undo previous ones. She has spent more than half a century being her authentic self. Sometimes that authenticity includes things like a devoted audience of snowmen and other random Christmas decorations that intently watch every game played from the stage just off the lobby end of the ice. It also includes a banquet room that sees far more drylands than receptions.

At most places, those would be called “oddities.” At Rostraver, they’re just kind of normal.

---

The ACHA counts several venues old and famous enough to be identifiable by a single name among its home rinks – Yost, Matthews, Munn, Wally B – but those places exist primarily for the varsity teams at their respective schools and give in to the pressures of modernization every few years.

There’s another constantly growing category of course, the relatively new palaces that grab headlines because newness and eight-figure price tags are inherently headline-worthy.

Liberty’s LaHaye Ice Center might be the standard bearer, thanks to a colossal top-to-bottom renovation in 2015 that produced 4,000 seats, a four-sided LED scoreboard, a full video production room, luxury suites, and improved locker and concession options – all for lead tenants that are ACHA teams. The McKendree Metro Rec Plex is another jewel, as is Minot State’s Maysa Arena, which was renovated and expanded in 2016. The mostly-for-NCAA set on this side of the ledger includes several arenas recognized as among the finest in college hockey: Miami’s Goggin Ice Arena, Penn State’s Pegula Ice Arena, and Notre Dame’s Compton Family Ice Arena.

Fundamentally though, there’s a problem with them. Their differentiation isn’t any unique architectural trait, earned character, or history witnessed, it’s simply the fact that they’re newer and shinier and contain better technology than those built earlier. At least until another one goes up and the sports-industrial complex demands it have a bigger scoreboard, more space in the locker rooms, and stronger wifi while the incumbents have only added a couple layers of grunge and maybe a crack or two. That elite status only sticks if the construction docket remains relatively empty.

People don’t listen to signs, even hand-painted ones

Rostraver, though, is undeniably ours, in a way the others aren’t. In a landscape filled with NCAA arenas and faceless, nearly-identical community rinks she’s an outlier, a legitimate entry in that ever-shrinking list of historic hockey destinations, and one whose credibility comes largely without the help of more mainstream sports leagues and their media machine. Others can take The Gut, I’ll wager that Rostraver has done more living in roughly the same amount of time and feels like home to more people.

That last part isn’t really a coincidence, it’s an atmosphere cultivated over the decades by long-time owner Jim Murphy.

“The owner ‘Murph’ – myself and my fiancé literally don’t know his real name, but everyone knows Murph,” Vulcans all-time goal scoring leader Kelsey DeNardo said. “Anyone that grew up playing at Rostraver has their own Murph story. He has been the owner there since anyone can remember and has had an incredible impact on hockey at Rostraver and in the area. He is a unique guy. He keeps the history in the rink throughout, pictures of youth hockey through the years and trophies dating back to the late 70s.”

“Honestly, everyone that works there is very unique, the workers make you feel like part of a community bigger than just your team, they make Rostraver feel like home.”

In 1975, with the hometown Pittsburgh Penguins foundering in red ink, she was a vital local practice option. While Rostraver lives a healthy jaunt down the Monongahela River from the former site of Civic Arena, she was certainly a much more cost-effective option than Canada, where the team had been holding training camp.

A Cal U media guide claims that the quintessential barn hosted a Muhammad Ali amateur fight but, given that the man then known as Cassius Clay began his professional career five years before she was around, it’s a dubious story at best. A more verifiable one involves an eventual winner of the Conn Smythe and Vezina Trophies, Ron Hextall, who started in net for the first time at Rostraver at the age of eight in 1972. A handful of other NHLers have also braved her infamously spartan locker rooms and frigid temperatures as youth players.

Her wheelhouse, though, is the blue-collar hustle and staying in business by working the edges as a place that’s far more Amanda Slezak than Amanda Kessel. There are the three Vulcans women’s and men’s teams of course, but Rostraver is also home ice for numerous youth and high school teams, and a couple of short-lived low-level pro teams. She’s also welcomed arena football, comedy shows, pro wrestling, and concerts – including several notable artists on the left or right tails of the fame curve like Modest Mouse, Slayer, My Chemical Romance, and Machine Gun Kelly.

She’s even seen at least one on-ice engagement, between DeNardo and former men’s player Steve Oberly prior to Cal’s alumni game in 2018.

“My fiancé picked Rostraver and the Cal hockey alumni game because we both played ice hockey at Cal U and it is actually how we met,” DeNardo said. “We met my freshmen year but did not officially start dating until my junior or senior year. About two years later he popped the question at the annual alumni game hosted at Rostraver, it kind of brought the whole thing full circle.”

“We also plan to get some actual engagement pictures done there, because my fiancé grew up playing there for [the Mon Valley Thunder] and I finished my career there.”

Rostraver has met with triumph, and also disaster, never the latter more than on February 14, 2010 when a rink-sized chunk of her wooden barrel-vaulted roof came crashing down under the weight of a couple feet of snow.

Mercyhurst defender Sara Ochterski, then ten years old, was there that day, watching her brother win a tournament championship with the Erie Lions mite team.

“They had gotten off the ice after winning and were celebrating in the locker room, and people heard a slow on and off cracking,” she recalled. “When that continued, everyone started to run out of the building. I remember my dad tossing my brother over his shoulder and carrying him out fully dressed, skates and all. Everyone was outside maybe ten minutes after getting off the ice when the roof collapsed. You can never forget the cracking and popping sounds it made.”

“Everyone made it out, but it was a game that could have easily gone to overtime, and that would have been an entirely different outcome than what thankfully occurred with no injuries. Walking back into that rink to play [today] is just surreal after being there when it collapsed, it’s a chills running down your spine kind of deal.”

Many predicted a permanent demise as the cratered edifice spread news of the misfortune from a hilltop home; Murph managed to have Rostraver back on her feet and re-opened in October.

The roof replacement segment certainly took away some of her celebrated old-time hockey aesthetic, a loss frequently lamented by locals. But, in a bizarre way, the incident crystallized her bona fides as the Hobey Baker of ACHA venues, as she now consists of a modern steel structure spanning most of the length of the ice, awkwardly sandwiched between the original ends of the building, with a bunch of support stumps outside leading to nothing and serving no purpose other than reminding people of what once was.

Reminders of both good times and bad seamlessly exist side by side at Rostraver

A lot of times, even in better days, her victories are something less than absolute.

She’s appeared in a major film, as the home to Seth Rogen’s beloved beer league team in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. But it was a role that amounted to one fairly inconsequential (though funny, if you enjoy goalies sucker punching players on breakaways, and honestly, who doesn’t?) 45-second scene with most of the Rostraver iconography barely visible. In fact, she wasn’t playing herself, but rather an imaginary rink roughly 40 minutes away where the Monroeville Zombies did their best to keep the western Pennsylvania tradition of Slap Shot alive.

Nearly a decade later, Rostraver enjoyed a much less anonymous turn in the spotlight as the winner of the 2017 Kraft Hockeyville USA contest, beating out 1300 other arenas (after initially being nominated by Cal’s equipment manager) to win rink upgrades through three rounds of online voting.

“Winning money from Hockeyville was a pretty huge event for the rink, because it needed serious remodeling,” Vulcans forward Mira Rolin said.

To be specific, the successful grassroots effort pulled in $150,000 to complete some piping and lighting fixes, and the NHL chipped in some protective netting and work on the boards. Nevertheless, the league deemed her unfit for Hockeyville’s centerpiece, a preseason game between the Penguins and St. Louis Blues.

Everyone did their honest best to compensate, including using Rostraver for the Pens’ morning skate on gameday and other fan events throughout the week, but the sparkling UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex on the other side of Pittsburgh got the NBCSN cameras and the associated eyeballs.

She’s venerated locally, but largely unknown a couple hours from the Monongahela Valley. Her victories are often qualified and her losses can be catastrophic and nearly tragic. She will never be the subject of a commemorative coffee table book like many sports facilities that survive through the decades, even though she retains more of her age than most of them. She’s welcoming and genuine, despite the structure that covers most of her ice surface only having a decade under its belt. She’s seen an immeasurable amount of history under her roofs from future NHL stars to championships, and even to film and music A-listers, but relatively few are aware of any of it.

Rostraver is imperfect, but she’s also perfect in her imperfection.

---

If Rostraver is the perfect ACHA building, Cal U might be the perfect tenant for Rostraver. Sure, the 2008-09 vintage Vulcans women’s program might be neophytes in Ice Garden terms, but they’ve driven plenty of hard miles as well. There was early success, a couple DVCHC titles, then a couple more after moving over to the CHE, roughly coinciding with five straight nationals appearances between 2012 and 2016.

“We had a great group of girls who just knew how to play hockey,” DeNardo said. We wanted to win and we all just pushed each other. We made efforts for dryland together and did a lot of team bonding and dinners. Many of us were absolute best friends and still are today.”

“I think the fact a lot of us grew up playing together or against each other was a big deal too. Maria Sciacca and I were giant rivals our whole lives and it continued in a positive way when we were on the same team, along with many of the other girls I was rivals with. Megan Cooper and I constantly pushed each other to be our best and play our best on the team. I’m thankful for leaders like Melissa Gleason and Michelle Daley who brought a little bit of an older perspective and really made everyone focus.”

Then their own roof caved in, as a disproportionate amount of the roster responsible for the success moved on and there was nobody to replace them. The Vulcans were forced to take a hiatus during 2016-17, a stunning move given the team’s success. Hiatuses are for irrelevant teams on the brink of oblivion that have been creeping towards the abyss for years, not for one of Division 2’s dominant programs.

“That had been brewing for some time,” DeNardo added. “We did so well for so many years and picked up some recruits along the way, but because we had a great core, recruiting was not a strong suit. Many players actually continued on and went for master’s degrees so we could all keep playing and have a team.”

“Unfortunately, during my senior year recruiting efforts fell extremely short, and our coach quit at season’s end, and that obviously made recruiting that much harder for the following year. Many players that did not graduate also had a bad taste in their mouths and refused to play that following year as well even though they were healthy. That hiatus year was sad. I was going to continue my career with Cal U while I received my master’s that year, but there was not a team.”

Like Murph before it though, the school in one of the most unflinching sections of a famously-unflinching metropolitan area got back on its feet quickly.

The Vulcans managed to put a team on the ice for 2017-18, but were plagued by low player counts and lopsided scores until things started to click into place this year. A bevy of players from the successful Steel City Selects program – Rolin, Jayda Mears, Katie Hill, and Morgan Gloeckl among them – converged on Rostraver, as did a renewed spirit.

“There has been a big improvement since 2017 when we only had eight players and most didn’t know how to play hockey,” Mears said.

“Now we have people transferring here who know how to play hockey. We started from trying to keep up with the other team to actually becoming more serious. Everyone is starting to work harder to win games and practices are taken more seriously.”

The results followed, starting with a stunning season-opening upset of Delaware, a team had hung a 12-3 result on Cal at the 2019 CHE playoffs. Then came the East Coast Showdown, where the Vulcans blitzed DVCHC teams Towson, Montclair State, and Penn to take the showcase title. Then came an important sweep of Pitt, a team threatening to fill the vacuum left by Cal’s absence (both physical and metaphorical) and become the Pittsburgh area’s hegemon.

Then came Ohio State.

In terms of seismic activity, Delaware was bigger. The Blue Hens are a strong program, while OSU has had their own struggles over the last few seasons. But taking down the Buckeyes might prove even more important to the team’s development, simply for the way the Vulcans were pressed and persevered. Iron sharpens iron, and the hottest fires produce the strongest steel, if you enjoy regionally-appropriate platitudes.

Mears, who has spent most of her career among D2’s scoring leaders, and linemate Rolin got to work late in the first period, when Rolin chased down a loose puck, pivoted in the slot, then found Mears collapsing down the back side for a pretty goal. Less than five minutes of game time later, with the second period just beginning, Gloeckl nicely broke up a Buckeye rush, allowing Mears to take it the other way and bury. 2-0 Cal.

While that pair of digits looked good on Rostraver’s shamrock-accented scoreboard, which somehow outlasted the ceiling that once held it up, they belied a game flow that was often carried by Ohio State.

The Buckeyes, like Cal, were short on depth but possessed good talent at the top end (though perhaps not quite as good as the person who printed OSU’s NCAA team roster in the program thought), and were able to erase the Vulcans’ lead just as quickly as it was drawn. First, St. Louis Lady Blues product Mikayla Richter took it coast to coast herself, then Clancy Chichetti converted Emma Brown’s setup to pull things level though to the end of the second period – and the third.

Photo: David Hague (www.davidhaguephotography.com)

Meanwhile, despite allowing the two goals, Hill was stellar in keeping the game within reach. She closed with 45 saves on 47 OSU shots.

“It was a back and forth game, and we worked well as a team,” Rolin said. “We knew that was an important game, because they badly outshot us [during a 2-2 tie between the teams in December].”

“But we had timely scoring, and Katie really stood on her head and kept us in the game, like she always does.”

In the last minute of overtime, Brown tried to carry the puck out of the Buckeye zone. Mears cut her off just inside the line on the right side, then navigated to the slot and took on both Ohio State defenders at once. With Cal’s men and Penn State Altoona looking on in full uniform while waiting to take the ice, Mears twisted her scarlet-clad opponents even tighter than the rods of the black metal partition that guards the skate rental counter out in the lobby, somehow emerged with the puck on the other side of the traffic jam, and slammed it home.

As a goal horn punctuated the Vulcans’ latest big win, Rostraver echoed it off of a steel roof, a monument to her near-death experience, and back towards the ice. The old lady has seen a lot and certainly couldn’t be blamed for some indifference towards the latest of thousands of early February games, but that goal and Cal U’s own ongoing resurrection had earned her approval.

Faith

Michigan-Dearborn at Concordia
Arctic Coliseum
Chelsea, MI

October 4, 2019

It’s game day, and Maria Barlow is the head coach of the Concordia University Ann Arbor women’s hockey team.

Maria was also the head coach yesterday of course, although her official title was on the back burner for one of her others, Maria the Director of Hockey Operations, as she sorted out issues with her team’s ACHA-mandated coaching registrations and background checks. At other times, there’s also Maria the Equipment Manager, Maria the Graphic Designer, Maria the Social Media Manager, Maria the Spiritual Leader, Maria the Business Manager, and many others stemming from the myriad tasks that go into running a college hockey team.

This is a story that should start at the beginning though, because once upon a time, there was also Maria the Goalie: a standout at Michigan State, one of the ACHA’s most tradition-heavy programs, from 2011-15. Short of a national championship (she missed that one by a year), Maria accomplished just about everything else there is to accomplish. One of her signature moments came at the 2013 Central Collegiate Women’s Hockey Association playoffs, when she delivered a 1-0 title game shutout of powerful Robert Morris to deny the Eagles a second straight league title. She was also a member of the 2015 U.S National University Team, playing for Team USA at the World University Games in Granada, Spain.

All along the road, Maria had a favorite (if a bit cliché, she’ll admit) Bible verse on the side of her mask:

I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.

Philippians 4:13

While there are few universally-accepted facts attached to Philippians (or The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians in its long-form title), scholarly consensus holds that it’s sort of a composite of several letters that Paul the Apostle wrote to Philippi, the site of Greece’s first Christian community, likely during the early 60s AD. The text indicates that Paul was in prison at the time of writing and quite possibly, it was his final time in custody, in Rome prior to his beheading on Emperor Nero’s orders between 64 and 67 AD.

What did Paul do while on death row? Wrote large chunks of human history’s best seller, which I’m now discussing nearly 2,000 years after his demise. Not a big deal.

Beyond that background, the context of the what he said is worth examining. Paul had been on a missionary trip to Philippi about ten years prior to his predicament and remained in touch, to the point where the Philippians sent him gifts in prison (which, unfortunately, did not include a nail file baked into a cake), and some of the epistle is essentially a thank you note for their generosity. However, Paul’s writings are also a series of final instructions to the church there. He urged them to reject worldly traditions and conflicts that interfere with proper worship, but more to the point, he was hopeful that his imprisonment would help spread Christianity, and he directed them to rejoice in the Lord regardless of circumstances.

His crime, since I haven’t mentioned it yet, was essentially “being a Christian in the Roman Empire.”

Job may be the standard biblical go-to for the perseverance of faith in the face of tribulation, but you could do a lot worse than Paul.

Next to the capital-Q Questions that Christians answer through the Bible, building a hockey program might seem trivial. But the nature of the faith needed in either case is similar: you have to trust in a larger plan, even when day-to-day circumstances don’t always offer much support for it.

As Maria the Goalie became Maria the Coach just a couple years before Concordia started a hockey program – God’s plan, she’ll tell you, given that she was one of the few in her family who didn’t attend the school – that’s what she was forced to do, because the Cardinals’ first season was, and there’s not really much way around this, ugly on the ice. Twelve games, six total goals scored, never fewer than five allowed in any one game, and a Death Valley of a low point coming from a 23-0 loss to a Davenport team that finished 8-19-0 (while playing without their only goalie, it should be noted). The last three contests on the schedule were canceled, more or less out of an effort to move forward with regrouping and retooling heading into 2019-20.

That team’s major bright spot was a top line of Mira Rolin, Brittney Badger, and Alex Ragon, a group that accounted for each of Concordia’s goals. Although the run of play typically made their job an impossible one, in general terms, they looked like a legitimate building block and possibly even a unit that would fit in somewhere on a championship contender.

Badger and Rolin left the team and the school during the offseason. So much for that.

What do you do? You started a program as determined by God’s plan, and poured everything you have into it. While you do have to make plenty of allowance for newness (even the most successful start-up programs in ACHA history generally weren’t at their best in year one) things really haven’t gone extraordinarily well by most of the visible measures. The answer isn’t to abandon everything you believe, it’s to double down on your process, your culture, and your goals. It’s to do what Paul did. It’s to have faith.

Sure enough, Maria the Recruiter got to work, and good things started to happen, including landing nine freshmen for 2019-20. One of the group’s headliners is Kassidy Scheben, a defenseman out of Kentucky with star potential. Scheben has more than a little in common with an old Maria the Goalie nemesis, Michigan’s Kalli Bates, who had a similar ability to carry the puck in from the line and create instant offense. Virginia’s Izzy Hootselle has already developed some chemistry with holdover Olivia Drys, as the pair combined on CUAA’s first goal of the new season and generated plenty of other chances over the first few games. Colleen Redding is a defenseman from an Upper Peninsula town named Iron Mountain, although she’s 5-7 and more of a puck mover than a choke slammer.

The class also includes a pair of goalies, Lizzy Knappenberger and Teagan Johnson, who join returning Britney Sibson in the Cardinal crease. With Maria the Goaltending Coach on the job, you have to assume at least one of them, if not more, will be fantastic.

Recruiting is as much art as science, but one common denominator is the work: thousands of calls, emails, and conversations that, if all goes well, produce a full roster eventually.

“I got an email from Coach Barlow about possibly coming to the school,” Drys explained of her recruiting process, then toured the school with [fellow sophomore] Kim Mills and loved the campus, loved the atmosphere, and the Christ-driven community, and just fell in love with it.”

“I actually grew up playing roller, and I came to Concordia on a music scholarship with no intentions of playing hockey,” forward Breanna Sheridan admitted. “Then I met these girls on the first weekend, and sort of got recruited in by them.”

Hey, plain old luck helps too. But however they arrive, the destination is the same, and also different from others.

“Measuring success with Team 2 is definitely different than how other teams may measure theirs,” Maria explained. “We are looking to build our current players to strive for excellence in academics, athletics, and personal growth, while maturing as Christians as well. We want to go our and be proud of the effort we give each and every game we play.”

It doesn’t take long to see some of those differences, or at least signs of them. Roughly half of the teams out there lose more than they win, but not many of those remain as upbeat and fun as the Cardinals. A lot of schools are affiliated with a denomination of Christianity (including a bunch of Concordias, and most who carry that very Lutheran name are related to the one in Michigan, although a couple aren’t), but not all of them pray before the national anthem and again at the end of the game. Many programs have rules about cell phone usage in the locker room or within a certain time of the game, but not all of them physically collect the phones in a repurposed box of goldfish crackers. Almost every team has injured players, but not all of them travel to away games and chart shots and faceoffs just to contribute whatever they can.

When you’re at a Cardinals game, the primary sound you can identify from the benches across the ice is Maria the Motivator yelling “PERFECT!” or “THERE YOU GO!” Even the program’s supporters seem to buy into that brand of positivity, with a group of college-aged guys in front of me yelling “NICE SHOT!” on an early drive by Adrianna Rugiero and “THAT WAS CLEAN!” on a delay of game penalty assessed to Concordia later on. I thought about what that one possibly could have meant for a while, then let it go because hey, it’s still a work in progress on all angles.

It’s a unique sort of place, and there’s plenty to show that a strong identity is starting to form behind the scenes.

“Coming to Concordia is a very different experience than any other school. We may not have a Big Ten name or a multi-million dollar rink on campus, but our small school has so much more to offer than that,” Maria said. “We’re a small, family-like campus but also located in the top college town in the U.S.”

“Another huge sell is the emphasis on being a Lutheran school, and we pride ourselves on being a good example of Christian leaders and hope to help our students and athletes grow through learning more about the faith.”

After recruiting and culture building, the next step, of course, is to improve as a hockey team and start to compete in and win games. There’s evidence of that too, at least a little bit. The Cardinals opened the year on the other side of the mitten at a showcase hosted by Grand Valley State, and while they dropped all three games, the team generally skated well with the hosts, along with Midland and Aquinas, early on before fading late in games. Dressing eight skaters and a goalie will tend to do that, while Maria the Patient has to wait out the early season for a couple injuries to heal and a couple recruits to turn 18 and become eligible.

Things are trending in the right direction though, so much so that I felt confident enough to circle CUAA’s home opener against Michigan-Dearborn as a possible first win for the program, then drive up to Michigan to see it, ready to tell the world about faith and redemption through the gospel of hockey.

The Cardinals lost 12-0, because growth isn’t always linear, and because you don’t always get the story you want to write. That can be God’s plan too.

It’s not worth launching off the high dive when discussing the game’s details. The starting lineup was botched (Hootselle’s hometown was given twice, her name was given zero times), I kept stepping in a bright green wad of gum, the rink was freezing, and Concordia was down 3-0 within the first five minutes of the game, then 8-0 at the end of the first period. It was not going superbly.

A funny thing happened on the way to 24-0 though.

As the Cardinals stepped down towards the bench from their balcony locker room after the intermission, one of those guys in front of me, in the group that thinks delay of game involves hitting, yelled “THIS IS OUR PERIOD!” To be clear, there was nothing whatsoever to indicate that it was about to be the Cardinals’ period. The culture remained strong.

Concondia didn’t actually win the second period in any tangible, measurable sense. But they didn’t lose it either, and that’s important at this stage of the team’s development. Johnson was spectacular in goal, Drys found Hootselle for a close call on the same play that produced a goal against Grand Valley last weekend and blocked a couple dangerous shots, and Sheridan, the player who wasn’t even supposed to be here, produced another great scoring chance. At the end of the thing, the score remained 8-0.

“It wasn’t our best game, but I think after the first period, we all came together and we stayed positive,” Drys said. “Attitude is everything.”

“The second period was amazing, I think all the girls did great,” Mills added.

You might not always get the season you wanted, but you can get great games within those seasons. And you might not always get the game you wanted, but you can get great moments within those games. This second period felt like a moment, and after a little more work and a few more bodies, it will be a moment that serves the team well and ultimately helps delivers a win the next time their backs are against the wall, whether facing Nero or the Wolverines.

Take it on faith.